Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2020, 08:26:30 AM
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We now have US-China (South China Sea) and China vs. the World, and with this thread we now have China in America:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/how-china-has-built-its-extensive-honey-trap-spy-network
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/facebook-fact-checker-funded-by-chinese-money-through-tiktok_3610009.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2020-12-11
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-06/harvard-leads-u-s-colleges-that-received-1-billion-from-china?fbclid=IwAR0VqjLFFZKvNAGjhmIQMQlZWsYa8uAR53nIbLnwngxEQ5tChpzpEvUSq48
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/canada-invited-china-to-participate-in-military-exercises-reports?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=benshapiro&fbclid=IwAR0GRNScNZQGr1GtznDo2XgnEwptVGizqirj86PQTGZKfaccRMzGV6cXWRM
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https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1001270?fbclid=IwAR3DrXo1rd-PFpZq9ypOHpeqSNBAA3pwynshmy5UU_9tYwauAXo2XVCgPtM
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/23/feinsteins-real-insider-trading-scandal-is-selling-america-out-to-china/?fbclid=IwAR1w6KJB0arDGWTrCw3Dt5DgvKKeeXP460SnrhfuaiDO5XHo27pVPjObe_w
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(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fang_fang_meets_chin_chin_12-14-2020.jpg)
Not sure what the PLA's version of the medal of honor is, but I think she has earned it.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16853/espionage-china-spying-us
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https://nypost.com/2020/12/08/professor-claims-china-has-people-in-americas-core-inner-circle/?fbclid=IwAR2cz0COmO8arA8MQHLuiKQ9QUhSUaFNH1pkGdEoi81S_wocec_aTW36YwM
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has anyone heard a peep from Joe Gaffe or his "inner circle"
about this ? or the MSM really investigating
do we have to sit here and watch the bastards give our country away?
yet we have some repubs fretting over Trump fighting obvious election fraud as being important
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https://nypost.com/2020/12/09/the-biden-family-put-national-security-at-risk-devine/?fbclid=IwAR0ABcT1zHJSYL3nvyApnJq_3wYt2vhyC9B5ELdfZzuD11Oml1th3QwDqk8
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/76513-its-ok-to-laugh-at-bidens-new-ethics-rules-2020-12-16?mailing_id=5513&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5513&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/12/16/walmart-pivots-from-chinese-suppliers-triples-imports-from-india/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9061559/Hunter-Biden-asked-Chinese-energy-tycoon-Ye-Yianming-10-million-2017-email.html
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https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/12/the-chinese-communist-dictatorship-and-the-domination-of-america/
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16842/china-films-hollywood-censorship
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/02/09/busted-mike-pompeo-says-he-has-list-of-american-governors-compromised-by-communist-china-n381385?fbclid=IwAR1NM8gOdWjggljzIIDfOZ8jpkzA1LeR_WCHU9EZF6RAsfVTUwa9V57Pqpk
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/biden-sold-out-america-china-while-working-daniel-greenfield/?fbclid=IwAR2opNOHyHA9ZDJkHObniRQiZkrE7Odncfjbt52m77uSnvYD0Agj31cJcio
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https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/08/sen-dianne-feinsteins-ties-china-go-way-deeper-alleged-office-spy/?fbclid=IwAR2YNmi0NN6QYxsOKMtElLqIIizroIWGs_WcgHgq_oyznlp3tYUBSKJJ2rw#.X9cb73dF4Fg.facebook
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/11/chinese-learn-english-online-us-tutors-remote-jobs-rise/1356821001/
Via telemedicine I have had women call in who when I ask if they work and what kind tell me they teach English to Chinese . I think all were mother s who could make bid bucks sitting at home
2000K per week for a 30 hr job ?
wow
Chinese learn to speak our language but Americans do not learn Chinese.
We are so screwed.
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I actually had this come across my radar screen and looked into it-- Cindy had lost her job, my teaching income was down, blah blah. The language of the agreement would have had the Chinese sitting on my shoulder for pretty much everything in my digital life.
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The language of the agreement would have had the Chinese sitting on my shoulder for pretty much everything in my digital life.
they seem to have a bit of.a catch in everything they do with us
always with clauses that gives them intelligence and control over us
now we have the stooges in the WH again
with Wall Street sucked into it
the Bergs and the Soros's and the google heads
it is tempting to make > 100 K for 30 hr per week from home
they are using us ....
they know the power of money
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https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/12/the-chinese-penetration-of-america-part-two/
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/huge-chinese-spy-rep-swalwell-sleeping-pictured-chinese-man-spied-sen-feinstein-20-years/
Collusion.
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/china-used-stolen-data-to-track-cia-operatives-in-africa-europe-report.amp?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0Me5EA064_ULYmLqVUWX9do741ZxZgw9rc3rQ9gaw0TuPwuAEljZeWTPA
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Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, came to the U.S. from Cuba in 1957 on a four-year student visa. He had sided with Fidel Castro against the Batista dictatorship, for which he was jailed and beaten. But he later soured on Castro and was granted political asylum in the U.S.
Like so many people who have escaped political oppression, Mr. Cruz has a special appreciation for America and its freedoms. So why did his son recently block legislation on the Senate floor to open America’s door to people like his father—Hong Kongers now enduring a crackdown by another Communist government?
The legislation is “The Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act of 2020,” and it passed the House in early December by voice vote. The bill would make it easier for Hong Kongers to gain refugee or temporary protected status. TPS allows people from designated countries to remain and work in the United Status.
Mr. Cruz, who has supported Hong Kong’s democracy movement in the past, offers two main objections. First, he says the bill isn’t really about helping Hong Kong; it’s another Democratic effort to relax standards on behalf of “open borders.” Second, he says it would give China an opening to infiltrate spies into the U.S.
He prefers his own bill to cut off federal funding for Hollywood filmmakers who censor their films for screening in China. He is also pushing the Shame Act, which would sanction China for forced sterilizations and abortions directed at religious minorities such as the Muslim Uighurs.
We’re all for ending government subsidies to Hollywood, and we’ve condemned forced abortions for more than three decades. But neither issue contradicts support for Hong Kong’s persecuted democrats. And nothing challenges—and embarrasses—a Communist regime more than when its own people want to flee to freedom. In Berlin the Communists had to build a wall to keep people in.
China probably would try to use an opening for Hong Kongers to sneak its agents in. But that was also true of Cuba’s escapees. And if the issue is spies, who are more likely to be agents for Beijing: Hong Kongers who risked arrest by protesting for democracy, often carrying American flags—or the children of Chinese Communist Party members who attend American universities?
The Hong Kongers who would take advantage of a legal path to the U.S. are decent, hard-working people like Rafael Cruz. The Republican Party spoke up for Soviet refuseniks and dissidents during the Cold War. But now some want a new Cold War with China while shunning its victims.
At a moment when many Biden appointees want to reset relations with China, conservative Republicans shouldn’t be working against an effort that would keep the heat on Beijing while giving Hong Kong people hope.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/your-new-tcl-hdtv-made-china-security-risk?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/26/jon-ossoffs-china-ties-compound-democratic-partys-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=JIqK991ak%2FY9Gx7Aqhsu9uw5B02CxS52LrbCuYGXTEBGu6GovROQNBFHZVdcgjt6&bt_ts=1609017275782
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second
https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/12/the-chinese-penetration-of-america-part-two/
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https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/530008-eric-swalwell-and-the-spy-a-lesson-in-how-china-is-undermining-us?fbclid=IwAR1t9QHEiy6XK-yaIiySewufBtD77sJb5d_5Is1ZLze-PeGpvIKHLOp7stY
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Note how he got the gig:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/california-pension-fund-china-investments
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Beijing’s Bigger Honey Trap
Eric Swalwell and Hunter Biden are only the tip of the Chinese influence iceberg.
By William McGurn
WSJ
What do Eric Swalwell and Hunter Biden have in common?
Both are highly connected, Mr. Swalwell as a member of the House Intelligence Committee and Mr. Biden as the son of the incoming president. Both have made news for their dealings with China, Mr. Swalwell for his relationship with a Chinese spy named Christine Fang, and Mr. Biden for business deals made with enterprises connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Both also benefit from a U.S. press corps uninterested in getting to the bottom of their stories.
When the New York Post published emails in October raising doubts about Joe Biden’s claims he’d never discussed his son’s business dealings, many dismissed the story as “Russian disinformation”—and some suppressed it. As for Mr. Swalwell’s China connection, the New York Times still refuses even to mention it.
But it isn’t just the Biden and Swalwell stories the press is missing. Their cases are only a microcosm of what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complains is an all-out Chinese Communist Party effort “to make Americans receptive to Beijing’s form of authoritarianism.” China does this on multiple fronts, often masquerading under the banner of “friendship” associations. But the agenda is always the same: to use whatever tools it has to mute opposition to China.
For the business sector, the pitch is simple: Come, there’s money to be made—so long as no one brings up human rights.
Consider Disney. In 1997, the company angered China by releasing “Kundun,” a positive film about the Dalai Lama. CEO Michael Eisner called the film a “stupid mistake” and vowed that Disney would “prevent this sort of thing” going forward. When Robert Iger took over, he made a priority of getting back in China’s good graces, and his achievements include Disney’s theme park in Shanghai in partnership with the government, through the state-owned Shendi Group. In addition, the studio filmed parts of this year’s live-action “Mulan” in Xinjiang province, home to Chinese concentration camps holding more than a million Muslim Uighurs.
Now Mr. Iger’s name is being floated as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Beijing.
In a September speech to state legislators, Mr. Pompeo cited Roger Roth, president of the Wisconsin Senate, as another Chinese target. Mr. Roth received an email from Wu Ting, wife of the Chinese consul general in Chicago, that asked him to “consider adopting a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people in fighting the coronavirus.” She helpfully included a draft. He sent back a one-word response: “Nuts.”
Such actions help explain why Mr. Pompeo recently shut down five “cultural exchange” programs that allowed congressional staffers to travel to China on trips paid for by Beijing. Because in reality China isn’t interested in genuine exchange; it wants opportunities to develop relationships with these staffers and use them for China’s purposes.
Or take China’s theft of data and intellectual property, including research on Covid-19. This columnist, who worked in the George W. Bush White House, had his personal information stolen by China in a 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management. In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China has “pioneered an expansive approach to stealing innovation through a wide range of actors—including not just Chinese intelligence services but state-owned enterprises, ostensibly private companies, certain kinds of graduate students and researchers, and a whole variety of other actors working on their behalf.”
American campuses are a particularly soft target. In 2019 Columbia President Lee Bollinger presented himself as a champion of free speech in a Washington Post op-ed in which he declared, “No, I won’t start spying on my foreign-born students.” But he said nothing about Columbia’s Confucius Institute, an institution Mr. Pompeo calls “part of the Chinese Communist Party’s global influence and propaganda apparatus,” or reports that Columbia’s Global Center in Beijing has canceled talks that might upset Chinese officials. Or the likelihood that China is spying on Columbia’s Chinese students.
The is the missing backdrop to the Hunter Biden and Eric Swalwell cases. Mr. Swalwell isn’t accused of any wrongdoing, but does anyone believe he is the only U.S. politician (or staffer) compromised by a Chinese honey trap? As for Mr. Biden, even without criminal charges, shouldn’t a press corps so eager to report the false but salacious charges about Donald Trump at least consider the possibility that China may have incriminating evidence on the new president’s son?
Next July marks the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China. China has changed much since then, and so has its approach to America. Joe Biden might be tempted to think his son’s case and that of Mr. Swalwell will pass. But they won’t, because they are part of a much larger and more sinister China story to which Americans are only now waking up.
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/12/30/u-of-cincinnati-prof-may-not-return-to-classroom-after-saying-chinese-virus/
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Possibly a Chinese CCP spy at the campus turned him in
they got to be laughing at our stupidity
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/12/31/jon-ossoffs-company-produced-documentary-praising-chinas-rise-in-africa/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/02/exclusive-sen-david-perdue-democrat-jon-ossoff-is-compromised-by-the-chinese-communist-party/
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/02/perdue-jon-ossoff-has-never-answered-the-question-about-his-relationship-with-communist-china/
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This is a source capable of exaggeration, but this particular article seems within bounds:
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/biden-omb-director-think-tank/
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/04/hunter-biden-cefc-china-jianming/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&pnespid=iuR29qReXB6NnAZy1n.AA3oTExk3rM7p8tDSqFdy
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2021/01/05/china-rising-nyse-withdraws-plans-to-delist-3-chinese-telcos/?fbclid=IwAR1gyhyogifg07hzLrOSQUEb3OBHhyLCU9WKmtSXJ3zZBqJ2wsSi-cUFTMQ
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/11/this-fight-is-inside-the-gates-today-pompeo-warns-lawmakers-of-the-chinese-communist-party/
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/11/this-fight-is-inside-the-gates-today-pompeo-warns-lawmakers-of-the-chinese-communist-party/
Inside the white house shortly.
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Apparently she was a registered foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance company until it came to light and the backlash caused her to back off.
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it is astonishing how the Chinese can so EASILY bribe so many of our politicians
the same ones who run around yelling and screaming Trump is a threat to out democracy!
and just to slap half the country the voted for Trump Eric swalwell is on an impeachment committee
yet Liz Cheney who mostly I have liked has to break up the republican party and vote to impeach
Same old crowd of insiders ......
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First rule of leftists behavior: If they are screaming about it, it means they are doing it.
it is astonishing how the Chinese can so EASILY bribe so many of our politicians
the same ones who run around yelling and screaming Trump is a threat to out democracy!
and just to slap half the country the voted for Trump Eric swalwell is on an impeachment committee
yet Liz Cheney who mostly I have liked has to break up the republican party and vote to impeach
Same old crowd of insiders ......
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16885/us-media-china
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/17/schweizer-mitch-mcconnell-wife-elaine-chao-financially-tied-to-the-chinese-government/
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/01/17/schweizer-mitch-mcconnell-wife-elaine-chao-financially-tied-to-the-chinese-government/
Schweizer: Mitch McConnell, Wife Elaine Chao Financially Tied to the Chinese Government
[Of course the whole financial world is tied to the Chinese Government.]
Yes. With her resignation from the cabinet with a minute left, his sabotage of the Georgia election, and his voiced support for impeachment, what role the wife had with the husband's decisions and vice versa. Positioning for network jobs? But it turns out they are in bed together financially and that might be the driver.
I like to believe Republicans don't tolerate this kind of bs, act quickly to remove and distance it. We'll see.
Hopefully they are on their way out anyway.
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/china-charge-chinese-communists-gloating-good-riddance-donald-trump/
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/china-charge-chinese-communists-gloating-good-riddance-donald-trump/
https://i.imgflip.com/4ullx9.jpg
(https://i.imgflip.com/4ullx9.jpg)
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Ummm , , , shouldn't it be "successors"?
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Ummm , , , shouldn't it be "successors"?
Yes, thanks.
Running on very little sleep these days, for some reason.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16986/biden-china-signal
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https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/01/23/world-doesnt-realize-already-at-war-china/?fbclid=IwAR1SyWUlRB4n4TfNp2l9pJdMx3HBsrCtvivPOI1ubOCWsebCTCzmeqFODxk
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I'm seeing that this thread is missing the Biden opening of our power grid to China.
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Biden allows Communist China back into US power grid ...
Search domain opentheword.org/2021/01/24/biden-allows-communist-china-back-into-us-power-grid/https://opentheword.org/2021/01/24/biden-allows-communist-china-back-into-us-power-grid/
According to reports, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order that would effectively allow Communist China to be involved in America's power grid. The order rescinded an executive order by Former US President Donald Trump forbidding the Communist Regime's involvement.
Did Joe Biden Just Make Our Power Grid Vulnerable to ...
Search domain pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/23/did-joe-biden-just-make-our-power-grid-vulnerable-to-foreign-adversaries-again-n1406749https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/23/did-joe-biden-just-make-our-power-grid-vulnerable-to-foreign-adversaries-again-n1406749
In December, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette issued a prohibition order "designed to reduce the risks that entities associated with the People's Republic of China pose to the...
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Banning Chinese Communist ...
Search domain channel411news.com/2021/01/23/biden-rescinds-trump-order-banning-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid/https://channel411news.com/2021/01/23/biden-rescinds-trump-order-banning-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid/
By Natalie Winters | The National Pulse President Biden has revoked a Trump-era executive order that sought to keep foreign countries and companies out of America's bulk power systems - principally entities associated with the Chinese Communist Party - as part of his "Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science […]
Biden suspends Trump executive order, opens door for China ...
Search domain ussanews.com/News1/2021/01/23/biden-suspends-trump-executive-order-opens-door-for-china-to-influence-our-electric-grid/https://ussanews.com/News1/2021/01/23/biden-suspends-trump-executive-order-opens-door-for-china-to-influence-our-electric-grid/
WASHINGTON, DC- In yet another indication that Biden plans on selling the United States down the river to China, the overmatched Biden quietly revoked an executive order issued by President Trump
Biden Suspends Another Key Trump Executive Order, It Was ...
Search domain www.chicksonright.com/blog/2021/01/25/biden-suspends-another-key-trump-executive-order-it-was-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2021/01/25/biden-suspends-another-key-trump-executive-order-it-was-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/
President Joe Biden's efforts to use executive authority to wipe away the impacts of former President Donald Trump came one swipe of the pen that impacts China's ability to gain a foothold in America's power grid, according to The Western Journal. "Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Keeping China Out of American ...
Search domain thedailycoin.org/2021/01/24/biden-rescinds-trump-order-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/https://thedailycoin.org/2021/01/24/biden-rescinds-trump-order-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Keeping China Out of American Power Grid By Jack Davis for Western Journal Amid President Joe Biden's wholesale efforts to use executive authority to wipe away the impacts of former President Donald Trump came one swipe of the pen that impacts China's ability to gain a foothold in America's power grid.
Biden pauses Trump order blocking Communist Chinese ...
Search domain americanmilitarynews.com/2021/01/biden-pauses-trump-order-blocking-communist-chinese-infiltration-of-us-power-grid/https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/01/biden-pauses-trump-order-blocking-communist-chinese-infiltration-of-us-power-grid/
January 25, 2021 Ryan Morgan On President Joe Biden's first day in office, he signed an executive order that, among other things, suspended for 90 days a Trump-era order that blocked Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid.
Huh? Biden rescinds order banning CCP involvement in US ...
Search domain www.independentsentinel.com/huh-biden-rescinds-order-banning-ccp-involvement-in-us-power-grid/https://www.independentsentinel.com/huh-biden-rescinds-order-banning-ccp-involvement-in-us-power-grid/
#NotMyPresident Biden has rescinded the Trump order to ban Chinese Communists from involvement in our power grid. Isn't that nice of him. He did it in the same executive action that ended the KeystoneXL Pipeline, the National Pulse reports.
Biden revokes Trump order that shielded U.S. power grid ...
Search domain disrn.com/news/biden-reverses-trump-ban-on-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-gridhttps://disrn.com/news/biden-reverses-trump-ban-on-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid
President Joe Biden has rescinded an executive order of former President Donald Trump that was designed to prevent foreign countries meddling with the U.S. power grid. Trump's order specifically prohibited "any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation" of bulk-power system (BPS) electrical equipment by "foreign adversaries."
Trump issues executive order to protect power grid from ...
Search domain thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/495711-trump-issues-executive-order-to-protect-us-power-grid-from-attackhttps://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/495711-trump-issues-executive-order-to-protect-us-power-grid-from-attack
The executive order bans the use of equipment for the power grid that was manufactured by a company under the control of a foreign adversary, or the buying of any equipment that poses a national...
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Think of all the money the PRC saved in military expenses by just buying the Biden crime family and the other dems.
Biden allows Communist China back into US power grid ...
Search domain opentheword.org/2021/01/24/biden-allows-communist-china-back-into-us-power-grid/https://opentheword.org/2021/01/24/biden-allows-communist-china-back-into-us-power-grid/
According to reports, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order that would effectively allow Communist China to be involved in America's power grid. The order rescinded an executive order by Former US President Donald Trump forbidding the Communist Regime's involvement.
Did Joe Biden Just Make Our Power Grid Vulnerable to ...
Search domain pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/23/did-joe-biden-just-make-our-power-grid-vulnerable-to-foreign-adversaries-again-n1406749https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/23/did-joe-biden-just-make-our-power-grid-vulnerable-to-foreign-adversaries-again-n1406749
In December, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette issued a prohibition order "designed to reduce the risks that entities associated with the People's Republic of China pose to the...
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Banning Chinese Communist ...
Search domain channel411news.com/2021/01/23/biden-rescinds-trump-order-banning-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid/https://channel411news.com/2021/01/23/biden-rescinds-trump-order-banning-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid/
By Natalie Winters | The National Pulse President Biden has revoked a Trump-era executive order that sought to keep foreign countries and companies out of America's bulk power systems - principally entities associated with the Chinese Communist Party - as part of his "Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science […]
Biden suspends Trump executive order, opens door for China ...
Search domain ussanews.com/News1/2021/01/23/biden-suspends-trump-executive-order-opens-door-for-china-to-influence-our-electric-grid/https://ussanews.com/News1/2021/01/23/biden-suspends-trump-executive-order-opens-door-for-china-to-influence-our-electric-grid/
WASHINGTON, DC- In yet another indication that Biden plans on selling the United States down the river to China, the overmatched Biden quietly revoked an executive order issued by President Trump
Biden Suspends Another Key Trump Executive Order, It Was ...
Search domain www.chicksonright.com/blog/2021/01/25/biden-suspends-another-key-trump-executive-order-it-was-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2021/01/25/biden-suspends-another-key-trump-executive-order-it-was-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/
President Joe Biden's efforts to use executive authority to wipe away the impacts of former President Donald Trump came one swipe of the pen that impacts China's ability to gain a foothold in America's power grid, according to The Western Journal. "Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Keeping China Out of American ...
Search domain thedailycoin.org/2021/01/24/biden-rescinds-trump-order-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/https://thedailycoin.org/2021/01/24/biden-rescinds-trump-order-keeping-china-out-of-american-power-grid/
Biden Rescinds Trump Order Keeping China Out of American Power Grid By Jack Davis for Western Journal Amid President Joe Biden's wholesale efforts to use executive authority to wipe away the impacts of former President Donald Trump came one swipe of the pen that impacts China's ability to gain a foothold in America's power grid.
Biden pauses Trump order blocking Communist Chinese ...
Search domain americanmilitarynews.com/2021/01/biden-pauses-trump-order-blocking-communist-chinese-infiltration-of-us-power-grid/https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/01/biden-pauses-trump-order-blocking-communist-chinese-infiltration-of-us-power-grid/
January 25, 2021 Ryan Morgan On President Joe Biden's first day in office, he signed an executive order that, among other things, suspended for 90 days a Trump-era order that blocked Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid.
Huh? Biden rescinds order banning CCP involvement in US ...
Search domain www.independentsentinel.com/huh-biden-rescinds-order-banning-ccp-involvement-in-us-power-grid/https://www.independentsentinel.com/huh-biden-rescinds-order-banning-ccp-involvement-in-us-power-grid/
#NotMyPresident Biden has rescinded the Trump order to ban Chinese Communists from involvement in our power grid. Isn't that nice of him. He did it in the same executive action that ended the KeystoneXL Pipeline, the National Pulse reports.
Biden revokes Trump order that shielded U.S. power grid ...
Search domain disrn.com/news/biden-reverses-trump-ban-on-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-gridhttps://disrn.com/news/biden-reverses-trump-ban-on-chinese-communist-involvement-in-us-power-grid
President Joe Biden has rescinded an executive order of former President Donald Trump that was designed to prevent foreign countries meddling with the U.S. power grid. Trump's order specifically prohibited "any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation" of bulk-power system (BPS) electrical equipment by "foreign adversaries."
Trump issues executive order to protect power grid from ...
Search domain thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/495711-trump-issues-executive-order-to-protect-us-power-grid-from-attackhttps://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/495711-trump-issues-executive-order-to-protect-us-power-grid-from-attack
The executive order bans the use of equipment for the power grid that was manufactured by a company under the control of a foreign adversary, or the buying of any equipment that poses a national...
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/epoch-times-statement-on-youtube-demonetization_3677553.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-01-30
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17012/china-push-biden
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants?fbclid=IwAR2OkcS3P7SaNwbLgWRuviNEEhbmdngupkbzohjjEQVaS0ec_-9Qr7D5Am8
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/white-house-press-sec-dodges-when-asked-why-hunter-biden-still-has-a-stake-in-chinese-investment-firm/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/facebook-fact-checker-funded-by-chinese-money-through-tiktok_3610009.html?fbclid=IwAR27iTGNSpqSMSmaLJeSWrS_6EQCBSo42xibXW_KFjofulwsPPBZtYJXFjw
https://www.theepochtimes.com/facebook-will-take-down-posts-with-claims-about-vaccines-it-deems-false_3689675.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-02-09&fbclid=IwAR2idvAc5jj2XpokEaUMuNoAQ_bEAf1MuASSxaErU8Fo1kT40WzP98sLlm4
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/bidens-cia-pick-was-president-of-think-tank-that-took-millions-from-chinese-communist-party-tied-entities-report?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mjk&fbclid=IwAR3-DWkcQDHw6YOfhenKXylWsOpmV-RWpbPCxJKq0QJjlH8O5v2bZNbRySQ
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/bidens-cia-pick-was-president-of-think-tank-that-took-millions-from-chinese-communist-party-tied-entities-report?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mjk&fbclid=IwAR3-DWkcQDHw6YOfhenKXylWsOpmV-RWpbPCxJKq0QJjlH8O5v2bZNbRySQ
Is anyone surprised? Understand that the PRC isn't the enemy to the feral government. We are.
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/02/biden-withdraws-trump-rule-that-us-schools-disclose-ties-with-communist-china-propaganda-institutes/
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https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/02/biden-withdraws-trump-rule-that-us-schools-disclose-ties-with-communist-china-propaganda-institutes/
The strangest part of the infiltration by the genocidal dictatorship of Communist China is that Democrats don't oppose it.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/SaraGonzalesTX/status/1359906563201392640
Buying the Biden Crime Family was the best money the CCP ever spent!
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https://www.patreon.com/posts/47403406
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https://www.patreon.com/posts/47403406
Does he know who cheated their way into the white house? We are now the PRC's vassal state. The left sees China as a model to be emulated.
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https://patriotpost.us/alexander/74237-joe-bidens-chicom-quid-pro-quo-crime-syndicate-2020-10-19?mailing_id=5633&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5633&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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https://summit.news/2021/02/09/biden-scraps-trump-mandate-for-universities-to-report-chinese-dealings/
Shocking!
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/065/405/262/original/77a1d3736daf43ad.jpeg
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/065/405/262/original/77a1d3736daf43ad.jpeg)
https://summit.news/2021/02/09/biden-scraps-trump-mandate-for-universities-to-report-chinese-dealings/
Shocking!
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17073/china-big-tech
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392771.php
But NO MEAN TWEETS!
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392771.php
But NO MEAN TWEETS!
They penetrated the highest office.
Strange that slow Joe knows exactly what they have done wrong, genocide of Uighurs, totalitarian takeover of Hong Kong and impending military invasion of Taiwan, or he couldn't be so specifically their lead apologist.
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https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/6DB161CB-1F7F-4D4D-ADF6-C1F5420DC6F0.jpeg
(https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/6DB161CB-1F7F-4D4D-ADF6-C1F5420DC6F0.jpeg)
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392771.php
But NO MEAN TWEETS!
They penetrated the highest office.
Strange that slow Joe knows exactly what they have done wrong, genocide of Uighurs, totalitarian takeover of Hong Kong and impending military invasion of Taiwan, or he couldn't be so specifically their lead apologist.
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Strange formatting. Is there a URL for that?
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Strange formatting. Is there a URL for that?
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/6DB161CB-1F7F-4D4D-ADF6-C1F5420DC6F0.jpeg
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https://twitter.com/Woj_Pawelczyk/status/1362037763944636419
Cultural norms!
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/19/bidens-unity-with-genocidal-communist-china/
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/02/21/doj-china-military-member-lied-secure-j-1-visa-conduct-research-stanford-university/
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"DOJ: China Military Member Lied to Secure J-1 Visa, Conduct Research at Stanford University"
looks like a sweet innocent school girl to me
oh come on she is so cute...........
not possible...........
God are we so naive
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17099/finance-china-military
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxk9a/china-anal-covid-tests-us-diplomats
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17054/us-arming-china
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/26/william-burns-carnegie-tung-chee-hwa/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=grV3oqhHBxSNmqagsSHwhN.DvWktINEwD8f60Dou
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/02/27/joe-biden-donald-trump-commerce-department-china-tech-threats/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=getemails&pnespid=2fI9uftIGQ_N1PUFo_FWnKXtih0vqZT49X.zZy9M
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https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-list-equipment-services-pose-security-threat
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/16/professors-and-faculty-members-at-cornell-university-protest-against-joint-program-with-chinese-university/
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U.S., China: FCC and Commerce Department Take Action Against Chinese Telecom Firms
2 MIN READMar 18, 2021 | 21:31 GMT
What Happened: U.S. Commerce Department launched subpoenas against a number of unnamed Chinese telecommunications companies, as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also voted to continue processes for revoking the operating licenses of China Unicom Americas and ComNet, a subsidiary of Pacific Networks, due to national security concerns, the South China Morning Post reported March 17.
Why It Matters: U.S. regulators are pushing Chinese telecom firms to prove their independence from Beijing. This signals that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is continuing its predecessor’s scrutiny on major Chinese firms’ connections to the Chinese government, especially in fields sensitive to national security like telecommunications. Amid ongoing U.S.-China talks in Alaska and a bevy of U.S. actions against China over the past week, the FCC and Commerce Department announcements will only further ensure that the Biden administration’s initial talks with Beijing are contentious and more about positioning than negotiating.
Stratfor
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Tech trade. The U.S. on Thursday imposed new restrictions on trade with several Chinese supercomputing centers. This came a day after the Washington Post published a blockbuster report purportedly showing how U.S. and Taiwanese technology was facilitating Chinese development of hypersonic missiles.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/several-new-york-times-staff-previously-worked-for-ccp-controlled-media-report_3768622.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-04-11&mktids=7b98d9590e0d9b93e3dc2bd608497ef0&est=bm6CUek8Brk1bIEd0moO5YRr2zReXhbRyDD7IyBycLueMLxhJYmtyiYGXGDJ70SetvvY
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/22/us-scientists-feared-compromised-china/?fbclid=IwAR2ttwBOTsZ75nUWU8Y-BxRdGu89rqxKJia-WETkWieyLxLrP_KgDmDWZgA
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https://thepostmillennial.com/hundreds-of-us-scientists-accused-of-chinese-industrial-espionage
Even Coca Cola :
https://populist.press/former-coca-cola-employee-convicted-of-stealing-120-million-worth-of-trade-secrets-to-sell-in-china_3788504-html/
Dems don't care
Bushes never cared
We spend the money doing research - it only costs them the price of the bribe to then walk off with it.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17316/china-totalitarian-controls
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/chinese-companies-hold-record-ipos-in-us-despite-tensions_3798475.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-05-03&mktids=dde638cfc42810e3fba4696359a6485a&est=Ycsneq86sIOQRV9NzCQ617LVykaoZGxNXJK2RLZQwwXRSpFshI%2FW51FUrZCX0FiJbXyK
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/does-the-us-have-time-to-counter-beijings-unrestricted-warfare_3792855.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-05-03&mktids=dde638cfc42810e3fba4696359a6485a&est=rVb3SOOjCt7WkDz5Z0PPZQ2%2FoBgdAtUkVPhjEY7k%2B5cJ1WF7rAHOsHra7k2dt16RSRp9
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/exclusive-conservatives-crack-down-on-chinese-political-influence-and-tech/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-05-07&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/05/17/exclusive-bombshell-photos-reveal-years-of-meetings-between-bloomberg-executives-and-chinese-propagandists-in-beijing/
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If I walked into Byron’s Smokehouse in Auburn, Ala., and asked folks if they’d want their retirement savings invested in Chinese companies, I’d get laughed out of the restaurant. So why would we allow the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which serves approximately six million government employees and retirees, including military veterans, to do just that?
The board that governs the TSP wants to invest a considerable portion of its more than $700 billion in assets in companies with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. President Trump stopped that move from going into effect last year, but with a new president in office, the order blocking the board’s decision no longer carries weight.
Congressional action is needed to provide a permanent solution, rather than relying on the whims of executive action. That’s why I am introducing the Prohibiting TSP Investment in China Act. This bill would bar TSP funds from being invested in any security of an entity based in China or in a subsidiary that is owned or operated by a Chinese company.
Blocking investment of federal retirement savings in Chinese companies is good for U.S. national security and good for investors. We shouldn’t be funneling capital to firms that routinely violate U.S. sanctions laws and actively enable the Chinese Communist Party’s military expansion and persecution of religious minorities. Chinese companies have a long history of putting investors at serious risk by manipulating financial reporting statements and failing to comply with basic audit standards to artificially inflate their performance.
The Luckin Coffee incident is a prime example. The Securities and Exchange Commission found that Luckin, the largest coffee chain in China, defrauded U.S. investors by lying about the firm’s performance and inflating retail sales by more than $300 million. Luckin settled with the SEC by agreeing to pay a $180 million fine, but Americans who invested their retirement savings in funds exposed to Luckin’s deception lost millions.
China-based companies whose stock is traded on U.S. exchanges are prohibited by Beijing from complying with U.S. securities and financial-reporting standards. The Chinese government also blocks U.S. regulators at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board from conducting standard inspections of the Chinese offices of international audit firms. Congress put investor protections in place for a reason. If a company is not in compliance, investors are at risk.
China’s refusal to allow its companies to comply with basic investor safeguards is cause enough to prohibit the investment of government-employee retirement funds in Chinese firms, but there are additional reasons to take pause.
Chinese contractors are supplying Beijing’s military buildup, enabling aggressive action in the South China Sea and toward land-based neighbors like Vietnam and India. These firms also supply the Chinese government with equipment used to spy on its citizens and commit genocide against religious minorities, like the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province. Not a single U.S. dollar should contribute to the Communist Party’s continuing human-rights abuses.
The American people recognize the economic and military threat China poses to the U.S. The Prohibiting TSP Investment in China Act would advance our national-security interests and restrict funds from flowing to firms beholden to China’s communist regime.
Mr. Tuberville, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alabama.
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Admittedly the given reason is not without plausibility, but we are dealing with Manchurian Joe here so let's keep our eye out for skullduggery.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administratiolpto-delay-revamp-of-trump-era-china-investment-ban-bloomberg/ar-BB1gSjBW
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The headline sounds good, but as we read the article, not so much , , ,
The move of authority from DoD to Treasury reminds me of President Clinton moving a similar authority from State Dept to Dept of Commerce for the purpose of facility technology to China. IIRC Bernie Schwarz of Loral Satellites gave Bill $345,000 to make the move so he could continue to help the Chinese with their rocket technology so they could buy more of his satellites.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/biden-orders-ban-on-59-chinese-defense-and-tech-firms_3843645.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-04&mktids=45f0bea289e396d3587938fd13ae3df3&est=EGn9pzbTnBrE5VqJF%2F%2FmJM3bgR7Bs8hUWK0jOSPY3RfwC1KWfcnc%2BKfU7j6E7Qmz98%2Fm
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https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-commerce-department-rescinds-tiktok-wechat-prohibited-transactions-list-2021-06-21/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/prominent-biden-allies-worked-for-nonprofit-with-ties-to-chinese-communist-party/
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or invades
my guess we will do nothing
certainly Europe won't
Japan will be unable to do anything:
https://thepostmillennial.com/chinese-state-media-publishes-three-stage-plan-for-invading-neighboring-taiwan?utm_campaign=64469
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17518/china-biden-administration
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17518/china-biden-administration
The DOJ/FBI will investigate in 3, 2, never.
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or invades
my guess we will do nothing
certainly Europe won't
Japan will be unable to do anything:
https://thepostmillennial.com/chinese-state-media-publishes-three-stage-plan-for-invading-neighboring-taiwan?utm_campaign=64469
"The US is a staunch ally of the nation of Taiwan,"
- The current US Commander in Chief is a staunch ally of [China] [Taiwan], choose one.
"a defensive pact between the two nations was enacted many decades ago, on March 3, 1955. It was replaced with a less-intensive agreement called the Taiwan Relations act in 1979, which remains in effect to this day."
- Gen. Eisenhower who defeated Hitler no longer makes those decisions. Note the trend, "less-intensive agreement", 1979. Hunter Biden's Dad (for sale) is now in charge.
US Budget increase year over year, 16%. Defense budget increase in the face of the increasing threat: 0.0%, not counting the diversion of resources to gender change and diversity over ship building and ABM.
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/06/the-five-surprises-in-pentagons-2022-budget/
"this budget decommissions 12 ships and buys relatively few replacements."
This is the will of the American people (as certified by Dominion Systems).
Chair of the Joint Chiefs believes cis-gender white males who work hard and support families, pay taxes and go to church within our borders are the biggest threat we face. [Current President suggests we aim the nukes at them.]
Even Trump, applying maximum economic pressure to PRC, did not rescue Hong Kong or any Uighur.
The longer China waits, the more military advantage they have. It's all headed in the wrong direction. What could go wrong?
Back to Eisenhower and a 1955 defense pact with Taiwan, what was THE lesson of WWII?
https://www.historyonthenet.com/nazi-germany-timeline
Stop evil sooner.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/billionaire-investor-charlie-munger-says-us-should-learn-chinas-authoritarianism?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
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https://thenationalpulse.com/news/a-chinese-spy-recruitment-scholar-is-now-running-joe-bidens-nsa-personnel-department/
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I did not know about this guy Zimmerman
I thought you meant Hunter
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nothing to see here folks
the big threat to our national security , democracy, our way of life is Proud Boys
and a bunch of fools who walked into the Capital (one armed with bear spray!!!!)
Our entire government is paid off by the CCP
when it comes to money - all bets are off
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"https://thenationalpulse.com/news/a-chinese-spy-recruitment-scholar-is-now-running-joe-bidens-nsa-personnel-department/"
:-o :-o :-o :x :x :x :x :x :x
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/27/biden-center-at-upenn-under-fire-over-financial-ties-to-china/
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https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/07/17/brad-johnson-degree-of-chinese-influence-in-us-top-circles-is-dramatic/
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it is so remarkable
how f... g stupid and bribed our politicians , our military brass
have been
we have for decades been pointing out on this board how every one of our military technologies
seems to be repeated in China
from Navy vessels to jets etc that look exactly like ours .... How many times since the 90's have we seen this.
and our phony leaders were such dupes or sold us all out
as did our corporations .....
including non military doctors like Hollywood Tony
for God s sake he is 80 yo
how can any bureaucrat work at this age
get rid of the guy for Christ's sake
I f w e get back the WH in '24 first thing is to fire the narcissist
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/19/american-professors-demand-closer-research-cooperation-with-china/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/26/bidens-department-of-justice-drops-charges-against-chinese-soldiers-who-lied-to-acquire-jobs-at-american-universities/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/26/bidens-department-of-justice-drops-charges-against-chinese-soldiers-who-lied-to-acquire-jobs-at-american-universities/
Of course. They weren't Trump supporters.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/the-expanding-frontier-of-tyranny/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-07-26&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/516/717/original/3a774aaf3052d39c.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/516/717/original/3a774aaf3052d39c.png)
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/516/717/original/3a774aaf3052d39c.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/516/717/original/3a774aaf3052d39c.png)
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/518/444/original/a7701c34eb784b37.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/080/518/444/original/a7701c34eb784b37.png)
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https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/07/28/oh-my-something-about-that-new-york-times-journalist-who-recently-called-trump-supporters-enemies-of-the-state/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/09/senate-panel-warned-that-china-could-create-dossier-on-every-american-using-stolen-data/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Benner
"Benner grew up in Vermont and was an English major at Bowdoin College, in Maine.[1] After graduating in 1999 with "zero idea" about a career plan, she moved to Beijing to teach English.[2] While there, she wrote freelance for the Beijing Review[1] about everything from monks to music."
The Chinese use Americans to teach them Chinese. I have had calls from numerous Americans who just happen to work from home - teaching Chinese in China English . I suppose they must pay well.
The CCP probably looks at all of this for recruitment purposes.
Funny . After college in New England she moves to China.
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/09/senate-panel-warned-that-china-could-create-dossier-on-every-american-using-stolen-data/
They also have your DNA. They could do far worse.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSRd29cNoAQ
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSRd29cNoAQ
Previous post: [Doug] They also have your DNA.
- Truth is stranger than fiction these days. If we had left wing 'fact checkers' on the board, I would expect to be called out an over the top statement. Instead it's over the top truth. China IS gathering our DNA.
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Perhaps we should be posting about this in the Biowar thread?
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/08/pull-us-ai-research-out-china/184359/
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/950409/the-ccp-has-long-been-in-the-wire-ed
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https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclusive-us-approves-licenses-huawei-buy-auto-chips-sources-2021-08-25/
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https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/cusef-sponsoring-events-travel-for-ag-officials/
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https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/rare-earth-war-us-china
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58682998?fbclid=IwAR1p0hALMsugfrsRxuh3ZQD0t-IFmHQyV1p_Z2LhSLCL1xtv1fKf4Bvb4MA
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1105609/huawei-princess-released-to-ccp
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secondhttps://texasscorecard.com/commentary/waller-chinese-backdoor-threatens-next-texas-blackout/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-us-military-pilot-accused-of-concealing-china-ties_4034180.html
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/secretary-of-the-china-lobby/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-10-12&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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Scroll to her net worth = 300 million $
her primary income source listed as "politics"
https://starsgab.com/gina-raimondo-biography/
no doubt she has investments that tie to China
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WOW.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/12/biden-ignored-pentagon-concerns-chinese-drone-purc/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=gWb2J%2BdVkJzzld1eCju21T%2F8NrzQb8pT8HvW1vqBv%2B7ObhuvNtzKEhjOS785Ez46&bt_ts=1634128557568
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17891/financing-china-war-machine
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/fcc-votes-to-terminate-china-telecoms-operations-in-us_4070367.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-10-26-3&mktids=c07e860a8a6a1d621ae0b1fb9ce0de06&est=IPmm6POu4%2FPE0a8e7DWO5SUOUfwWe3YWX3LJ42aC57AoZ16OQxHdeHSp3RNy%2B2BUJOXc
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second post
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/24/strategic-materials-and-the-new-cold-war/
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second post
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/24/strategic-materials-and-the-new-cold-war/
The enviosocialists will not allow the US to mine anything.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-medical-bodies-silent-on-chinas-organ-harvesting-due-to-fear-of-beijing-retaliation-doctor-says_4003495.html
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17946/china-influence-united-front
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/beijing-irked-by-us-bill-that-counters-china-threat_4113499.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-11-20&mktids=224cf8e35e67dc9b2ad5041f90a7960a&est=mz9mXyf%2BRUrj6hQJQXmBcSUd%2F%2F6sOr3sQz6fdMF2XtDAO9En0DpeanpAKts7eyj1cStS
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https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/11/29/tiananmen-square-episode-simpsons-missing-hong-kong-disney-plus/
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10 states pressed about pensions invested in BlackRock
BY JAMES VARNEY THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Consumers’ Research sent a letter to 10 governors this week asking them to take a hard look at their states’ pension funds invested with BlackRock, as the group campaigns against the financial giant’s ties to Chinese companies.
The 10 states’ pension investments amount to nearly $67 billion, according to Consumers’ Research.
“We want them to take the risk seriously that is portended as BlackRock favors Chinese companies over U.S. ones,” Consumers’ Research President Will Hild told The Washington Times. “These pension investments could face significant losses from national security and geopolitical pressures, and they could also turn around and be used against their own state interests.”
Thursday’s letter is part of an ongoing campaign that the conservative-leaning group started this year accusing the Wall Street giant and its CEO, Larry Fink, of too-close ties to Chinese Communist officials and the massive economy they control. China has the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States.
BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment firm in terms of assets under management, did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.
The pension figures used by Consumers’ Research were those available from public disclosures and do not represent all of the state pension money managed by BlackRock, Mr. Hild said.
Of the 10 states whose governors received the letter, Washington state with $13 billion and Florida with $10.7 billion top the list. West Virginia, with $2.1 billion in state pension funds managed by BlackRock, represented the smallest of the 10 states.
The letter cited growing concerns that U.S. investment in Chinese companies, which must have the approval of the Chinese Communist Party to operate, could prove problematic in a world where the interests of China and the U.S. do not always align.
The group’s “BlackRock Loves China” campaign is not the only voice urging caution.
In November, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which is convened by Congress, issued an annual report sharply critical of the laissez-faire attitude American investors appear to be taking toward China, recommending economic ties be subjected to much closer scrutiny.
“At stake in this clash of identities and sovereignty is the safety and security of the United States and its partners, friends and allies,” the report said. “The CCP is a long-term, consequential, menacing adversary determined to end the economic and political freedoms that have served as the foundation for security and prosperity for billions of people.”
Even some prominent leftwing figures have warned against the growing ties between Beijing and BlackRock, with investor George Soros attacking the situation in The Wall Street Journal.
“BlackRock’s unabashed gusto for Chinese markets flies in the face of concerns about China’s ascendant standing in the world, its authoritarian model of government, and its ambitions to supplant the U.S. as the pre-eminent world power,” the letter said. “Administrations of both parties have come to understand the great risk posed by the CCP and, breaking from prior policy of promoting China’s peaceful rise, labeled it a strategic rival against which the U.S. must compete.”
Along with its letter, Consumers’ Research released a “Consumers’ Warning” Thursday that highlights connections between BlackRock and China, and it released a digital ad targeted at the 10 states, which also includes Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
“BlackRock is knowingly using investments funded by hard-working Americans to support companies directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” the warning said. “These investments made with Americans’ retirement savings are strengthening the Chinese economy and enhancing the Chinese military.”
On Friday, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office released what it called a “preliminary statement” and said it was investigating the matter.
“We understand the concerns raised by Consumers’ Research with respect to any investment that might further the interests of the Chinese Communist Party,” the statement read. “With respect to these issues, we believe all institutional investors would benefit from clear and consistent guidance promulgated by relevant U.S. institutions, such as the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), who are uniquely qualified to identify and appropriately restrict any such investments.”
Mr. DeSantis is “an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist regime,” but his office plans to review Florida’s pension portfolios.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-china-exports-repression-using-a-network-of-spies-hidden-in-plain-sight
https://www.propublica.org/article/even-on-us-campuses-china-cracks-down-on-students-who-speak-out?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=river
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https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-fcc-expelled-chinese-telecom-national-security-risks?fbclid=IwAR0ncq09rXNYlNZnulmHdSUBX_FMH33z53ATxds53osvRdtTZrKXwKJndco
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/12/08/cruz-kerry-is-customer-of-the-year-for-chinese-concentration-camps-and-were-funding-chinas-concentration-camps/
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s MIT’s Research Helping the Chinese Military?
My concerns about how Beijing might be using our findings were dismissed as racist and political.
By Michelle Bethel
Dec. 10, 2021 11:23 am ET
I was thrilled when I joined the board of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research seven years ago. But last week I resigned. I’m no longer confident the institute can ethically push the boundaries of science for the good of humanity while working with institutions beholden to the regime in China.
My stepfather, the late Patrick McGovern, founded the institute in 2000 to foster knowledge of the human brain and cure diseases. He was a global pioneer, who expanded the institute’s partnerships with institutions in China during a more optimistic time in that country.
I have real affection for China and its people. I moved to Shanghai with my husband in 2006. Over the next seven years, I gave birth to three children there and learned the culture as well as the language.
China was different then. The government had, at least to a degree, gotten out of the way of its citizens—enough that the country was thriving on the work ethic of its people and their desire to succeed. We saw striking changes: skyscrapers went up; new highways were built, people catapulted themselves out of poverty into the modern world.
But times have changed. The Communist Party has reasserted itself in every aspect of China’s society—economic, social, cultural and, yes, scientific. Yet MIT and the McGovern Institute seem to have failed to scrutinize these developments. I believe that MIT doesn’t have a firm grasp on events in China or on the risks of partnerships with Chinese institutions in cutting-edge areas of science that are subject to misappropriation or abuse for military modernization or repression.
Reuters recently published an article about a Chinese professor at a Danish university who collaborated with Chinese researchers to investigate monkeys’ brains at high altitudes. It concerned me because the professor followed the rules of the university as well as the laws of Denmark, yet his research might have aided the People’s Liberation Army. By conducting research with institutions in China, the McGovern Institute unwittingly could be aiding the country’s repressive security apparatus or its military, whose officers have published articles declaring biology a new domain of warfare.
The Chinese Communist Party, in pursuing what it calls “military-civil fusion,” has passed laws stating that all institutions, including those in partnerships with Western universities, are obligated to serve the modernization of the Chinese military. This requirement and the Party’s opacity make it hard to ascertain if the PLA is using our research.
I was concerned about the potential reputational damage to the institution that bears my stepfather’s name. When I first aired these concerns a few years ago, other board members took offense. One said that any serious inquiry into the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party would be “racist.” A key member of the institute asked me to “stick to science” and not to mention China again.
On reading the Reuters article last month I raised my concerns again. Board members again dismissed the issues I cited, saying scientific progress is paramount. One characterized my motives as “political”—a head-scratcher, given that I don’t wear my centrist political views on my sleeve.
This week the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, citing credible reports that the Communist Party is conducting genocide against Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. These are serious accusations that MIT should be concerned about. Examining whether our research may be aiding the PLA is neither political nor racist.
This problem isn’t unique to the McGovern Institute or MIT, which are filled with talented scholars who want to advance science for the good of humanity. The problem is not necessarily with any specific institution in China. The problem is the nature of an autocratic system that is only as ethical and trustworthy as its rulers—who avail themselves by decree of all scientific research and data generated in China.
Nobody on the McGovern board can be certain whether the institute’s collaboration with the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, or with Chinese universities, benefits the Chinese military. These institutions don’t fall under U.S. law or MIT rules. They fall under China’s laws, including its 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese institutions to share information with the government on demand, and the 13th Five-Year Plan for Military and Civil Fusion, which focuses on “cross-pollination of military and civilian technology” in areas including “neuroscience and brain-inspired research.”
Given my concerns, the logical next step would be a thoughtful discussion. As an academic institution, we should promote diversity of opinion and sincere debate. Yet when colleagues at the institute abruptly shut down this idea, I saw little merit in continuing to express my concerns internally—or in remaining on the board.
In parting, I ask the board, and others like it across the country, to take a stand against working with repressive governments. We should promote ethics before the pursuit of science.
Mrs. Bethel is CEO of Pazow! and an alumna of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/apple-gives-275b-to-china_4150279.html?utm_source=opinionnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=opinionnl-2021-12-12
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/where-are-you-going/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=196427087&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9iEiNiCsoOICk0QgXZ2UA3PaZKMpb5GNB5DZb4UunX-viQ7SKmYYx4zmCB089tKFGuPpQY_N2n38hTlZ29G1mMd9pnAA&utm_content=196427087&utm_source=hs_email
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/top-5-imported-foods-from-china-you-should-avoid_231731.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-12-17-2&mktids=bfa7185aae71ad2c9e01fb93c7b7478f&est=U1L%2FxLmblxibjztgP3D%2BbZj%2FDwDxnbIgarslx1vZYOQyiXZYA443hiv6S1jbA7tplMeO
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-harvard-chemistry-chair-admits-to-taking-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-from-china_4165630.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-12-19-2&utm_medium=email&est=GOlV%2Fn7SsIlWlIcJcZib3yaQX8jqKSwwd58yChCQfIlsLMqG2bskE1Z3L7%2BI9c%2BodUY6
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The U.S. Pursued Professors Working With China. Cases Are Faltering.
MIT professor’s academic collaboration in Shenzhen led to criminal charges, but the university says such ties are ordinary practice
Representatives of MIT, Chinese university SUSTech and the Shenzhen government after striking a collaboration agreement in 2018. MIT professor Gang Chen is at far right. ALLEGRA BOVERMAN/MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
By Aruna Viswanatha
Follow
in Boston and Sha Hua
Follow
in Hong Kong
Dec. 20, 2021 11:05 am ET
In January 2020, Gang Chen and about two dozen other professors and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology traveled to Shenzhen, China, to talk about overlapping university research, visit local companies and interview students interested in studying at MIT.
When Mr. Chen landed back at Boston’s Logan airport, Customs and Border Protection agents pulled him aside, seized his laptop and two cellphones and began asking him what he had been doing in China and why. Mr. Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering and an American citizen, told them he had been collaborating with a Chinese university and that all his research had been conducted in the U.S.
One year later, he was arrested on charges of concealing extensive ties to China in grant applications he had made to the U.S. government. It was one of a string of attention-grabbing cases brought by the Justice Department to address suspicions that the Chinese government was exploiting academic ties to engage in technological espionage.
Since then, the government’s pursuit of academics for alleged lying about their affiliations has faltered. The first such case to go to a jury ended in an acquittal. Out of 24 other cases, nine defendants have pleaded guilty. Charges have been dropped completely in six others, five of which officials said they dismissed because the scientists involved already had been sufficiently punished by being detained or otherwise restricted for a year.
The rest are pending, including one against a professor at Harvard University who went on trial on Dec. 14. By comparison, about 92% of the Justice Department’s overall white-collar prosecutions end in convictions.
In recent weeks, Justice Department officials have discussed whether to drop additional cases against academics, including Mr. Chen, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Chen has pleaded not guilty.
The allegations against Mr. Chen and others, which came amid sharp anti-China rhetoric from the Trump administration, sparked criticism from some in academia that the Justice Department was improperly targeting American scientists of Chinese descent—something the department has denied. At a minimum, the cases showed that at times what the Justice Department saw as suspicious contacts between American professors and scientists and government officials in China were something the universities regarded as ordinary academic collaboration.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, questioned by a lawmaker in October about the cases, said the new head of the Justice Department’s national security division planned to review the department’s approach to countering threats posed by the Chinese government. A spokesman said that review would be completed soon, and the agency would provide additional information in the coming weeks.
Chinese officials have called on the U.S. to halt the effort. In a written statement, Liu Pengyu, a representative of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that China’s policies in connection with U.S. scientists “are no different from the common practice of other countries,” and that U.S. authorities should “stop stigmatizing China’s programs.” The embassy didn’t comment on the details of Mr. Chen’s case.
The U.S. effort seems to have helped Beijing attract Chinese-American scientists to China. More than half a dozen top researchers of Chinese descent said in interviews they had either moved from posts at U.S. universities to China or were looking for a chance to do so, saying they feared becoming a target of what they viewed as Justice Department overreach.
The federal government has estimated that each year more than $225 billion in intellectual property is lost to China. National-security officials have said publicly that U.S. universities are a key conduit in that loss of technology.
Beginning in about 2018, as the Trump administration criticized a variety of China’s trade and technology practices, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. agencies that sponsor much university research began flagging instances where grant recipients appeared to be trying to transfer sensitive technologies to China and to hide Chinese funding when applying for U.S. government support.
Separately, American officials urged universities to more thoroughly vet certain types of collaborative research with institutions in China, citing Chinese law that allows the government to tap any technology or research conducted under such collaborations to advance its own interests.
In 2019, federal prosecutors began charging academics with lying to U.S. grant-giving agencies about their China connections. In the summer of 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that the agency was opening a China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours, and warned that Americans “are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”
On Jan. 13, days before President Biden’s inauguration, prosecutors charged Mr. Chen with failing to disclose some of his ties to China to the Energy Department, which funded some of his research. They alleged he had served as an adviser to the Chinese government, to a Beijing-funded development company and to the board at Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology, or SUSTech, the institution with which MIT was collaborating.
As agents investigated Mr. Chen, they suspected he had pursued the collaboration at SUSTech not to benefit MIT but to benefit China, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The allegations of the complaint imply that this was not just about greed, but about loyalty to China,” said Andrew Lelling, then the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, in announcing the case.
In a later filing, lawyers for Mr. Chen, who became a naturalized American citizen in 2000, described Mr. Lelling’s “speculation” about Mr. Chen’s loyalty as “grossly insulting.”
From the moment that charges were filed, MIT has offered vigorous defenses of its professor and the university’s SUSTech collaboration, saying such cooperation was crucial to advancing science. MIT President Rafael Reif called the arrest “deeply distressing and hard to understand.”
In a group letter to Mr. Reif, more than 200 of Mr. Chen’s colleagues wrote: “The complaint against Gang vilifies what would be considered normal academic and research activities, including promoting MIT’s global mission.”
A lawyer for Mr. Chen, Robert Fisher, said his client was grateful for the support and “looks forward to his day in court.”
Mr. Chen was born in 1964 and grew up in China’s Hubei province, where his mother had been forced to move during the Cultural Revolution. His university assigned him to study thermal power, which his father thought meant he would become a boilermaker. Instead a Chinese-American scientist recruited him to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1993.
After stints at Duke University and the University of California, Los Angeles, he moved to MIT in 2001, assembling a large research group and churning out papers on topics such as how to use batteries to convert thermal energy into electricity. In 2013, he became head of MIT’s mechanical engineering department.
By the mid-2010s, MIT was cultivating ties with China. It received $125 million from Chinese nationals and organizations between 2015 and 2019, more than any of its university peers, according to self-reported data collected by the Education Department. It also received around $11 million from now-blacklisted Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co., other Education Department data show. The U.S. government alleges that Huawei gear could be used by Beijing to spy globally, which Huawei has denied.
Chinese diplomats in New York often dropped by MIT to visit Chinese students, and they were in frequent contact with Mr. Chen, who was one of the most cited researchers in his field and was well-known in China. Those contacts, captured as the U.S. monitored Chinese diplomats, landed Mr. Chen on the U.S. government’s radar, according to people familiar with the matter.
The diplomats asked Mr. Chen to serve in various posts. Mr. Chen spurned some Chinese requests and accommodated others. In 2013, he declined to serve on an advisory panel for the Chinese government, according to people familiar with his activities. The next year, told it would involve minimal effort, he accepted the offer, but there is no record that he followed up or was paid for it, those people said.
In February 2016, China’s then vice minister of science and technology, Wang Zhigang, visited Boston and spoke to MIT officials and faculty, including Mr. Chen, both on campus and at a dinner with Chinese-American scientists. In the subsequent complaint against Mr. Chen, prosecutors cited notes he took on his phone that day as evidence of his efforts to advance China’s strategic goals.
The most recent convention of the Chinese Communist Party had “scientific innovation placed at core,” Mr. Chen had written, noting that the question was “how to promote MIT China collaborations.” Mr. Chen later said the notes merely reflected Mr. Wang’s words to him.
After the meeting, MIT’s associate provost for international affairs, Richard Lester, asked Mr. Chen how China’s science ministry could be a partner for MIT in China. “It would seem from today’s meeting that there is a possible path forward there,” Mr. Lester wrote in an email.
At MIT, officials were particularly interested in Shenzhen, a city adjacent to Hong Kong that had grown into an advanced manufacturing and technology center.
In 2016, Ma Xingrui, then-Communist Party secretary for Shenzhen, pushed visiting U.S. professors for partnerships between the city’s institutes and U.S. universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University. He suggested to Mr. Chen that he consider a collaboration between MIT and SUSTech, the university the city’s government had set up to complement the economic growth.
Former national-security officials not connected to Mr. Chen’s case said SUSTech’s recruitment of scientists with experience at labs run by the U.S. Department of Energy, including the SUSTech’s past president, had raised suspicions among government security officials.
MIT officials viewed a SUSTech collaboration favorably, given SUSTech’s Western-trained faculty and its decision to teach many classes in English. They believed Shenzhen’s manufacturing prowess would be valuable for MIT students to experience.
U.S. investigators were concerned about Mr. Chen’s continued contacts with Chinese government officials as he kept them apprised of the SUSTech-MIT plans.
Shenzhen, a city adjacent to Hong Kong, has grown into an advanced manufacturing and technology center.
PHOTO: BERTHA WANG/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In January 2017, Mr. Chen accompanied a dozen MIT faculty members to SUSTech for a workshop to discuss areas in which the two schools could cooperate.
That February, a Chinese diplomat sent Mr. Chen another note that was flagged by prosecutors. In it, Mr. Chen was told that the science ministry had launched a new area of funding for “key special projects” between China and other governments. The diplomat encouraged Mr. Chen to consider the MIT-SUSTech collaboration as such a project, provided he obtain related U.S. government funding. Mr. Chen never responded.
One month later, Mr. Chen renewed a grant he has received for more than a decade from the Energy Department, to continue his research into how atoms vibrate and carry heat in plastics.
Mr. Chen was reimbursed for his travel to speak at a California conference hosted by ZGC Capital Corp., a Silicon Valley fund affiliated with Zhongguancun Development Group, a company funded by the city of Beijing that was a member of an MIT program that connects faculty with industry. Prosecutors later alleged he hid from the Energy Department a post ZGC offered him. He turned down the post but continued to work with the Beijing company through the MIT program, people familiar with the matter said.
In the fall of 2017, Mr. Chen took a paid position to mentor students at a middle school in Chongqing, whose headmaster, Wu Xianhong, was the founder of investment company Verakin and had endowed a fellowship at MIT. Mr. Chen gave a speech there, encouraging students not to fear science. Mr. Wu’s investment company advertised the affiliation, saying it offered a talent program that had “famous experts and professors from top universities” as tutors. Prosecutors said in the indictment that Mr. Chen hid that post from the U.S. as well. Lawyers for Mr. Chen have argued he was under no obligation to disclose it.
In June 2018, MIT and SUSTech struck a deal under which SUSTech agreed to pay MIT $25 million over five years. SUSTech would send some faculty members and students to MIT each year, and MIT faculty members and students would travel to Shenzhen. That fall, Mr. Chen took a sabbatical from MIT and spent part of the semester at SUSTech.
That November, MIT continued to expand its engagement with China, hosting with the Chinese Academy of Sciences a science and technology conference in Beijing. MIT’s president and Mr. Chen introduced the event.
The event included discussions between MIT professors and the founders of technology companies iFlytek Co. Ltd. and SenseTime. The following year, the U.S. Commerce Department added both firms to its blacklist, accusing them of playing a role in Beijing’s repression of Muslim minorities in northwest China. SenseTime described the allegations as unfounded, and iFlytek has said the U.S. move wouldn’t have a serious effect on its business. MIT has since terminated a research collaboration with iFlytek.
In 2019, Congress held a hearing in which U.S. national-security officials warned about scientific interactions with China.
That April, MIT said it wouldn’t renew its contracts with Huawei, and would intensify its vetting of projects that involved China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. Apparently, it didn’t think its January 2020 visit to SUSTech—which preceded Mr. Chen being questioned at the airport—would present any problem.
After Mr. Chen’s arrest early this year, Mr. Reif, MIT’s president, indicated that MIT and the government appeared to be construing the SUSTech collaboration very differently. “These funds are about advancing the work of a group of colleagues, and the research and educational mission of MIT,” he said. MIT has continued to pay Mr. Chen’s legal bills.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Mr. Lelling, the former Massachusetts U.S. attorney whose office charged Mr. Chen, said he thought the Justice Department should rethink its efforts to “avoid needlessly chilling scientific and business collaborations with Chinese partners.”
Meanwhile, professors at MIT and SUSTech are continuing their collaborations. University officials say they are still working to figure out how to respond to the growing calls to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies while maintaining a welcoming research environment.
At an October hearing on research security before a House subcommittee, MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, said law enforcement and the university would benefit from better understanding each other, given the differences in the ways they work and share information. “It’s a work in progress,” she said.
—Lekai Liu contributed to this article.
Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Sha Hua at sha.hua@wsj.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzdCiA1pO6U
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DeSantis aims to pull all state pension funds out of China
Investors accused of ties
BY JAMES VARNEY THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and some of his administration’s top officials moved Monday to take control of the state’s huge pension portfolio from private asset managers that invest heavily in communist China.
At a meeting of the State Board of Administration, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Attorney General Ashley Moody joined Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, in a motion to “revoke all proxy voting authority that has been given to outside fund managers.”
The state officials said they need to ensure that fund managers “act solely in the financial interest of the state’s funds.”
The measure also orders a survey of the Florida Retirement System’s investments “to determine how many assets the state has in Chinese companies.”
The state took action after Consumers’ Research, a conservative watchdog group, launched a campaign accusing BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company by assets under management, of close and growing ties with Beijing.
The bond between BlackRock CEO Larry Fink
and China’s communist leaders also has drawn criticism from left-wing billionaire George Soros.
In addition to investing clients’ money in Chinese companies, BlackRock was awarded a contract to sell mutual funds in China. The venture has raked in some $1 billion, according to published reports.
“I would like the SBA to survey the investments that are currently being done,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement. “When the Legislature comes back, they can make statutory changes to say that the Communist Party of China is not a vehicle that we want to be entangled with. I think that that would be something that would be very, very prudent.”
Figures for BlackRock’s investments in China are difficult to pinpoint, but they represent a small portion of the more than $9.6 trillion in assets that the firm manages.
BlackRock’s China A Opportunities Fund, which has returned more than 32% since its 2018 inception, has more than $47.4 million, according to its most recent report.
“BlackRock has been using their proxy votes to hamper American companies, leading to higher burdens on Americans when we can least afford it,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild said. “They have used American investment dollars to cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party in a betrayal of our nation that puts American pension dollars at risk.”
BlackRock declined a request for comment.
Although Mr. Fink is an ardent supporter of green initiatives and BlackRock has tried to force American companies to follow an environmental agenda, China is the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases.
China also has been accused of numerous human rights violations, including forcing Muslimminority Uyghurs into labor camps, stifling Hong Kong’s traditional democracy, and silencing and coercing tennis star Peng Shuai over rape charges against a high government official.
National security officials have raised concerns about investments in Chinese companies that operate with the permission of the communist leadership and, in some cases, work closely with the military.
Published reports show Black-Rock has invested in at least two Chinese companies, iFlytek and Hikvision, that have been added to the U.S. “entity list” as national security and foreign policy threats.
It is not illegal to invest in such companies, although they are forbidden from trading with U.S. corporations.
Florida’s announcement is the latest in a string of state initiatives to signal that companies should focus on business and profits for shareholders rather than a political agenda.
Last month, West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore led a coalition of 15 states that threatened to pull funds if bankers tried to stifle oil and gas companies to appease environmentalists.
Mr. Moore called the warning a “pushback against woke capitalism.”
Some top Florida officials supported Mr. DeSantis’ concern Monday.
“As Americans got our cheap goods, the Chinese government wasn’t playing by the rules when it came to intellectual property or trade,” Mr. Patronis said.
“I take my fiduciary responsibilities seriously, and I think the SBA needs to start asking harder questions when it comes to whether investing any more in China is a good idea. It seems limiting our exposure to China is not only good for our country, but it is the financially prudent thing to do for our state,” he said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal agencies have cautioned that Chinese investments can be subject to the whims of communist leaders and are outside the influence of U.S. or other regulators.
In September, the SEC warned of risks associated with variable interest entities, which are listed on U.S. stock markets but are essentially shell companies with no control over the Chinese entities.
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https://www.foxnews.com/us/harvard-scientist-paid-by-china
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From Wikipedia :
notice the bullshit part about this is "McCarthyism" and linkage to "Trump"
no mention out scientists are being bribed by Chinese so they can steal our science
and they are happily taking cash, grants and other bribes to do so , selling us all out in the name of "SCIENCE". And speak out against this traitorous behavior and you get called "McCarthyist", a MAGA etc .
And of course he has to be Jewish.....Harvard Prof. Anyone think he is a Democrat - but he does vote for the party that states they represent the poor. so it is all ok because he feels for the poor in his righteous heart :roll:
Federal charges
On January 28, 2020, Lieber was charged with two federal counts of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about his links to a Chinese university. According to the Department of Justice's charging document,[72] there are two counts of alleged crime committed by Lieber. First, during an interview by DoD on April 24, 2018, Lieber was asked whether he was involved in the Thousand Talents Program. Lieber stated that "he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program", adding that "he 'wasn't sure' how China categorized him." The DOJ believes that Lieber's statement was false, because an intercepted email dated June 27, 2012, from Wuhan University of Technology ("WUT") included a contract for Lieber to sign. Second, in November 2018, the NIH inquired of Harvard University about Lieber's foreign affiliations. In January 2019, Harvard interviewed Lieber and reported to NIH that Lieber "had no formal association with WUT" after 2012. The DOJ believes Lieber's statement was false. Lieber was charged with two counts of violating 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2), one on April 24, 2018, and one in January 2019 for making the allegedly false statements.
During his arraignment, authorities executed search warrants at his home and office in Lexington, Massachusetts. Lieber was placed on paid administrative leave by Harvard.[73]
On June 9, 2020 the Department of Justice indicted Lieber on false statement charges alleging that, unbeknownst to Harvard University and beginning in 2011, Lieber became a "Strategic Scientist" at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. He later became a contractual participant in China's Thousand Talents Plan from at least 2012 through 2015.[74] A month later he was also charged with four tax offenses for failing to report income he allegedly received from China.[75]
Critics expressed worry that Lieber's arrest could be McCarthyism, as a part of the rising tension with China due to China–United States trade war, started under the Presidency of Donald Trump.[76][73][77][78] Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, reports anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over legitimate sources of international funding, "...slowly but surely, we're going to have something of a McCarthyish purity testing."[76] In March 2021, several dozen scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter in support of Lieber, arguing that his prosecution by the government was "unjust" and "misguided" and "discouraging US scientists from collaborating with peers in other countries."[79]
In the spring of 2021, Lieber requested that his trial be expedited because he was suffering from lymphoma.[75]
Lieber's trial opened on December 14, 2021 in Boston with jury selection. He pleaded not guilty to all six felony charges.[80][81][82] On December 21, 2021, Lieber was found guilty on two counts of making false statements to the U.S. government, and of failing to declare income earned in China and a Chinese bank account.[83] In a taped interview, Lieber admitted travelling from China with tens of thousands of dollars in bags of cash, which he said he never disclosed to the IRS.[84]"
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Perhaps a certain amount of puffery on the part of the organization, but worth noting nonetheless
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/21/report-33-members-congress-advisory-board-group-ties-ccp-affiliated-organization/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-universities-maintain-ties-with-chinese-institutions-that-support-beijings-military-development-report-says_4173275.html?utm_source=uschinaia&utm_campaign=uschina-2021-12-24&utm_medium=email
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second post
https://www.theepochtimes.com/anders-corr-on-communist-chinas-reported-275-billion-deal-with-apple-and-the-road-to-global-tyranny_4175550.html?utm_source=uschinaia&utm_campaign=uschina-2021-12-24&utm_medium=email
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-us-navy-sailor...
Former US Navy Sailor Sentenced to 30 Months for Exporting Military Equipment to China
By Frank Fang December 22, 2021 Updated: December 22, 2021 biggersmaller Print
A former U.S. Navy sailor has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for conspiring with her husband to illegally ship export-controlled sensitive military equipment to China for profit, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Dec. 21.
Ye Sang “Ivy” Wang, 37, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China, was a logistics specialist for the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command from 2015 to 2019, where her duties included making military equipment purchases, according to a DOJ statement.
The Naval Special Warfare Command—the naval component of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)—includes the Navy’s SEALS and Special Boat Teams.
Her husband, Shaohua “Eric” Wang, 38, also a naturalized U.S. citizen, enlisted his wife to “use her Navy position” to purchase military equipment for resale, according to the statement. He traveled to China frequently, had buyers in the country, and maintained a warehouse in China to house the military equipment.
In March 2018, Ivy used her military email and her mailing address at the Navy command to order “a device for identifying United States military personnel in the field,” the DOJ stated. When the device arrived at the Navy command, she was deployed in Iraq. She told her command that the item was for her husband for an upcoming camping trip.
Upon her return from Iraq in October 2018, she admitted to law enforcement agents that she knew that her husband was shipping military equipment to China illegally.
Her husband continued to press her to make more purchases, even handing her an Excel spreadsheet of items that he wanted her to buy. According to prosecutors, Ivy got so “annoyed” at her husband that she “gave him her password to her military email and told him to buy the export-controlled military equipment posing as her” when she was deployed overseas.
“Ms. Wang betrayed her oath to the U.S. Navy and ultimately threatened the operational readiness and safety of our nation’s military by attempting to acquire and illegally export sensitive military equipment to China,” said Joshua Flowers, special agent in charge of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Southwest Field Office, according to the statement.
In addition to her 30-month sentence, Ivy was also fined $20,000. Her husband was sentenced to 46 months for his role in the scheme on Feb. 3, 2020, according to the DOJ. The couple is from San Diego.
According to a court document (pdf), Ivy became the target of an investigation when a special security officer in Navy command was alerted that she had repeatedly tried to obtain a top security clearance. Her job already granted her a classified security clearance. The officer was also alarmed to learn that she was compiling a list of the Navy command’s deployment personnel records, including names and addresses, according to the court document.
Court documents also show that one of the companies that she reached out to was the U.S.-based Airborne Systems, a maker of military parachutes. It’s unclear if she purchased anything from the company on behalf of her husband.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/huawei-bypassing-us-sanctions-by-collaborating-with-chinese-smartphone-partners_4166372.html?utm_source=uschinanoe&utm_campaign=uschina-2021-12-26&utm_medium=email
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second
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-researchers-built-hypersonic-aircraft-prototype-using-scrapped-nasa-design_4159515.html?utm_source=uschinanoe&utm_campaign=uschina-2021-12-26&utm_medium=email
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18083/china-american-academics-traitors
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-harvests-masses-of-data-on-western-targets-documents-show/ar-AASk8e0
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Fentanyl
https://www.wibw.com/2021/12/30/rcpd-fentanyl-overdoses-become-leading-cause-death-ages-18-45-2021/
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/094/792/039/original/4444b06d41a8abf7.mp4
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/094/792/039/original/4444b06d41a8abf7.mp4
Fauci: "Yes, we had a very minor collaboration with the Chinese Communists, uh, Chinese scientists."
Let's see. Do the Communists or the scientists run the Institute? I believe he had it right the first time.
If what they did was good and right and the responsible thing to do, why is the qualifier, "very minor", so emphasized?
If you did it to gain function, er, knowledge, of all these viruses, where is that knowledge of all these viruses.
Very, very, very best case, you squandered that taxpayer money and should be fired or prosecuted. Worst case, your recklessness funded this pandemic.
https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/wuhan-lab-was-to-get-1-5m-in-federal-grant-money-for-bat-study-emails/
If you gave me $1.5 million to gain no knowledge of viruses whatsoever, would the money be very minor or would it be criminal?
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Fair that they can make their case as long as they are identified as who they are.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-state-media-uses-times-square-screen-to-play-xinjiang-propaganda_4200206.html?utm_source=uschinanoe&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-01-08&utm_medium=email
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Fair that they can make their case as long as they are identified as who they are.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-state-media-uses-times-square-screen-to-play-xinjiang-propaganda_4200206.html?utm_source=uschinanoe&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-01-08&utm_medium=email
Fair is when our messages go up in Tiananmen Square for the Chinese New Year.
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Of course, but OTOH I'm not seeing that we should limit our access to all sides because the other side does.
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The Looming Threat of Chinese Spyware
Bruce Abramson
Bruce Abramson
January 17, 2022 Updated: January 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary
One of the great lessons of the past two years has been that the events poised to change our lives often percolate far from public consciousness.
Gain-of-function research on coronaviruses interested almost no part of the general public until it was far too late.
Critical race theory took over our classrooms long before parents began to notice, complain, and find themselves playing a late defense.
Street riots had been part of the American terrain since 2014, but most people other than those directly involved more-or-less shrugged them off until a massive wave engulfed urban America.
Few other than activists or election scholars thought much about the role of propaganda, or about balancing ballot access and election integrity, until the credibility of America’s elections came under attack.
Which is why it might be worthwhile to set these now-front-burner issues aside for a moment and consider another critical threat arising in a place that few Americans care to look: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spyware worming its way into our defenses, infrastructure, communities, schools, and homes courtesy of procurement policy and purchasing decisions.
Like the issues that dominate today’s front pages, this one is already visible—at least at the federal level—to those who are willing to look:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains a National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Relying in part on the NVD, a 2019 Inspector General report (pdf) singled out the Department of Defense’s procurement of Lenovo computers, Lexmark printers, and GoPro cameras as potential threats to national security—a threat that we have yet to address.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), in a February 2021 report (pdf) raising awareness about China’s economic long war against the United States, argued that “Chinese firms’ presence in Silicon Valley should not be treated as aboveboard commercial ventures but as spying outposts for the CCP.”
And just last week, a letter from representatives John Katko (R-N.Y.) and Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) (ranking members of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Innovation, respectively) to Secretaries Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security) and Gina Raimondo (Commerce), called for an inquiry into whether “civilian agency procurement of commercial off-the-shelf information technology items may pose cybersecurity risks for telecommunications infrastructure,” comparable to the national security vulnerabilities discussed in the IG report.
In a sign of the glacial pace that the federal government has set in addressing these critical issues, last week’s letter was essentially a followup of their inquiry dated last April 13 (pdf).
Still, the federal government deserves at least some credit for basic awareness of the issue. That’s more than can be said for the states. Lenovo, Lexmark, and other brands with CCP ties are used widely in state government offices around the country. Robert Chernin, my colleague at the American Center for Education and Knowledge (ACEK), recently called out the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) for its master contracts with Lenovo.
That contract is hardly the only problem at the state level. The procurement contracts that landed these Chinese products in government offices positions the CCP to track critical information on American infrastructure, energy, security, emergency awareness, and personnel. Perhaps hitting a bit closer to home, it also gives the Chinese regime a far better window into America’s classrooms than most American parents can claim.
It seems likely that most of these potential incursions are happening not because of corruption or maliciousness, but rather because of laziness, inattention, and the insularity of procurement decisions. If Lenovo or Lexmark makes your school district a compelling offer, why not take it?
We’ve all been there. Though we all know today that our devices and software spy on us, most of us can remember when we first learned that “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” Millions of us have simply accommodated ourselves to a world in which a few tech titans—and the various companies to whom they’ve sold their collected data—know the most intimate details of our lives.
Perhaps it’s time to consider that these giant and intrusive American corporations may be the least of our problems. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, China has been so pleased with its domestic surveillance network and social credit scores that it’s now expanding its reach across the globe. America’s wide open procurement policies and love of low prices is welcoming that expansion with open arms.
Taken together, the dissemination of Chinese technology products at all levels threatens the privacy and security of every American. It’s long past time to think about the implications of our purchasing and procurement decisions. As we learned the hard way with the issues that have dominated the past two years, the time to act is before things hit the front page.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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second
https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/18/fbi-icon-china-investment-plane-technology/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=seJiDSZbLroY3qXc.SSuT4mDuk._VYJyP___yuls.wNmm2vS.GFC.M75o8qlwf8hFoe9rDzM
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U.S. Drops Case Against MIT Professor Accused of Hiding China Ties
Gang Chen was one of around two dozen academics charged since 2019 with allegedly lying about their affiliations
The U.S. had pursued Gang Chen on suspicions that he had forged a collaboration between MIT and a university in Shenzhen to benefit China.
By Aruna Viswanatha
Updated Jan. 20, 2022 1:48 pm ET
Federal prosecutors dropped criminal charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor accused of hiding his China ties, saying in a Thursday filing that the government no longer believed it could prove its case at trial.
Gang Chen was arrested last January on charges of concealing posts he held in China in a grant application he had made to the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that prosecutors had recommended that the Justice Department drop the case, based in part on witness testimony that investigators obtained since his arrest, citing people familiar with the matter.
One of those people included an Energy Department official who told prosecutors in recent weeks that the agency didn’t believe Mr. Chen had an obligation to disclose the posts at the time, and didn’t believe the department would have withheld the grant if officials had known about them. The Energy Department later started asking researchers for more information about their foreign connections.
“As a result of our continued investigation, the government obtained additional information bearing on the materiality of the defendant’s alleged omissions,” prosecutors wrote. “Having assessed the evidence as a whole in light of that information, the government can no longer meet its burden of proof at trial.”
The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, signed off on the dismissal, but could ask the government for more information about its decision.
In a statement, Mr. Chen’s lawyer, Rob Fisher, said: “The government finally acknowledged what we have said all along: Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man.” Mr. Fisher added that Mr. Chen was never in a Chinese government talent recruitment program and never served as an overseas strategic scientist for Beijing, as prosecutors had initially alleged.
In a separate statement, Mr. Chen thanked his friends and colleagues for their support “during this terrible year,” and said the Justice Department’s other similar cases continue “to bring unwarranted fear to the academic community and other scientists still face charges.”
In a December article, the Journal reported on how U.S. government investigators pursued Mr. Chen on suspicions that he had forged a collaboration between MIT and a university in Shenzhen to benefit China, though the collaboration had the support of MIT. Some of the posts Mr. Chen was accused of hiding, the Journal reported, were either connected to his relationships through MIT or those he wasn’t paid for, and Justice Department officials had discussed dropping his case last year.
The U.S. Attorney in Boston, Rachael Rollins—who was sworn in to the post last week after Vice President Kamala Harris broke a tie on her confirmation—said in a statement that prosecutors had an obligation “to continually examine the facts while being open to receiving and uncovering new information.”
“Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice,” Ms. Rollins said.
MIT had supported Mr. Chen since his arrest and continued to pay his legal bills. After prosecutors’ Thursday filing, MIT President Rafael Reif posted a letter to the MIT community saying, “Having had faith in Gang from the beginning, we can all be grateful that a just outcome of a damaging process is on the horizon. We are eager for his full return to our community.”
Mr. Chen was one of around two dozen academics charged since 2019 with allegedly lying about their affiliations, in attention-grabbing cases brought by the Justice Department to address suspicions that the Chinese government was exploiting academic ties to engage in technological espionage.
Some of the cases have been successful for the U.S. government. A jury convicted Harvard University chemistry professor Charles Lieber in December 2021, for example, of lying to Defense Department investigators and others about his participation in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents program aimed at wooing foreign experts.
But another case, the first to go to trial, ended in an acquittal in September after a judge said that prosecutors had provided no evidence that the professor intended to deceive the government, and prosecutors have dropped several other cases.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in October that he would task the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, Matt Olsen, with reviewing the department’s approach to countering threats posed by the Chinese government. The Justice Department is expected to provide more information about the results of that review in the coming weeks, a spokesman has said.
Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com
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China’s Huawei Pays Tony Podesta $1 Million for White House Lobbying
By Eva Fu January 22, 2022 Updated: January 22, 2022biggersmaller Print
Long time Democratic power broker Tony Podesta has earned $1 million over the past half year lobbying the Biden White House at the behest of a blacklisted Chinese tech giant, recent federal disclosures show.
Huawei, which was placed under trade sanctions during the Trump administration, paid Podesta $500,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 in an attempt to shake off the trade impact of the restrictions, according to the disclosure form filed on the evening of Jan. 20. With the $500,000 Podesta made from the previous three months lobbying the White House, he has been compensated $1 million over a six-month period for the lobbying effort.
Podesta’s latest lobbying campaign targeted the Executive Office of the President and centered around “telecommunications services and impacted trade issues,” the disclosure said.
Huawei, once the world’s largest telecom makers, has been facing international scrutiny in recent years. U.S. authorities have flagged the China-based company as a national security threat, saying the company’s close ties with China’s ruling communist regime, as well as Chinese law, could make it a potential espionage tool for Beijing.
A stream of U.S. sanctions since 2019—which have barred Huawei from using U.S. technology and software, and shut out its gears from critical U.S. infrastructure—have slashed the company’s annual revenue by a third. In November, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that further tightened restrictions on Huawei by restricting it from receiving new equipment licenses from U.S regulators.
Battered by the restrictions, Huawei has ramped up its U.S. influence operation in recent months. Podesta is one of half a dozen lobbyists the firm has engaged since July, which includes a former congressman and one former congressional aide, according to disclosure filings.
At the time, the company had been pushing for the release of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder Ren Zhenfei, who had been detained in Canada on fraud charges for business dealings with Iran evading U.S. sanctions.
Meng was eventually allowed to return to China after inking a deal with the Department of Justice.
Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as White House chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. He was also a former counselor to President Barack Obama, overseeing climate and energy policies.
Epoch Times Photo
President Bill Clinton (R), his Chief of Staff John Podesta (C), and his aid Doug Band (L), leave the Oval Office of the White House for the last time on Jan. 20, 2001. (STEPHEN JAFFE/AFP/Getty Images)
The filings indicate that Huawei spent $3.59 million on lobbying in the United States in 2021, nearly eight times as much as the year before. The$3.59 million was also half a million higher than heightened spending in 2019, when the sanctions were first put into place.
The White House and Huawei did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ inquiries. Tony Podesta declined to comment and directed all questions to Huawei.
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https://nypost.com/2022/01/22/how-tech-elites-are-helping-china-achieve-global-supremacy-new-book/?fbclid=IwAR00d7wjtARwet_FHb20YjOoU3MEUg8PfPo4Q2aCF23FscetSj5ShLcUEXM
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https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2022/01/26/nba-interrupts-wizards-clippers-game-with-chinese-ambassador-speech/
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Treason?
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2022/01/26/revealed-sen-dianne-feinsteins-husband-partly-owned-a-chinese-company-that-sold-spyware-to-u-s-military/
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third
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/26/schweizer-pelosi-wont-allow-hearings-on-covid-origin-while-her-family-does-a-lot-of-business-in-china/
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you beat me to the above posts
this is really a scandal of the highest order
how crooked and f'g stupid these politicians
are
yet no comment for the corrupt msm who also is bribed to look the other way
:x :x :x
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Both my mom and I bought the book yesterday!
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/for%20your%20leader%20choose.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/for%20your%20leader%20choose.jpg)
you beat me to the above posts
this is really a scandal of the highest order
how crooked and f'g stupid these politicians
are
yet no comment for the corrupt msm who also is bribed to look the other way
:x :x :x
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Malicious’: Rep. Tenney Slams China-Run Tech Giant for Attempting to Interfere With Congress
By Rita Li and Steve Lance January 28, 2022 Updated: January 28, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) criticized Chinese surveillance giant Hikvision as being “very malicious and malevolent” for attempting to interfere with U.S. government protocols and silence dissenting voices.
“It is really just no business of a foreign Chinese-backed company to be interfering and trying to use and exploit our Ethics Committee to try to spy on and try to cause sanctions, or even fining or any other penalties, to be weighed in on a U.S. company that is actually exposing them in the media,” Tenney told NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media, during a Jan. 26 program.
Washington has blacklisted China’s Hikvision, a leading video surveillance gear maker both at home and abroad, since 2019 under Trump-era orders over cybersecurity and human rights concerns. The U.S. government said the company, with a market value of over $70 billion, supports the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses in the far-western Xinjiang region.
IPVM specified in a March report last year how data captured by facial recognition cameras across China should be segmented by dozens of characteristics—from eyebrow size to skin color and ethnicity.
The congresswoman said the state-controlled Chinese company had attempted to go after IPVM, a Pennsylvania-based video surveillance research firm that has published key investigations revealing the long-standing issues against the tech giant. Last year, Hikvision wrote to congressional ethics officials, asking to investigate IPVM’s alleged illegal activities, Axios reported.
“It was attempted censorship, using our very own government against another [U.S.] company,” Tenney said during the interview.
Play Video
“This company is very malicious and malevolent,” she said. “Hikvision is actually a Chinese backed state-run surveillance company that actually sadly, is doing the type of surveillance and video surveillance to actually determine ethnicity. And it’s been used against the Chinese Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China to segregate them and to target them.”
In a joint letter with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent on Jan. 18 to congressional clerks, Tenney said Hikvision is “bullying” American publisher IPVM into silence for its unfavorable reporting.
The alleged influence attempt came after Hikvision resigned its membership in the Maryland-based trade organization Security Industry Association (SIA), putting it down to IPVM’s participation. IPVM called the act an excuse in a statement, saying Hikvision was being investigated for violating the SIA ethics code and facing the risk of being expelled.
Tenney said many companies in the West hope in a good faith that China open up and minimize human rights violations. “But the opposite is true. They’re really naturally and instinctively authoritarians, and they can be cruel and exacting.”
“And they’ve used the United States. And some of these, I’ll say naive … U.S. partners, who have allowed this to continue to fester and grow. … They undermine freedom and they undermine human rights along the way,” she said.
re-education camp in Xinjiang
The outer wall of a believed re-education camp is equipped with several surveillance cameras in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region on May 31, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
Hikvision, together with Dahua Technology, another one of China’s largest artificial intelligence companies also blacklisted by Washington, owns one-third of the global market share for video surveillance, according to a report by Deutsche Bank AG (pdf).
More than 300 different U.S. government organizations, including local governments and public schools, have purchased cameras and surveillance systems from the two companies since August 2019, government contract data show.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Hikvision for comment.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-made-covid-19-test-kits-are-coming-to-millions-of-american-households-via-white-house-initiative_4244843.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-01-30&utm_medium=email&est=Brj%2B3aUTh28JIlwB6Pgk236WeCJr9sFE7UFnYYwcE9LtvvgrXX6UmT2WmmR1P4jhgknr
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-made-covid-19-test-kits-are-coming-to-millions-of-american-households-via-white-house-initiative_4244843.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-01-30&utm_medium=email&est=Brj%2B3aUTh28JIlwB6Pgk236WeCJr9sFE7UFnYYwcE9LtvvgrXX6UmT2WmmR1P4jhgknr
Chinese made bio weapon
Chinese made masks
Chinese made test kits
Makes sense
Did the big guy get his 10% ?
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CCP May Collect Top American Athletes’ DNA at Beijing Olympics, Experts Say
By Dorothy Li and Joshua Philipp January 30, 2022 Updated: January 31, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Sealed from the rest of Beijing in a “closed-loop” bubble, over 200 American athletes are receiving daily COVID screening for the Winter Olympics. But some experts worry that U.S. Olympians’ DNA might be collected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Patricia Adams, executive director of Canada-based non-profit Probe International, said “it’s a very likely possibility” that the CCP will be collecting top-performing athletes’ DNA at the Games.
“They [CCP] are doing the testing every day … and [there’s] absolutely no oversight over the use of the products that they’re getting,” Adams said during a Jan. 26 webinar on EpochTV’s “Unmasking Communist China” program.
In the online event, Stephen Yates, chief executive of consultancy firm DC International Advisory, spoke of the threat posed by the Chinese regime’s mass collection of personal information and health data. U.S. officials and experts have previously sounded the alarm that Beijing is amassing a large database that includes Americans’ personal and health information, which could be used to enhance artificial intelligence systems and fields of medicine, as well as assist in espionage and military operations.
The danger, Yates said, lies in the CCP using the mass data set for unethical purposes.
“China has weaponized artificial intelligence and a lot of other studies of the human process in ways that civilized countries wouldn’t even allow, so we don’t have any way to really know what this dark window of the future might be,” he said.
According to Yates, CCP may use the massive data set to give their athletes a competitive advantage or increase opportunities for psychological warfare.
The Winter Olympics is set to open in Beijing on Feb 4. The diplomatic boycotts announced by the United States and a spate of other countries, which is meant to hold the communist regime accountable for its human rights violations in Xinjiang, don’t keep athletes from competing at the Games.
The U.S. athletes arrived in Beijing on the evening of Jan. 28, and were sent straight to hotels situated in a closed-loop system surrounded by wire fences. Everyone in the bubble can only leave via special vehicles, and staff in full protective suits carry out mouth swabs on them every day.
Epoch Times Photo
A security guard stands guard at a hotel parking in Beijing on January 29, 2022. (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)
In the online event, Adams suggested that the CCP may “get rid of an American who’s the likely winner of the gold” through what she described as “nefarious means using false positive COVID test.”
Beijing’s Olympic organizers on Jan. 29 denied reports that they may potentially manipulate COVID test results, saying that the tests are up to international standards, according to state media China Daily.
Adams said that “at the end of the day, it’s all being done by the Chinese government, and nobody really knows what’s going to happen to the data.”
She noted the problem is “nobody trusts the Chinese government.”
“The Chinese government has demonstrated to the world over and over and over again that they don’t follow rules. They follow their own rules. They don’t follow international rules. They don’t follow treaties that they’ve signed.”
The CCP’s known record of cyber espionage has led several countries, including the United States, UK, and Canada to tell their athletes to bring a burner phone for the Games. Cyber security experts warned that Beijing 2022, a compulsory health app for the Games, may spy on users through encryption flaws.
“I think that athletes are very, very nervous. And they’re not happy,” said Adams.
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China Is Undermining the US Through Elite Capture: Author
By Frank Fang and David Zhang January 30, 2022 Updated: January 31, 2022biggersmaller Print
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The United States is currently traveling down a losing path in its battle against China because the communist regime has co-opted many American elites in Washington, Wall Street, corporate America, and the U.S. tech sector, warned author Peter Schweizer.
Schweizer, who recently released his new book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win,” said that his book shows how appalling it is that some of the elites have been willing to “kowtow to the regime” just so that they have access to the Chinese market.
“They should be embarrassed,” he added. “They seem to be all too happy to do the bidding for Beijing when it comes to American politics.”
Schweizer made the remarks during a recent interview with EpochTV’s “China Insider” program. He is also the president of U.S.-based think tank Government Accountability Institute.
“I think what’s important for people to keep in mind is that Beijing doesn’t have to lobby for its own interest, because there are so many powerful interests in the United States that will lobby on their behalf,” he said.
The present course will only mean that China will replace the United States as the world’s top superpower, according to Schweizer.
“Unless we start to take radical action, we will lose, there is no question in my mind,” he said. “We will lose because our elites will be happy to sell out, collect their money, and position themselves in elite positions for generations to come.”
That outcome does not necessarily mean that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would occupy the United States, he added, but America as people know it will be very different.
“For some people who say, ‘Look, that’s not my concern,’ this should be their concern,” he said. “Life here is going to be heavily influenced by what the regime in Beijing wants.”
Washington
One of the U.S. government officials named in the book is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and how the longtime senator has come to the defense of the CCP while her husband, Richard Blum, reaped profits by inking business deals with Chinese firms with ties to the Chinese regime.
In defending the Chinese regime, Feinstein compared the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre—where at least 10,000 people were killed by Chinese tanks and soldiers—to the 1970 Kent State shootings and the 1993 Waco siege in Texas, according to Schweizer’s book.
“I was appalled as anyone by the tanks at [Tiananmen] Square, but three tanks of this government went into Waco and killed 29 children,” Feinstein said during a Senate hearing. “Now those are not analogous; they are different situations. It was wrong of our government, and it was wrong of the Chinese government.”
In 1994, when the U.S. Senate was contemplating rescinding most-favored-nation trading status with China, Feinstein objected and said such a move would be “counterproductive” and would “inflame Beijing’s insecurities.”
The book also explores the relationship between Feinstein and former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, going back to the days when they were mayors in San Francisco and Shanghai, respectively. The book quotes the Los Angeles Times saying the relationship gave Blum “access to the normally impenetrable Beijing political system.”
In 2000, Kam Kuwata, who was Feinstein’s then-spokesperson, was quoted in SFGate saying that Blum “has a right to do business and he’s never done anything wrong.”
Silicon Valley
“Beijing is very sophisticated in appealing not only to the pocketbooks of these players, but also to their egos,” Schweizer said, pointing to Microsoft founder Bill Gates as an example of the latter.
In 2006, China’s state-run media outlet People’s Daily Online named Gates as one of 50 foreigners shaping “China’s modern development.” According to his book, Gates was the only true technologist on the list.
“He’s a member of something called the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), which sounds sort of friendly and nonpolitical. It’s actually, of course, an organization run by the [Chinese] Communist Party, and its goal is to advise the Chinese government on technology policy,” Schweizer said.
Gates was one of 18 foreigners selected by the CAE to be one of its lifetime members in 2017, according to People’s Daily Online. The media outlet explained that the foreigners would be to “improve CAE’s status in the field of engineering.”
The CAE supports the Chinese regime’s policies. In a 2018 article published on its website, CAE’s party committee stated that it provided “important scientific support” to the regime’s industrial blueprint of “Made in China 2025,” while endorsing its “Military-Civil Fusion” strategy and “Belt and Road” initiative.
In June last year, Microsoft was in the middle of controversy when its search engine Bing yielded no results when users in several countries including the United States entered the query “tank man,” the iconic unidentified man who was pictured standing in front of a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in 1989. Microsoft’s explanation for the empty search result, “accidental human error,” drew criticism from human rights organizations.
The CCP
In short, the Chinese regime doesn’t care if American politicians are Republicans or Democrats, as long as they are willing to do Beijing’s bidding, Schweizer said.
“They don’t mind if American politicians talk about the Uyghurs occasionally, or say we should have a diplomatic boycott,” Schweizer said. “They’re fine with that.”
“As long as you’re helping them on the main tenets of what they want, which is access to American finance and access to American technology, and a few other things.”
Schweizer added: “That is the strategy they’re employing.”
The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimated in 2017 (pdf) that the U.S. economy suffers an annual loss of between $225 billion and $600 billion due to China’s intellectual property theft each year.
Last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the agency is opening one new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours, and has about 2,500 active investigations across the United States.
“My sense of what people have to understand is, the nature of the Chinese regime is such that it cannot be trusted,” Schweizer said. “And I don’t think it can be trusted in its relationship with us and we need to keep that in mind with everything.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Feinstein’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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With mass data theft, China poses threat unlike all others
FBI tries to protect U.S. technological know-how
BY BILL GERTZ THE WASHINGTON TIMES
China’s intelligence services and related hackers are engaged in a “massive, sophisticated” program to steal information as part of a technology theft campaign larger than all other foreign adversaries combined, said FBI Director Christopher A. Wray.
Additionally, Chinese intelligence agents, including professional officers, government officials and co-opted Americans, are all part of a plan to obtain valuable American proprietary technical know-how to support the ruling Communist Party regime, Mr. Wray said in a speech in California on Monday night.
The China threat today “reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before — and it’s vital that all of us focus on that threat together,” the FBI chief said. He noted that more than 2,000 FBI investigations are focused just on Chinese efforts to steal U.S. information and technology.
“There’s just no other country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation and
economic security than China,” he said. “The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries, so much so that we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations about every 12 hours.”
In some of his most extensive comments on the campaign, Mr. Wray, noting the FBI’s role in battling the Soviet Union during the Cold War, said the primary adversary for the U.S. now is with China.
“Today, we in the United States and the Western world find ourselves in a very different struggle against another global adversary: the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “There are some surface-level similarities between the threat posed by the Chinese government and the historical threat of the Soviet Union. The Chinese government also rejects the fundamental freedoms, basic human rights and democratic norms we value as Americans.”
Unlike with the Soviet Union, U.S. companies are heavily invested in China’s economy, and Beijing dispatches large numbers of students to elite U.S. universities. China also commands a far greater financial power and a more dynamic economy than the Soviet Union had before its collapse in 1991, Mr. Wray said.
He said Beijing is using its global reach and market power “to steal and threaten rather than to cooperate and build.”
“That theft, those threats, are happening right here in America literally every day,” he said.
The threat is not just economic; it also poses a challenge to American freedom, the FBI chief said.
China’s state-controlled media provided no response to Mr. Wray’s remarks.
Neal Ziring, technical director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate, seconded the FBI chief’s warnings. He said Tuesday that Chinese threats in cyberspace are “huge.”
“The Chinese government has a large number of folks that are dedicated to doing this, spread across multiple elements of their government,” Mr. Ziring said during an online meeting of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. “And they are very aggressive at what they do.”
The Chinese operations are targets of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, as well as private-sector security companies, he said. But more needs to be known about Chinese cyber-espionage tradecraft to better counter the threat, he said.
Asked about knowledge of Chinese hacking activities, Mr. Ziring said, “We have some good insights, but we always like to have more.”
Noting his past remarks highlighting the dangers China poses, Mr. Wray doubled down on the problem in the speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
The Chinese government uses multiple avenues of attack, often in seemingly nonthreatening ways, analysts say.
For example, President Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” plan targets 10 areas where China seeks to be a technological and market world leader in robotics, green energy production and vehicles, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and other industries.
Chinese spies “throw every tool in their arsenal at stealing the technology to succeed in those areas,” Mr. Wray said. “Here in the U.S., they unleash a massive, sophisticated hacking program that’s bigger than those of every other major country combined.”
The technology collectors operate from most major cities in China and often join forces with cybercriminals whom the FBI chief described as “cyber mercenaries.” He cited the example of a group of Chinese cybercriminals associated with the Ministry of State Security, the civilian spy agency, which he said stole “terabytes” of data from hundreds of companies.
“They’re not just hacking on a huge scale but causing indiscriminate damage to get to what they want, like in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack, which compromised the networks of more than 10,000 American companies in a single campaign alone,” he said.
Chinese intelligence officers support those efforts by targeting the same information, exploiting “scores of cooptees” — people who are not technically Chinese officials but take part in intelligence operations and identify sources, providing cover and communications for spy operations. The human spying networks seek to obtain secrets in nontechnical ways.
China’s government also invests in partnerships with U.S. companies that will give proxies supporting Beijing inside access to valuable technology.
“Sometimes they just wave enough money to get what they want, but often they also conceal which companies they actually control or use companies they don’t literally own but instead can control through embedded Chinese Communist Party cells,” Mr. Wray said.
One goal of the Chinese covert operations is to disguise their technology acquisition efforts from American companies and the U.S. government. The case in Ohio of Chinese intelligence officer Xu Yanjun, recently convicted of economic espionage, highlights what Mr. Wray said is an example of efforts to steal aviationrelated technology.
The FBI said Mr. Xu was engaged in getting proprietary information on an advanced aircraft engine produced by General Electric and a foreign joint venture. Mr. Xu recruited company insiders with access to sensitive data who assisted MSS hackers operating from inside China to target the same data. He also exploited his relationship with a senior information technology official to plant malware in a joint venture laptop.
As a result, the Chinese government was able to steal technology related to a composite turbofan blade technology unique to GE and is now working to produce a copy of the engine.
The operation also involved the use of the social media business platform LinkedIn, a favorite of Chinese intelligence, Mr. Wray said.
“Xu is just one Chinese intelligence officer working for an entire unit dedicated solely to stealing aviation secrets, which is just one of those 10 technology areas the Chinese government has prioritized for stealing,” he said.
Chinese government hackers also have obtained massive amounts of personal data on millions of Americans from hospitals, health insurance companies and credit card firms.
Mr. Wray said Mr. Xi’s promises in 2015 to halt the hacking of U.S. technology and supplying it to Chinese companies did not reduce the problem. “In the years since, they’ve hit ever more companies and workers,” he said.
Stolen data includes source codes from U.S. software companies, testing data and chemical designs from drug companies, and engineering designs from manufacturers.
“The common thread is that they steal the things companies can’t afford to lose, so the Chinese government’s economic theft campaign is not just unprecedented in its breadth, it’s also deeply damaging, undoing the labor, ideas and investments of decades, and leaving lives overturned in its wake,” Mr. Wray said.
China’s government also is targeting people inside the United States “for personal and political retribution,” Mr. Wray said. They include perceived enemies, refugees, dissidents and minority Uyghurs in western China who the State Department declared last year were victims of a government policy of genocide.
Beijing launched its “Fox Hunt” program in 2014 under cover of an anticorruption drive but in reality “targets, captures and repatriates former Chinese citizens living overseas whom it sees as a political or financial threat,” he said.
More than 9,000 people have been forcibly repatriated as part of the Fox Hunt program, under which they are imprisoned or controlled by the government. The program was successful, Mr. Wray said, because much like Beijing’s economic espionage program, the Chinese involved disregard diplomatic norms and international law in grabbing victims.
Hundreds of people in America, primarily green card holders or naturalized citizens, are on the Fox Hunt target list.
The program is “the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Chinese government’s transnational repression,” Mr. Wray said.
“For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has targeted, threatened and harassed U.S.-based Tibetans and Uyghurs, Falun Gong adherents, prodemocracy advocates and any others who question their legitimacy or authority,” he said.
Mr. Wray said the FBI is applying lessons learned from fighting terrorism to countering the Chinese government threat, using joint counterintelligence task forces around the country.
“The volume of criminal and threatening actions we see from the Chinese government is immense, but the good news is that our partners and allies these days are more alert to the danger than ever,” he said.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/7/hytera-chinese-telecom-firm-indicted-theft-motorol/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=CcnTVATBp6Z8MmzRxF4E4nydDhmzvLfpnP4n5pqQicd5O0wKJvdjwcyoUVaoiiZ1&bt_ts=1644317139156
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FDA Raises Concerns About China-Developed Drugs
Agency could slow the plans of big Western drugmakers to sell Chinese-tested medicines in U.S.
Officials at the Food and Drug Administration say they are concerned about the quality of the studies evaluating China-developed drugs.
PHOTO: JASON REED/REUTERS
By Peter Loftus
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Updated Feb. 9, 2022 7:25 pm ET
U.S. regulators are poised to tap the brakes on approving dozens of cancer drugs and other new medicines developed in China.
The regulators have expressed concerns about the quality of studies largely conducted in China and whether the results can apply to patients in the U.S.
The shift threatens to halt the plans of Western drugmakers, including Eli Lilly LLY -0.37% & Co. and Novartis AG NVS -0.60% , who were eyeing billions of dollars in sales from bringing the Chinese medicines to the U.S. It could also raise a new source of tension between the two countries.
Lilly this year was aiming to roll out a lung-cancer immunotherapy developed in China and sell it at a lower price than similar drugs already on the market.
The Food and Drug Administration’s reservations threaten to upend the plans. The impact of its concerns could become clearer Thursday, when agency advisers consider the evidence for the drug from Lilly and its Chinese partner Innovent Biologics Inc. 1801 +6.06%
The advisory committee is expected to vote on whether to recommend FDA approval of the drug and to discuss whether the Chinese clinical-trial results for it are applicable to American patients.
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.
“We have nothing against drugs being developed in China,” said Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA’s cancer-drugs division. “Our issue is, are those results generalizable to the U.S. population?”
Two Chinese drug-industry trade groups didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Drug-industry executives and analysts say the apparent shift in tone could lead to delays or outright FDA rejections of efforts to bring a growing pipeline of the treatments to American patients.
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Chinese biotech companies and their Western partners may have to conduct additional tests of their proposed new drugs in U.S. patients, some analysts say.
“There does seem to be a change in tone as to the approvability of these data sets in the U.S.,” said Jacob Van Naarden, president of Lilly’s oncology unit. Innovent didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company said in a document submitted to the FDA that its study conducted in China supports approval.
China, long a source of drug ingredients, has placed a priority on developing a homegrown biotechnology industry in recent years.
In 2019, the FDA approved the drug, Brukinsa, a lymphoma treatment from BeiGene Ltd. , that had been primarily tested in China. Most subjects in the clinical studies that led to the approval were in China, but some were in the U.S.
That same year, Dr. Pazdur said at a medical conference the FDA would accept Chinese-only drug-study results if they were “quality” data.
Researchers work inside a Beijing laboratory at BeiGene, a Chinese biotechnology firm.
PHOTO: GILLES SABRIE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Clinical trials, especially the large, late-stage studies that regulators review to decide whether to approve a new drug, are among the biggest research and development expenses.
Industry executives and analysts viewed Dr. Pazdur’s comments as offering a kind of shortcut for China-tested drugs to get cleared in the U.S. without having to do extensive U.S. trials.
“Now that path appears to be closing,” Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal said in an interview. He said Dr. Pazdur’s more recent comments amounted to “a clear change in tone at the FDA, from encouraging this to discouraging this.”
Dr. Pazdur said his 2019 comments have been misinterpreted as encouraging companies to take certain steps.
When drugs are tested only or primarily in one country such as China, Dr. Pazdur said, it is difficult to assess whether the drug would have the same benefits and safety profile in the U.S. population.
Richard Pazdur, director of the FDA’s cancer-drugs division, says he has concerns that the Chinese drug studies used outdated study designs.
PHOTO: JOSHUA ROBERTS/BLOOMBERG NEWS
There may be differences between countries in medical care and population that affect how a drug performs, he said.
The FDA has more flexibility to accept China-only clinical data for diseases that are less common in the U.S. than in Asia, such as nasopharyngeal carcinoma, Dr. Pazdur said.
Dr. Pazdur said he was concerned the Chinese studies used outdated study designs, which don’t directly establish whether the China-developed drug works as well as similar drugs approved in the U.S. in recent years.
He also expressed concern about the integrity of data generated by drug studies in China.
An analysis by Chinese regulators in 2016 found that about 80% of domestic drug applications reviewed at that time contained fabricated, flawed or insufficient data from studies, the British Medical Journal has reported.
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In some cases, there were discrepancies between original study data and what was submitted to regulators.
“The elephant in the room is obviously, what is the quality of the data that is coming from these foreign countries?” Dr. Pazdur said.
There are about 25 potential new cancer treatments that were tested only or predominantly in China and which companies have told the FDA they would like to sell in the U.S., Dr. Pazdur said.
FDA officials including Dr. Pazdur raised some of the concerns in an article published by the New England Journal of Medicine in December, titled “The Wild West of Checkpoint Inhibitor Development.”
Checkpoint inhibitors are cancer immunotherapies like the one that Lilly and partner Innovent want to bring to the U.S., named Tyvyt.
Lilly executives have said they would sell Tyvyt in the U.S. at a substantially lower price than older, similar drugs such as Merck & Co.’s Keytruda and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. ’s Opdivo. Lilly said Wednesday it would sell the drug at a 40% discount to comparable brands, pending regulatory approval.
Keytruda and Opdivo can cost more than $150,000 per patient annually.
Innovent conducted a trial of Tyvyt in nearly 50 hospitals in China that enrolled nearly 400 patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer.
Researchers found that giving patients both Tyvyt and chemotherapy prolonged the median time to disease progression or death to about 8.9 months, versus five months for those on chemotherapy alone.
Mr. Van Naarden said he thought the Tyvyt study was well-conducted and the results are applicable to the U.S. population.
FDA staff said, in a document posted online Tuesday, the data from the clinical trial “are not applicable to the U.S. population and U.S. medical practice.”
A final agency decision on whether to clear the Lilly-Innovent drug is expected by the end of March.
Write to Peter Loftus at peter.loftus@wsj.com
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https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2022/02/08/red-handed-blackstone-founder-pumped-100m-into-marxist-education-for-american-and-other-students-studying-in-china/
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".Blackstone founder pumped $100m into Marxist education"
schwarzman
is a "republican"
"close friend to Trump"
but apparently also to RED CHINESE
think of the bright side - he probably gets loads of $$$$
from , thru China ties........ :-P
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/microsoft-intel-ge-provide-direct-support-to-chinese-military-state-security-bodies-report_4256768.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-02-06&utm_medium=email&est=YEJxLb5GXSVHDorJZ8N9dJ9hfU0WGYICIDcaJZ%2BvKpZJnDeaVKf6HDqhjKHU%2BVoaiIUP
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-made-covid-19-test-kits-handed-out-to-over-100000-super-bowl-fans_4277980.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-02-15&utm_medium=email&est=bLR6JV7cun%2F7FS9k3fdGy0FwHfTJqBG9QrIu64TC20Co8wOlHVIH%2Fhb6mm7PqmNSefVn
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/02/17/red-handed-20-republicans-who-sold-out-to-china/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/corporate-america-continues-to-coddle-communist-china_4289775.html?utm_source=Opinion&utm_campaign=opinion-2022-02-24&utm_medium=email&est=sZeCzBkyVu2iTqBWxA1WFfC%2FNbjomqI%2BsG3p3FGr1mbYX5frXBf9iGtxVpJMuTYNgiC9
Corporate America Continues to Coddle Communist China
Jared Whitley
Jared Whitley
February 23, 2022 Updated: February 23, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Commentary
Corporate America wants you to know that they’re making the world a better, more inclusive, more sustainable, and more (insert buzzword of the day) place. Just look at all their donations to left-wing nonprofits, and rainbow flags, and green logos. They must be good if they say they are, right?
Well, just so long as you don’t look too deeply. When Corporate America jangles “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) credentials in one hand to distract you like a kitten with a shiny thing, they’re shaking the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) hand with the other hand.
For example, Disney will only make movies that “look like” America, but it isn’t about to put black people on their Chinese movie posters. Big Tech has long since sold out to China, with last year Microsoft-owned LinkedIn even blocking an Axios reporter’s profile in China because she wrote about “prohibited content.” Amazon, Nike, and others were alleged to have potentially used in their supply chains forced Uyghur labor.
Coming full circle, Disney was quick to thank Chinese authorities for their help with “Mulan,” which was filmed right on the doorstep of the Uyghur concentration camps, of which China reportedly has 260.
This kowtowing to pure evil is in spite of the fact that one in five corporations say China has stolen their IP within the last year—and that wealth could be turned against us to blow up our aircraft carriers.
Congress has started paying attention to this, with Republican members of Congress introducing sanctions against China for its horrifying behavior toward the Uyghurs. Whether the Biden administration will respond is doubtful, even when they pay lip service to the idea of growing a spine.
If the embarrassingly low ratings for the Olympics in China are any sign, the American public is sick of this self-destructive selling out to Beijing. Corporations will start pulling out of China, but they need a leader.
Without closely examining the facts at hand, one would think that person could be South African entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is beloved by many on the right and the left. His alternative energy efforts earned him Time’s Person of the Year, and he then went to the conservative Babylon Bee to denounce wokeness as “divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a reason—it gives them a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
However, Musk seems to be in on the China long-game as well.
In January, two Democrat representatives, Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), joined Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in castigating Musk for opening a showroom in the Xinjiang region, the heart of the CCP’s anti-Uyghur atrocities. They implored Tesla to set a better example against the CCP’s crimes. It’s unknown the extent of Tesla’s involvement behind China’s red curtain, but we do know Musk took more than $2 billion in loans from China to build its Gigafactory.
In 2021, Musk tweeted well-wishes to the Chinese Communist Party for their 100th anniversary, calling the “economic prosperity” of the oppressive regime “truly amazing.” The previous year, he’d told one podcast that “China rocks.” He criticized the “complacency and entitlement” in the United States, especially in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York—three cities conservatives aren’t going to rush to protect—while praising the Chinese as a “hard-working people.”
Praising slaves… for being hard working?
World affairs have shifted seismically in the last few years. The fact that Western European and North American benevolence and power have positively determined the course of history for the past 100 years is no measure that they will do the same for the next 100. Unless dramatic measures are taken, the CCP will guide the fate of the human race.
This is a group that horribly abuses its own people. The CCP responds to domestic protests with tanks, not open arms. Who knows what their plans are for the rest of us, once nothing can stand in their way?
For years, liberals hated Corporate America because of the corporate part. Now conservatives hate Corporate America for abandoning America. Both sides should come together to oppose abuse of slave labor in China’s oppressive regime. It’s disappointing to see Musk’s name on the list of companies linked to Xinjiang—let’s hope his name will be at the top of the list to reject it.
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/03/03/red-handed-microsoft-created-research-lab-to-work-on-artificial-intelligence-for-chinese-military/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-us-defense-contractor-ceo-arrested-for-allegedly-exporting-military-technology-to-china_4319238.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-06&utm_medium=email&est=keesyJAAw%2FAR49r8L1U9oW5Jbd4DF1ojAcItSm0W8E0F4JQy5P8KVQbqSvGC8lzYca5W
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-us-defense-contractor-ceo-arrested-for-allegedly-exporting-military-technology-to-china_4319238.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-06&utm_medium=email&est=keesyJAAw%2FAR49r8L1U9oW5Jbd4DF1ojAcItSm0W8E0F4JQy5P8KVQbqSvGC8lzYca5W
I will be curious to see if Israel extradites his brother to the US.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-good-life-of-criminal-suspects-who-flee-to-israel-1.8010981
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Chinese Hackers Penetrated at Least 6 US State Governments, Cybersecurity Firm Says
By Michael Washburn March 8, 2022 Updated: March 8, 2022biggersmaller Print
A hacker group backed by the Chinese regime has exploited vulnerabilities in the online systems of at least six U.S. state governments in order to compromise and gain access to those networks, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said March 8.
Mandiant’s lengthy report presents the findings of an investigation that began in the spring of 2021, in response to a breach by a hacker group known as “APT41” of an unnamed state government’s system, and continued through last month.
“Our investigation into APT41 activity between May 2021 and February 2022 uncovered evidence of a deliberate campaign targeting U.S. state governments. During this timeframe, APT41 successfully compromised at least six U.S. state government networks through the exploitation of vulnerable Internet facing web applications, often written in ASP.NET,” the report stated.
ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft, is an open-source web framework enabling users to construct internet apps and services on the .NET platform. The weaknesses and vulnerabilities of some versions of ASP.NET have been public knowledge for years. The website CVE Details has even published lists of various design flaws, such as the inability to handle an unencrypted view state or the vulnerability to a denial of service transmitted via a SOAP message, that might allow hackers and other bad actors to attack and disrupt apps and services utilizing ASP.NET.
Despite these vulnerabilities, some states in the U.S. continue to utilize the platform for web-facing systems. The Mandiant report did not name the six states known to have suffered APT41 breaches during the period under review.
The motive for the attacks is financial, and specifically the hackers’ personal gain, according to Mandiant.
Cyberespionage on the part of APT41 are not a new phenomenon, the report stated, referencing the organization’s long record of mass scanning and exploitation of vulnerabilities. APT 41 is known to have targeted computer and internet systems and networks in industries and sectors as diverse as banking, defense, education, the legal industry, oil and gas, real estate, telecommunications, and travel.
In 2020, five Chinese nationals from the hacker group were indicted in the United States on charges relating to sprawling hacking campaigns to steal trade secrets and sensitive information from more than 100 companies and entities worldwide.
What sets apart the breaches detailed in the new report is their deliberate targeting of U.S. state governments.
Mandiant’s report detailed how a favorite target of the Chinese hackers has been the USAHerds app, which 18 states utilize to keep track of the health of animals and coordinate responses to any outbreaks. Three investigations carried out in 2021 led to findings that APT41 had seized upon a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHerds app to breach its security.
Mandiant also relays the surprising finding that, even after a highly similar vulnerability had come to light in Microsoft Exchange Server, which made use of a decriptionKey and static validationKey, USAHerds installations relied on the same machineKey values.
The new report comes amid warnings that the Chinese regime is on track to becoming a global cyber superpower. It is also the latest in a string of breaches allegedly attributed to Chinese state-sponsored hackers.
Chinese hackers are widely suspected of having orchestrated the long-running cyberattack announced last month which targeted News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
Last year, the United States formally attributed the massive breach of Microsoft’s email server to hackers affiliated with the regime’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security. The hack compromised tens of thousands of systems globally.
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How the world would be if we did not have DARPA?
More precisely we would not have internet.
We would not be having all these upheavals.
While we have freedom of information we also have all the down side.
We still have mobs controlling us, MSM Governments, whole new almost un enforceable crime,
more propaganda ..........
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18357/elon-musk-china
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House Republicans worry about intel of Chinese influence over Forbes
BY GUY TAYLOR THE WASHINGTON TIMES
U.S. lawmakers are investigating whether the Chinese government is attempting to control one of America’s beacons of free market capitalism: Forbes Global Media Holdings.
Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence began investigating the issue late last year, according to government documents obtained by The Washington Times.
Forbes Global Media Holdings denies the intelligence committee has singled it out. A spokesman for the company told The Times that any suggestion of Chinese government influence over Forbes’ operations is “completely unfounded.”
Some committee Republicans grew concerned last year over the prospect of such influence as executives at the New Jersey-based publisher of Forbes magazine worked on a deal with a Chinabased special acquisition firm, or SPAC.
That company, Magnum Opus Acquisition Ltd., reportedly received funding from an entity run by the Chinese Communist Party.
In a Nov. 23 letter to Forbes CEO Mike Federle, Republicans on the intelligence committee asked the company to assist in an “investigation related to China’s malign influence activities against U.S. corporations.”
“It is essential for you to be informed of any malign influence efforts related to your company and how such efforts impact American economic and security interests,” then-Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican, wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Times.
Mr. Nunes, the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican at the time, has since retired from Congress.
A committee source who confirmed the authenticity of the letter told The Times that the investigation is continuing under Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio, the current ranking Republican.
The November letter and a lengthy response that Forbes Global Media Holdings provided to the committee in December have not previously been reported.
An examination of documents by The Times gave no indication that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is reviewing the proposed Magnum Opus deal with Forbes, has been formally notified about the intelligence committee investigation.
Under the $630 million deal, which
Forbes announced in August, the iconic business media brand would transition into a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange as part of a merger with the Hong Kong-based Magnum Opus.
SPACs, which have been in vogue on Wall Street, are companies that have no operations of their own but are formed to raise money through initial public offerings expressly for the purpose of buying or merging with existing companies.
Magnum Opus is identified as a SPAC that received some of its initial financing from the Chinese government. According to SEC filings, China’s sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp., provided institutional seed money for the company.
A March 2021 SEC filing described China Investment Corp. as “a wholly state-owned company incorporated under the laws of the People’s Republic of China.”
With total assets worth more than $1 trillion, China Investment Corp. is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds.
Some in the national security community question whether the entity is a conduit through which the ruling Communist Party seeks to wield influence over Chinese financial firms investing in public and private companies around the globe.
Such influence appears to be increasing in Hong Kong. China’s ruling communists in recent years have imposed political crackdowns and harsh media restrictions on the formerly autonomous, pro-democracy city-state.
SEC filings show that China Investment Corp. owned a roughly 5.8% stake in Magnum Opus when the deal with Forbes Global Media Holdings was announced, although the filings also show that China Investment Corp. has since disposed of its shares.
Reports maintain that Magnum Opus has since raised funding for the Forbes deal from more than a dozen other investors.
DailyMail.com reported last month that Magnum Opus had raised $400 million for the deal from 19 investors, most of whom are based in Hong Kong or elsewhere in China.
Forbes has an average of nearly 115 million monthly users of its various internet platforms and publishes a printed magazine with an audience of at least 6 million. The magazine is known for its promotion of free market capitalism. Its ad campaigns for many years jokingly described the publication as a “capitalist tool.”
The publication was founded more than a century ago by Scottish immigrant newspaperman B.C. Forbes. It is perhaps best known today for its pro-capitalist rankings, such as the “30 under 30” list of richest young Americans.
Steve Forbes, a grandson of the company’s founder and a former Republican presidential contender, is listed as the editor-in-chief of Forbes Media on the website of Forbes magazine. Randall Lane is listed as the chief content officer.
Mr. Forbes did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Forbes Global Media Holdings announced the pending Magnum Opus deal on the magazine’s website in August as a transaction that “will enable Forbes to further capitalize on its successful digital transformation, using technology and data-driven insights to create more deeply engaged audiences, and associated high-quality and recurring revenue streams.”
Others have questioned the transaction.
“This deal raises serious and grave concerns about Forbes, which is truly the mouthpiece of democracy and capitalism and is effectively being taken over by the Chinese,” a senior source at Forbes told DailyMail.com last month.
Forbes Chief Communications Offi cer Bill Hankes sharply disputed that sentiment when The Times asked for comment.
“Forbes is and always will be fiercely independent, and any suggestion that the Chinese or any other government would have any influence is completely unfounded,” said Mr. Hankes, who also dismissed the view that Republicans on the House intelligence committee have targeted Forbes for investigation.
Mr. Nunes’ November letter was merely a “general inquiry,” Mr. Hanks said in an email to The Times, and Forbes Global Media Holdings has had no correspondence with the committee since it responded to the letter in December.
In announcing the Magnum Opus deal, Forbes Global Media Holdings said the entire management team of Forbes would run the company.
Concern about Chinese influence over Forbes began as far back as 2014, when a Hong Kong-based investment group called Integrated Whale Media Investments bought a majority stake in Forbes.
A December 2017 op-ed in The Washington Post by China expert and author Isaac Stone Fish said the purchase was followed by “several instances of editorial meddling on stories involving China.”
Mr. Fish pointed specifically to Forbes’ decision that year to discontinue publishing articles by Communist Party critic Gordon Chang. Mr. Fish also noted the case of former Forbes contributor Anders Corr, who said a Forbes editor emailed him in 2016 saying it was “not accurate to say China impoverishes its people or to label [Chinese President] Xi Jinping a dictator.”
The accusations of influence at Forbes have factored into the House Republicans’ investigation into the publication’s dealings with Chinese companies.
Mr. Nunes raised the issue specifically in his Nov. 23 letter, which included more than two dozen questions about Forbes’ policies for protecting against Chinese government influence.
“Since the 2014 purchase of Forbes by Integrated Whale Media, there have been accusations of censorship against China critical narratives and retaliation against employees who produce them,” Mr. Nunes wrote. “Have you investigated these accusations?”
On Dec. 16, Forbes’ legal team at Holland & Knight responded to the intelligence committee by saying such “accusations have been investigated and are not based in fact,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Times.
The response, marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” says Forbes “decided to phase out its ‘Opinion’ channel to focus more on fact-based policy reporting” in 2017. It said “a contributor named Gordon Chang was cut as part of this process.”
It also said Forbes removed a post by Mr. Corr in 2017 “because it was poorly executed” and that his term as a contributor ended “due to a history of reporting that did not meet Forbes’ standards.”
Mr. Hankes, the chief communications officer at Forbes, told The Times that the magazine “continues to publish articles critical of China that are readily available online.”
He pointed to the example of a Forbes article in January that highlighted abuses of press freedom in China. The article focused on a list of abuses presented by the “One Free Press Coalition” ahead of the Winter Olympics in China.
Topping the list was the case of Hong Kong media entrepreneur and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, who was arrested and jailed as part of a Chinese crackdown on political and media freedoms in Hong Kong.
In addition to questions about Forbes articles on China, the Nunes letter sought information about whether anyone from Forbes had interacted with Chinese government officials, most notably from the State Council in Beijing.
The council oversees China Investment Corp., which provided initial funding for Magnum Opus.
“Has anyone from Forbes ever had a meeting with anyone from the Chinese State Council Information Office? If so, who and what was the context?” Mr. Nunes asked.
Forbes responded through Holland & Knight’s letter that “to the best of the company’s knowledge, no person at Forbes has met with anyone from the Chinese State Council Information Office.”
A source familiar with the correspondence said it has been shared with the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency executive branch investigative arm that examines foreign entities’ takeovers or purchases of U.S. companies for national security questions.
The Treasury committee did not respond to a request for comment from The Times.
The SEC declined to comment, although SEC Chairman Gary Gensler recently raised concern about Chinese companies trading in U.S. capital markets in general.
Mr. Gensler suggested in a September op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal that his primary concern is less about Chinese government influence than a potential lack of transparency in Chinese companies that engage in deals with U.S. companies and investors.
“I don’t believe China-related companies currently are providing adequate information about the risks they face — and thus the risks that American investors in these businesses face,” Mr. Gensler wrote. He added that many Chinese companies “establish contractual relationships with shell companies in foreign jurisdictions, like the Cayman Islands,” which in turn raise capital on U.S. stock exchanges without “actually confer[ring] ownership of the operating company to American investors.”
“I worry that some investors don’t realize they’re putting their money into a Cayman shell rather than a company operating in China,” he wrote.
Whether the SEC approves the Magnum Opus deal with Forbes remains to be seen.
Filings indicate that a late-March deadline for Magnum Opus to complete the acquisition and take Forbes public could be extended if the SEC has not approved the deal by then.
Magnum Opus did not respond to a request for comment.
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CCP Agent Conspired With New York Police Officer to Spy on Americans: DOJ
By Andrew Thornebrooke March 30, 2022 Updated: March 31, 2022biggersmaller Print
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on March 30 unsealed charges against a Chinese national accused of working as an unregistered agent of the Chinese communist regime.
Sun Hoi Ying, 53, is alleged to have spied on at least 35 individuals in the United States and to have fed information from his efforts to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 2017 to 2022.
Sun’s activities were part of “Operation Fox Hunt,” a CCP initiative begun in 2014 to forcibly repatriate Chinese dissidents and other alleged fugitives back to mainland China, or else to coerce them into paying financial settlements to the regime, prosecutors said.
He relied on private investigation firms and a New York law enforcement officer to conduct his covert activities, according to the warrant for his arrest. At least one of his victims, a pregnant woman, was forcibly detained for eight months while visiting China.
“This case demonstrates, once again, the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] disdain for the rule of law and its efforts to coerce and intimidate those it targets on our shores as part of its Operation Fox Hunt,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in a statement.
“The defendant allegedly traveled to the United States and enlisted others, including a sworn law enforcement officer, to spy on and blackmail his victims. Such conduct is both criminal and reprehensible.”
Enlisting Locals
Many of Sun’s victims were U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage who have been in the United States for years, according to court documents.
In one effort, Sun allegedly tracked down a victim who had been living in the United States since 2002, by enlisting help from the leader of an unnamed community organization in New York City, as well as that of an unnamed New York law enforcement officer.
Court documents outlined how, beginning in 2003, the CCP systematically detained and sued two former spouses and other family members of the victim based in China in order to coerce her to return to the country or otherwise enter a monetary settlement.
One former husband was found innocent of charges related to using CCP funds to purchase property, although his property was confiscated by the CCP anyway, the document said. The CCP also began an effort to forcibly seize the property of a second ex-husband.
The New York law enforcement officer is alleged to have identified themselves as such during multiple meetings with the victim and Sun, and reportedly described themselves as a go-between.
The officer also met with the victim privately and relayed all information about the meeting back to Sun so he could deliver it to his CCP handlers back in China, according to the court file.
The officer and community leader weren’t named as defendants in the case but were described as co-conspirators.
Targeting a Pregnant Woman
In another case, Sun targeted a pregnant woman in order to gain leverage on her father, both of whom were U.S. citizens.
Sun’s campaign against the family began with photographs and addresses of the victims being collected by private investigation firms. This information was then sent to the CCP, which distributed the information on lists of fugitives and their families, the court file said.
The daughter, then pregnant, traveled to China with her spouse and child in 2016.
When the family attempted to return to the United States, she was told by CCP authorities that she had been placed on an “exit ban” list as punishment for her father’s crime. Her child and spouse could leave China, they said, but she would not be allowed to leave until her father came back to China to face charges, the court document said.
CCP officers allegedly told her that she wasn’t to inform the U.S. government about the exit ban, and that the U.S. Embassy in China was helpless to do anything about her status.
When she told CCP officers that she was pregnant, they told her that the child would be born in China unless her father returned to face charges, according to the document.
She was allegedly held for eight months before the CCP made a deal with the United States to release her, provided she deliver official Chinese documents to her father.
Widening Crackdown
The case against Sun is just the latest of several CCP espionage prosecutions.
In March, the DOJ unsealed charges against five other men in three separate cases, all of whom were accused of extending the CCP’s repressive reach to U.S. soil.
One of the cases involved a conspiracy to intimidate and physically assault a U.S. Army veteran running for Congress. Another involved the stalking and intimidation of an American Olympian and her father. Still another involved the harassment of an artist for his sculpture depicting CCP leader Xi Jinping as a giant coronavirus molecule. All of the victims were ethnic Chinese who had been critical of the CCP’s abuses.
The DOJ’s announcement of the cases followed shortly behind the Biden administration’s controversial decision to terminate the China Initiative, a Trump-era anti-espionage campaign designed to thwart CCP spying in the United States.
The program was accused by activist groups of being racist, but a DOJ internal review found no evidence to support that claim. Nevertheless, the decision was made to scrap the program to avoid what Olsen called a “harmful perception” of bias. Critics claimed that the termination of the program would make the nation appear weak.
The DOJ touted three of the cases brought forward as evidence that the post-China Initiative framework was working. Each of the cases brought forward in the last month began under the previous administration.
“This activity is antithetical to fundamental American values,” Olsen said of the CCP’s transnational repression. “We will not tolerate such repression here when it violates our laws. We will defend the rights of Americans and those who come to live, work and study in the United States.”
Sun is currently at large in mainland China, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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Shen Yun principal dancer Angelia Wang rehearses at the performing art company's campus in upstate New York. An Epoch Times investigation found the popular performing arts group has been targeted in a campaign by China's communist party. (Courtesy of Shen Yun Performing Arts)
US FEATURES
Beijing’s Long Arm Targets Shen Yun Artists in Upstate New York
The Chinese Communist Party uses playbook of ‘unrestricted warfare’ to target leading performing arts company
By Petr Svab April 14, 2022 Updated: April 14, 2022biggersmaller Print
CUDDEBACKVILLE, N.Y.—Dancers and musicians who have fled communist China and found a base in the serenity of rural upstate New York are now finding themselves the target of overseas operations by Beijing as well as an American national with close ties to China.
An investigation by The Epoch Times, which reviewed thousands of pages of documents, internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, and over a dozen interviews, uncovered a decade-and-a-half-long campaign by the CCP on U.S. soil.
The target of the CCP’s operation is Shen Yun Performing Arts, the performing arts company celebrated for its world-class performances of classical Chinese dance and music. Why the group is targeted is clear from its slogan this year: “China Before Communism.”
The systematic campaign of intimidation, propaganda, and possible sabotage has targeted the group’s members, performing activities, and campuses.
Meanwhile, The Epoch Times investigation has found that a U.S. national, who has been exceptionally active in opposing the group’s expansion, has deep ties to China.
“Yesterday, I was standing on stage at a prestigious venue to roaring applause, and back here at our home, I’m being spied on, harassed, and living in an environment where hostile people are formulating and spreading egregious lies about us,” said Steven Wang, a principal dancer with Shen Yun. “And to know that the CCP is behind all this … doing this to us on U.S. soil, is scary.”
Many of Shen Yun’s artists experienced first-hand religious persecution under communist rule in China. Many of them practice Falun Gong, an ancient Chinese spiritual practice consisting of slow-moving exercises and spiritual self-improvement based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
The CCP marked Falun Gong for elimination in 1999 after government surveys estimated that 70 million to 100 million people were practicing it—figures that outnumbered the Party’s membership at the time. Human rights advocates have estimated that millions of Falun Gong followers have faced unjust arrest, kidnapping, torture, and death at the regime’s hands.
Wang’s father is one of them. He was imprisoned in China for practicing Falun Gong and tortured to the brink of death; he died shortly after his release.
A Campaign of Intimidation
The CCP sees Shen Yun “as very dangerous,” because of its efforts to revive and depict traditional Chinese culture, said Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist infiltration in the West. “They [the CCP] want to say Chinese culture is socialist,” he added.
In Loudon’s view, the CCP would be fully expected to go after Shen Yun with fervor, and indeed the dance company has had to overcome multiple forms of interference—some obvious and some outright dangerous.
Theaters have received threatening letters from Chinese embassies and consulates, warning them not to host Shen Yun lest they antagonize the Chinese regime. Public officials have received similar letters, urging them not to attend the shows. In 2009, a tire exploded on a Shen Yun bus carrying dozens of dancers from Phoenix, Arizona, to their next destination in California. When the driver brought the bus in for service, the mechanics told him the blown tire had unusual marks on it. Apparently, somebody used a drill to make a hole halfway through the rubber—not enough for it to deflate, but enough for it to burst once on the road.
Several months later, one of the company’s buses was found to have two slashes on its tire, again just halfway through, both clearly made with a blade. A few days later, a tire on another bus burst while en route from Memphis to Little Rock on I-40 West. That same bus was found with slashes on one of its tires again two days later.
In one case, somebody even poured corrosive chemicals over the brake and accelerator pedal cables of a Shen Yun promotional van. The company eventually had to arrange 24/7 security for its vehicles.
Even basic information, such as the identities of the staff, have been exploited by the regime. The parents of one Shen Yun emcee would receive visits in China almost every weekend from the authorities. The husband of one of the company’s instrumental soloists was jailed in China.
The home of a Shen Yun choreographer, Chen Yung-chia, was broken into in August 2013. “The intruders seemed to be professionals, as they left no fingerprints,” Chen said in a statement at the time. Valuables, such as cash, gold jewelry, and expensive watches were left untouched. What did go missing were four laptop computers and a DVD player. “The intruders had a motive [other than simple robbery],” Chen said. “They came here thinking they could gather sensitive information about Shen Yun.”
The biggest prize for Beijing, however, has been to target the company’s training facilities in upstate New York. Named Dragon Springs, the site hosts a Tang Dynasty-style temple as well as the campus of Shen Yun Performing Arts. Based on insider information, the CCP treats the site as a “headquarters” for the efforts of Falun Gong followers to counter the persecution in China.
“Attack the overseas Falun Gong headquarters and bases systematically and strategically,” reads one CCP directive document obtained by The Epoch Times.
The campus, which has produced the top talent in classical Chinese dance in the world, houses not only the company’s training and rehearsal spaces, but also two schools, Fei Tian Academy of the Arts and Fei Tian College, which help train future talent for the troupe.
Despite improving security measures over the years, the campus has faced repeated incidents of harassment, trespassing, and vandalism.
In one incident, somebody cut a hole in the perimeter fence large enough for a person to crawl through. In another, somebody smashed a security camera. Once, somebody got on the property, broke into the utility box of one of the security cameras, and cut the wires. The incidents were reported to authorities, but it appears the culprits haven’t been found.
One staffer had nails and even dead animals thrown in the driveway of his home near the campus.
In the early years, Chinese consular staff showed up at least once in a car marked with diplomatic plates, sneaked onto the property, and scurried away when discovered by staff.
Lately, the staff have come to suspect a new and more sophisticated form of harassment.
An Unexpected Visit
In November 2018, Dragon Springs, which is home to the Shen Yun campus, submitted a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), a major document required for further expansion of the site.
On Nov. 14, 2018, the town of Deerpark, New York, held a public hearing on one of the small projects planned for the site, the construction of a larger driveway to allow easier access by buses. As is common in the town, several locals spoke in support and opposition to the project. There were, however, a couple of unexpected guests that night.
Alex Scilla, 39, an American who at the time had been living in Tianjin, China, for 15 years, stood up and said he was “concerned” about the “safety” of the driveway, the board meeting minutes show (pdf).
It’s not clear what prompted Scilla to suddenly take the hour-long drive from his second home—a small condo in New Paltz, New York—on that frosty evening only to utter a sentence in opposition to a driveway. The Epoch Times reached out to Scilla multiple times with questions regarding his activities. He did not respond to any of the questions and instead had his lawyer send a threatening email.
The other unexpected guest was Long Island civil and forensic engineer Steven Schneider. He said he had obtained documents under the New York Freedom of Information Law, reviewed a traffic study done for the campus, and performed a site visit, the meeting minutes show.
He said the project would create “a lot of traffic on an already hazardous road” and that the traffic study didn’t consider accidents around the driveway.
As it turned out, Schneider was working on a broader evaluation of the campus’s DEIS. Two reports from Schneider’s firm would appear on the website of a nonprofit Scilla later founded. Apparently, the firm spent at least half a year working on the project. There was no mention of who paid for the job.
Epoch Times Photo
Neversink River in Cuddebackville, N.Y. (Vanessa Rios/The Epoch Times)
“I really can’t remember the names,” Schneider told The Epoch Times when asked whether Scilla was involved in the project. He said it was something he did years ago and has had nothing to do with since.
Schneider was just the first in a lineup of environmental consultants and lawyers that came in Scilla’s wake, in what seems to be a part of his battle against Shen Yun’s campus.
To this day, Scilla maintains ties to China, including to a company in Tianjin.
Tianjin holds a special significance in the CCP propaganda machinery. Several party insiders previously told The Epoch Times that the city hosts the base of the regime’s internet censorship apparatus. It is also home to the Tianjin Political and Legal Committee (PLAC), which insiders previously told The Epoch Times is connected to the staging of pro-CCP and anti-Falun Gong protests in New York.
PLACs on various levels control China’s colossal security apparatus, which is largely responsible for enforcing the regime’s political and religious persecution campaigns.
Scilla’s Ties to China
Scilla’s background is described in some detail on his LinkedIn profile as well as a bio posted on the website of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham China).
According to his 2018 bio, he lived in Tianjin, China, for 15 years. There’s no online mention of Scilla’s activities in China during the first seven years. If he had a source of income, he never mentioned it. In 2006, he married a Chinese woman named Lei Zhang, New York state records show.
Scilla’s first job in China, as mentioned on his LinkedIn profile, started in 2011: “General manager of Tianjin Zhongyi Steel Corp, a leading commercial/industrial recycling provider, based in the Tianjin Free Trade Zone, … a fully-licensed, accredited collector, and processor of all types of commonly recycled materials, with a strong focus on ferrous and non-ferrous metals and plastics.”
Yet this supposedly “leading” recycler company has virtually no online footprint and doesn’t show up in publicly accessible government databases in China, which would hold records of licenses for a recycling operation.
Around 2014, Scilla teamed up with farming entrepreneur Daniel D’urso to found an environmental committee at AmCham’s Tianjin chapter. The committee mainly held events, such as school exhibits with art made by children from recyclables they found during trash pickups.
In late 2014, Scilla was elected to the executive committee of the Tianjin AmCham with eight candidates vying for six seats.
His attendance in November 2018 at the Deerpark hearing appears to be his first foray into advocacy of any kind on U.S. soil.
In January 2019, Scilla registered a nonprofit at his New Paltz address—the Mid-New York Environmental and Sustainability Promotion Committee Limited, or NYenvironcom.
In February 2019, Scilla registered a company in China called Tianjin Zhongyi Xianfeng Environmental Consulting Service, which he then branded as Frontier Environ. The starting capital of the company was over $120,000. Lei Zhang serves as its supervisor, Chinese official records show.
There’s no indication the company has conducted business of any kind, and its website only vaguely describes the kind of services it’s supposed to provide. The nonprofit’s website lists Scilla’s company as a partner.
Scilla’s activities with the AmCham China committee were put on hiatus with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He wasn’t reelected to the Tianjin executive board in 2020 and is no longer listed as a member of the environmental committee, which was rebranded as Manufacturing and Sustainability Forum.
If Scilla indeed moved upstate to pursue life as an environmental activist, there would have been no shortage of opportunities around his new home town of New Paltz. The small, strongly progressive college town is nestled right on the Wallkill River, with the Hudson River to the east and the Catskill mountains to the northwest—the site of the reservoirs that provide drinking water to New York City. But Scilla’s nonprofit doesn’t appear to be particularly interested in its own backyard. The town’s records, including minutes covering public comment on development projects, mention neither Scilla nor his organization.
Based on its website, nearly all of the group’s advocacy is focused on the Shen Yun campus and a few other real estate projects tied to the Chinese expat community in Deerpark, which one of the documents on the site calls “satellite developments” of the campus.
Where Does the Funding Come From?
Scilla’s group says on its Guidestar page that it pulled in over $41,000 in 2021 and spent about the same amount. Those are self-reported figures; the group hasn’t filled federal financial disclosures, which aren’t required for nonprofits with incomes of under $50,000 a year.
Scilla listed the group’s 2020 and 2021 donors on its website. The Epoch Times was able to verify several of the donations.
A $1,100 contribution came from one of the Advised Funds at Aspen Community Foundation in 2020. The foundation manages dozens of funds, mostly for families. It’s not clear which fund provided the money.
Another donation came from The Bank of Greene County’s Charitable Foundation, which gave out $218,000 in 2021 shared among more than 200 recipients. The foundation says it gives up to $2,500 to any individual recipient.
Some money also came from the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation, a California nonprofit run by the Marxist scholar and environmental activist Ronald Chilcote. The group has yet to release 2021 financials, but past reports indicate it seldom issues a grant exceeding $5,000.
Orange and Rockland, a local utility company, donated $3,070 in March 2021 for a water monitoring program, its spokesman told The Epoch Times via email.
KeyBank Foundation and Steward’s Shops, another pair of donors, didn’t respond to inquiries, but seem unlikely to give more than $5,000 to a nonprofit the size of Scilla’s.
A small local environmental group also chipped in, according to the website.
Yet, despite the relatively modest amount of donations, money doesn’t seem to be an issue for the nonprofit. In January, Scilla and his organization launched a lawsuit against the campus, backed by several lawyers and environmental consultants.
Surveillance Targeting Chinese Dissidents
In recent years, the Shen Yun campus staff started to notice a new and troublesome form of surveillance—drones. The small, unmanned machines can fly low and fast, carrying high-powered cameras capable of snapping images and videos up-close and detailed enough to allow identification of individuals.
The staff suspected that at least one of the drones was being flown from the property of one of the neighbors who later joined Scilla’s lawsuit.
The Epoch Times spoke with two people who live in the neighborhood who confirmed they had seen a drone being flown from the neighbor’s land adjacent to the campus property at least four times between January and May 2020. They didn’t always catch the moment when the drone was taking off, but they saw it in the air, above the Shen Yun campus, and then landing on the property. One of them identified Scilla in several photographs as the one who operated the drone.
Based on the descriptions by campus staff, as well as the people from the neighborhood, the drone was not a toy. It was about two feet wide and seemed to be a type used by professional videographers that costs thousands of dollars.
Later that year, the staff noticed that two other neighbors put up cameras on their land and aimed them at the campus entrances. Both cameras appeared to be the same model. This has become a constant source of trepidation for the staff, as such surveillance can collect information on who’s coming in and out of the site, again threatening to reveal the identities of the staff. One of the cameras was taken down recently.
One of these neighbors has direct financial ties to Scilla. His environmental group, according to its website, financially supports a local organization, Deerpark Rural Alliance, headed by the neighbor.
“You know, back in China, every neighborhood has a surveillance committee, usually formed by retired ladies, to monitor their neighbors and report their activities to the government,” principal dancer Wang said. “Whenever I see the cameras these hostile neighbors have installed outside our front gates to spy on us, I’m reminded of the ladies from the surveillance committees in China.
“It’s creepy, and for many people, quite dangerous. I have friends who work here who still have family back in China. If they are identified as someone working at Dragon Springs, their family back in China could be in real danger.”
Scilla’s efforts culminated with the environmental lawsuit he filed in New York in January. It was immediately picked up by some Chinese state-controlled media to attack Shen Yun.
The activities aimed against Dragon Springs felt “disheartening” to Wang.
“When I first got my U.S. citizenship, when I cast my first vote in a U.S. election, these were moments that filled me with pride and gratitude. I cherished the fact that this country gave me a chance at a new life, free from tyranny. But now, the way in which we are targeted here … I just can’t believe this is happening,” he said.
Modus Operandi
To use American groups, environmental laws, or local ordinances as tools to achieve its goals would be fully in character for the CCP, according to Loudon.
“We know that the Chinese will use American groups to help them economically or help them militarily,” he said. “Why would they not use Americans to shut down cultural opposition, too?”
If somebody with strong China ties goes on to exert a focused effort against Shen Yun’s home base, “it would seem the most obvious conclusion” that the CCP is involved, he said.
“They see it as a major enemy. And, of course, they would use [for instance] the local zoning laws to put pressure on Shen Yun if they could. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t,” he said.
Epoch Times Photo
Casey Fleming, chairman and CEO of BlackOps Partners, in Washington. (ImageMasters)
Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners and a counterintelligence expert, agreed that such a move would be right out of the CCP’s playbook.
The regime pursues the strategies of “unrestricted warfare” and “hybrid warfare”—using any and all aspects of society as tools to achieve the same objectives as a war, to defeat and dominate the enemy, he said.
“They use all methods. ‘Religious warfare,’ ‘economic warfare,’ ‘drug warfare,’ ‘education warfare,’ ‘family warfare’—everything you can possibly imagine,” he said. “So yes, culture is absolutely critical for them to unwind our society for takeover.”
Environmental activism can be exploited for this purpose, too, to frustrate economic development and serve as a cover for intelligence gathering, he said.
“They’ll do whatever they have to do to maintain control, because control here is also control there [in China],” he told The Epoch Times.
“Their boldness to infiltrate and subvert the United States and the West is beyond most people’s comprehension.”
Just recently, the FBI indicted one American and one Chinese national for conspiring to act as agents for the CCP and enact a plan to tar the reputation of a Chinese artist living in the United States, after the artist made a satirical sculpture of CCP leader Xi Jinping. The Chinese national and his wife received from Hong Kong accounts $3 million “that appear consistent with payments made for their services rendered in surveilling and harassing the U.S.-based dissidents,” the complaint says (pdf).
Epoch Times Photo
FBI Director Christopher Wray during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington on Sept. 22, 2020. (OLIVIER DOULIERY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the Justice Department, other Chinese dissidents, one living in Indiana, the other in the San Francisco Bay Area, were also targeted. The department is now pursuing prison sentences of up to 15 years.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has also warned that China is “getting more brazen” in controlling certain speech inside the United States.
“For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has targeted, threatened, and harassed U.S.-based Tibetans and Uyghurs, Falun Gong members, pro-democracy advocates, and any others who question their legitimacy or authority,” Wray said on Jan. 31.
Epoch Times Photo
The U.S. State Department in Washington on Jan. 26, 2017. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
And just last month, the State Department took action against CCP agents for targeting members of religious and spiritual practitioners “including within the United States.”
“The United States rejects efforts by PRC officials to harass, intimidate, surveil, and abduct members of ethnic and religious minority groups, including those who seek safety abroad, and U.S. citizens, who speak out on behalf of these vulnerable populations,” the State Department said in a March 21 statement.
The State Department said it’s continuing to pursue accountability for those “responsible for atrocities and human rights violations and abuses wherever they occur, including within China, the United States, and elsewhere around the world.”
Petr Svab
Petr Svab
REPORTER
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Petr Svab is a reporter covering New York. Previously, he covered national topics including politics, economy, education, and law enforcement.
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second
THINKING ABOUT CHINA
Did Beijing Stop Pelosi From Visiting Taiwan?
How Pelosi should respond to threats from Chinese state media
Guermantes Lailari
Guermantes Lailari
April 14, 2022 Updated: April 14, 2022biggersmaller Print
Multiple news sources reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Gregory W. Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were supposed to arrive in Taiwan (Republic of China) on April 10.
Their anticipated visit was great news for the democratic island nation, the size of Maryland, with 24 million free people. Many in Taiwan might not appreciate that Pelosi is third in succession to become the president of the United States if the president and the vice president were removed from office—this visit was very important.
But something went wrong—she reportedly caught COVID-19, and her trip was “delayed.” Is this the true reason for the delay?
Before discussing the probable valid reason, a little background is helpful to understand the context.
Pelosi’s trip was preceded by several other high-profile visits of former officials. On March 1, a U.S. delegation led by former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen visited Taiwan to show additional support by the Biden administration, which had earlier approved a $750 million purchase of U.S. weapons by Taiwan in August 2021.
Former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo visited Taiwan for four days starting on March 2 and was feted by the political leadership, including President Tsai Ing-wen and Vice President William Lai. Tsai awarded Pompeo the Order of Brilliant Star with Special Grand Cordon for his solid and continued support of Taiwan.
Pelosi is not a neophyte to issues related to Taiwan. She conducted a virtual meeting with Lai on Jan. 29 to discuss security, the economy, and other mutual issues. They also discussed China’s human rights abuses and Pelosi’s support for Taiwan’s observer status in several United Nations agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO).
The last speaker of the House of Representatives to visit Taiwan was Republican Newt Gingrich in April 1997, a year after the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration. This crisis provides important context to understand the U.S. relationships with Taiwan and China.
Third Taiwan Strait Crisis
In 1995, then-Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui was invited to deliver a speech on Taiwan’s democratization experience at Cornell University, his alma mater. Initially, the Department of State (DOS) refused to give Lee a visa to visit, and he was forced to spend a night on his plane at a stopover in Hawaii.
The House of Representatives and the Senate then forced the DOS to allow Lee to visit Cornell and deliver his speech on June 9-10, 1995.
Furious that the DOS had allowed Lee into the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ordered the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to launch missiles and conduct live-fire drills in the summer and amphibious assault exercises in the fall of 1995. In response, then-President Bill Clinton ordered two carrier naval battle groups and other ships to Taiwan’s waters as a demonstration of force in December 1995.
Lee Teng-Hui
Former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui speaks during a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on June 1, 2007. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)
Later, the CCP attempted to prevent the reelection of Lee by having the PLA conduct a missile launch “exercise,” firing three nuclear-capable M-9 missiles from Hainan Island within 35 miles of the Taiwanese ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung. One missile flew over Taipei and landed 19 miles off the coast.
Some Asia watchers might recall similar actions in 1998 by the CCP’s puppet state, North Korea, in which it launched nuclear-capable Taepodong-1 missiles over Japan.
The DPRK tested its new ICBM on March 24 this year, the Hwasong-17, which can reach anywhere in the continental United States.
The Propaganda and Media War
During the propaganda war, the CCP argued that Ukraine is not Taiwan and no one should make such comparisons.
Why?
Because the CCP wants the world not to have sympathy for a free and democratic Taiwan.
The CCP does not want Chinese citizens to think that Taiwan is like Ukraine—this could cause morale problems during a conflict (PLA soldiers might be less enthusiastic about killing a victim of CCP aggression, as the Russian soldiers have toward Ukrainians).
The last thing the CCP wants is internal demonstrations against the regime during an invasion of Taiwan.
CCP Media and Psychological Warfare
As Pelosi planned to arrive, the CCP propaganda and military machine went into high gear. Beijing declared warnings with phrases like “immediate cancellation” and “China will need to respond with unprecedented stern measures.”
From the U.S. public perspective, such warnings are reminiscent of the childhood proverb, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
With the world community energized about Ukraine, the United States could easily turn the media and psychological warfare against the CCP by using the world’s sympathy for Ukraine toward Taiwan.
But the United States did not.
Why?
Chinese State Media Threatened an Air Blockade
Little noticed in the Western press was the Chinese language version of an April 7 article written by Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of state-run tabloid Global Times.
He wrote that Pelosi’s planned trip “will be an extremely serious incident, and it will be the most serious provocation by Washington to China on the Taiwan issue since then-Taiwan ‘President’ Lee Teng-hui visited the United States [in 1995].”
Hu provided two stern options for the CCP to counter Pelosi’s visit.
First, establish an air blockade (a no-fly zone) over Taiwan on the day that Pelosi arrives.
Second, if Pelosi’s aircraft does land on Taiwan, he recommended to fly PLA military aircraft over the island’s airspace. “If the Taiwan military opens fire on our fighter jets, the PLA should shoot down the aircraft, or carry out destructive strikes on the Taiwan military base where the missiles were launched,” Hu wrote.
Hardly anyone noticed his recommended threat to expand ramifications if Pelosi’s visit occurs: “China could take other retaliatory measures, including arms sales to Russia and a massive increase in Russian oil and gas purchases. China must resolutely retaliate against the actions of the U.S. and let them know that China is not to be messed with.”
Perhaps someone in the Department of State got the message from Hu and quickly passed it up to the White House. (This author recently discussed a PLA air and sea blockade of Taiwan.)
Recommended Initial Pelosi Reaction
In response to the CCP military threat to her visit, Pelosi should promise her support for a large U.S. military aid package to Taiwan—at least the value of the aid the United States provided Ukraine thus far ($1.7 billion) or ideally the amount the United States provides Israel ($3.8 billion per year from 2019 to 2028) to maintain its qualitative military edge (QME).
In fact, the U.S. Senate has two bills pending that support the idea of providing military aid to improve Taiwan’s QME: the Taiwan Deterrence Act (TDA) and the Arm Taiwan Act of 2021 (ATA). TDA seeks approval for $2 billion a year from the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program for Taiwan from 2023 to 2032 or $20 billion over a 10-year period. ATA requests approval to spend $3 billion a year from 2023 to 2027 or $15 billion for five years. Congress and the president should quickly approve one of the two aid packages.
A total of 46 House and 38 Senate bills concerning Taiwan are pending. Recently, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) submitted a bill (S.4035) that, if passed, would “’fast-track weapons to Taiwan’ by expediting congressional approval and eliminating administrative roadblocks.” All bills should be fast-tracked for approval.
What Weapons to Provide Taiwan to Deter the CCP?
Patriot air defense
U.S. long-range air defense systems Patriot (R) and British radar Giraffe AMB are displayed during Toburq Legacy 2017 air defense exercise in the military airfield near Siauliai, Lithuania, on July 20, 2017. (Ints Kalnins/Reuters)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests that defensive weapon systems for Taiwan should include the following weapon systems along with training and maintenance support: anti-air (Stinger, PATRIOT), anti-armor (Javelin), anti-ship (Harpoon), and anti-missile (THAAD, AEGIS, more PATRIOT, and, perhaps, even one of the two U.S. purchased Iron Dome batteries).
In addition to U.S. weapon systems, other members of the anti-Russian coalition could provide Taiwan with their equivalent anti-air, anti-armor, anti-ship, and anti-missile systems.
Is the US Going ‘All In’ to Support Taiwan?
In summary, Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan could have been a great benefit to show support for this vibrant democratic nation.
As a result of Chinese state media threats to her visit and her cancellation, one hopes that Pelosi, Congress, the Biden administration, and the American people will exceed expectations by helping Taiwan deter the CCP from invading this example of a Chinese-speaking fully democratic country, and gift Taiwan at least $2.5 billion.
One also hopes Pelosi’s cancelled visit doesn’t repeat the world’s complacency when the CCP crushed democratic Hong Kong.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Guermantes Lailari
Guermantes Lailari
Follow
Guermantes Lailari is a retired USAF Foreign Area Officer specializing in the Middle East and Europe as well as counterterrorism, irregular warfare, and missile defense. He has studied, worked, and served in the Middle East and North Africa for over 14 years and similarly in Europe for six years. He was a U.S. Air Force Attaché in the Middle East, served in Iraq and holds advanced degrees in International Relations and Strategic Intelligence. He researches authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that threaten democracies. He will be a Taiwan Fellow in Taipei during 2022.
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‘Beijing’s Plan to Overtake the United States’: Rubio Slams Universities’ $120 Million China Ties
By Andrew Thornebrooke April 14, 2022 Updated: April 14, 2022biggersmaller Print
More than two dozen U.S. universities entered into financial arrangements with China-based entities during the past year, including those directly governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to a new report.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) criticized the agreements, which are believed to have netted China more than $120 million, as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to supplant the United States as the world’s superpower.
“The Chinese Communist Party is exploiting our education and research institutions to steal our secrets and gain influence,” Rubio wrote in an email. “This is all part of Beijing’s plan to overtake the United States as the world’s most powerful nation.”
Originally reported by Fox News and based on both federal data and searches of the College Foreign Gift and Contract Report Database, about two dozen U.S. universities disclosed millions of dollars worth of ties to Chinese entities, the latter of which were frequently left unnamed in the reporting.
The largest financial tie detected was a $32 million agreement between the University of Houston and an unnamed private entity in mainland China. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted four agreements for a combined value of more than $26 million. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had six agreements worth more than $14 million.
None of the universities responded to requests for comment by press time.
Epoch Times Photo
In this April 3, 2017, file photo, students walk past the “Great Dome” atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
Although the disclosures help to reveal the sometimes insidious nature of foreign financial influence in the U.S. educational system, the true extent of the monetary strings linking academia and Chinese communism is likely far broader.
For example, after being prompted to investigate the issue by the Trump administration in 2020, the Department of Education uncovered $6.5 billion in undisclosed foreign gifts and contracts in the U.S. university system. That investigation found that universities frequently underreported the amount of money they received from foreign entities or else ignored the legal obligation to disclose such information completely.
It also found that China pumped roughly $1.5 billion into U.S. universities over a six-year period.
The infiltration of U.S. universities by the CCP is beginning to receive widespread recognition, including its efforts to disseminate pro-communist propaganda. To that end, the Senate approved legislation in 2021 to curb the malign influence of so-called Confucius Institutes, language centers funded by Beijing, on U.S. campuses, which have been criticized for pushing CCP propaganda disguised as cultural learning and suppressing academic freedom on college campuses.
U.S. government agencies have likewise been engaged in a years-long struggle to root out the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate U.S. universities in order to gather and steal cutting-edge research and technologies. The effort has uncovered several high-profile cases in which U.S. academics allegedly hid vast funding and contracts that they received from China’s communist regime.
Importantly, however, the Trump-era “China Initiative,” a key Justice Department (DOJ) effort to curb just such espionage efforts, was terminated by the Biden administration in February, following allegations of racial discrimination.
The DOJ stated that no evidence of bias had been found during an internal investigation, but that it would end the program anyway to mitigate its “harmful perception of bias.”
Rubio told The Epoch Times that the current administration would need to reinstate the program if the nation were to have a fighting chance at curbing the malign influence of communist control in U.S. universities.
“The United States must focus on the Chinese Communist Party and prioritize resources accordingly to combat this threat, including by restarting the China Initiative immediately,” he said.
Following
Andrew Thornebrooke is a reporter for The Epoch Times covering China-related issues with a focus on defense, military affairs, and national security. He holds a master's in military history from Norwich University.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijings-elite-capture-strategy-was-a-success-peter-schweizer_4407071.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-04-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=sHvOE0mtapQ1uHJ9kNxc1IG8IfFpF%2B1STOlS%2FLQyjkoh%2BbOuIV0BXFna3bYhvVt%2FKPTA
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/8/jury-convicts-tao-feng-kansas-professor-accused-hi/
one can only imagine how many are not caught
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Congress warned U.S. is in the dark about foreign investment
BY RYAN LOVELACE THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A former Commerce Department official warned lawmakers that the federal government is blind to who is bankrolling purchases of companies and critical technology in the U.S., making America vulnerable to foreign threats including from China.
Nazak Nikakhtar, formerly a Commerce Department assistant secretary in the Trump administration, told lawmakers that companies are failing to adequately investigate funding sources for their work and the U.S. government has sometimes failed to conduct due diligence as well.
Ms. Nikakhtar was the Commerce Department’s lead representative to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which scrutinizes commercial transactions for national security risks.
“As the former head of CFIUS at the Commerce Department, yes, we were completely in the dark, our intelligence community didn’t have adequate information, and I was frequently in the office until three in the morning using any open source information I could to get to the ultimate beneficial owner,” Ms. Nikakhtar told the Senate Intelligence Committee at a hearing this week.
Ms. Nikakhtar, now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, also said in written testimony that American data and technology transfer enabled China to race ahead in artificial intelligence and China would use American production against the U.S.
“We have had decades of unregulated supply chain and technology transfer to the [People’s Republic of China] that has systematically eroded our own supply chains and rendered us dangerously dependent on the adversary,” she wrote. “This is not a good national security strategy. We need a new strategy.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CFIUS includes representatives from seven different federal departments as well as White House officials and its purview was expanded by the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018. Ms. Nikakhtar, who was confirmed by the Senate in March 2018 and served into 2021, said the federal government has not yet fully utilized the authority provided by the law.
“As Joseph Stalin is rumored to have said, ‘We will hang the capitalists with the rope they sell us,’” Ms. Nikakhtar wrote. “Whether this quote is accurate or not, it is illustrative of what is happening today.”
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".“We have had decades of unregulated supply chain and technology transfer to the [People’s Republic of China] that has systematically eroded our own supply chains and rendered us dangerously dependent on the adversary,” she wrote. “This is not a good national security strategy. We need a new strategy.”
:roll:
and every president after Reagan till Trump allowed this to happen
and Biden and team give lip service to it
and we the people just watched it unfold before our eyes helpless
to the elites doing this.
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anyone even know who he is ?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/18/david-wenwei-chou-california-church-shooting-suspe/
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anyone even know who he is ?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/18/david-wenwei-chou-california-church-shooting-suspe/
Yes.
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Do I infer correctly that the ChiComs are now running hits in America?
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Do I infer correctly that the ChiComs are now running hits in America?
Yes, you are correct.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/top-gun-2-receives-praise-for-restoring-taiwan-flag-on-mavericks-jacket_4501991.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-06-01&utm_medium=email&est=%2FFBHfeLy7HLDBW4VbWoBXJt8DrdDRCHMZnuy29VoOHj5x31HBZq0fqb82DqAQGE%2BXmfo
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/has-china-already-won_4522279.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-06-11&utm_medium=email&est=haA9Ah4SVKWv89scJZlXzVpZq8ybK2D5FZBEIZD%2FRvme61h9ZJC8As7LwAN33qI2m8VR
Has China Already Won?
The United States and China are engaged in a technological arms race. The country with the best artificial intelligence, quantum computing technologies, and cyber weapons will be best positioned to win the wars of tomorrow.
Which begs the question: Who looks likely to win these tech-infused wars?
According to Richard Silberglitt, a senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, although the United States remains the global technological leader, “China and the United States are now approaching parity, or in some cases, the United States is falling behind, in areas of close competition.”
In other words, the United States is in the lead, but China is catching up. If we look closer, it appears China has overtaken the United States in many key sectors.
In an effort to combat the threat from the Chinese regime, the U.S. National Intelligence and Security Center (NCSC) has prioritized the following five key sectors: AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors, and autonomous systems.
According to the most recent NCSC report, these five sectors “produce technologies that may determine whether America remains the world’s leading superpower or is eclipsed by strategic competitors in the next few years.”
As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to employ various legal and illegal methods to overtake the United States, I ask this: Has the report arrived about five years too late?
In all five sectors, as I demonstrate below, China is already ahead.
Let’s start with AI. As the NCSC researchers noted, China already possesses “the might, talent, and ambition” to win the AI arms race.
Nicolas Chaillan, who left his role as the U.S. Air Force’s first chief software officer in October last year, certainly agrees. Frustrated by the U.S. military’s lack of digital progress, he believes China has already won the AI race, blaming “stale” technology and bureaucratic red tape for the lack of innovation in the United States.
In an interview with Verdict, Michael Orme, senior analyst at GlobalData and a China specialist, echoed Chaillan’s concerns. Orme suggested that Beijing has already “leveraged its wealth of data and the surveillance state to gain AI supremacy.”
The two men appear to be correct. In 2021, China overtook the United States in AI journal citations. And for those who say citations aren’t everything, I agree. However, citations shouldn’t be overlooked.
Then, there’s quantum development, an area China is set to dominate. If China does achieve quantum supremacy, which looks increasingly likely, then the CCP will have the power to inflict further damage on U.S. national security. In July last year, a Chinese research team built the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In this game of high-tech chess, their creation, which surpassed Google’s 2019 creation, gives China the “quantum advantage.” More worryingly, with such advances, China looks set to create the world’s first unhackable internet communications network.
Furthermore, according to a report published by Booz Allen, a global leader in cyber solutions, China’s quantum developments will “eventually undermine all popular current public-key encryption methods, and plausibly boost the speed and power of artificial intelligence.”
The researchers warn that by the end of the decade, “Chinese threat groups will likely collect data that enables quantum simulators to discover new economically valuable materials, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals.”
The Booz Allen researchers added, “most of quantum computing’s potential lies more than a decade in the future—but risk management must start now.” The United States, the CCP’s number one enemy, should take note.
The third key sector is biotechnology. As a report published by Insider warned, Chinese biotech companies are among the most powerful in the world. The Chinese biotech industry has a global footprint, stretching from Uganda to the United States. In August of last year, the Chinese company BeiGene announced plans to build a 42-acre research and development center in New Jersey.
Rather alarmingly, according to a New York Times report, the Chinese regime is currently “collecting medical, health and genetic data around the world,” using “the intersection of technology and genetic and biological research as an area of competition and espionage.”
China has repeatedly emphasized the importance of biology in future warfare. According to He Fuchu, a military medical scientist, the Chinese are busy working on “new brain-control weapons and equipment that interfere with and control human consciousness,” all in the hope of making “unmanned warfare possible.”
The fourth key sector involves semiconductors. For the uninitiated, without semiconductors, using smartphones, laptops, washing machines, and refrigerators simply wouldn’t be possible. Essentially, semiconductors are the brains of electronic devices. Until recently, the United States fully controlled the supply of these “brains.”
Today, however, China is on the ascendancy. Last year alone, the number of Chinese semiconductor firms tripled. The metaverse, the next step in the evolution of the internet, will rely heavily on semiconductors, hence China’s desire to become a dominant force.
The final sector involves autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars and surveillance drones. Baidu, China’s equivalent to Google, is leading the self-driving race. Last year, the Chinese company launched the first ever paid driverless taxi service.
In the United States, meanwhile, self-driving vehicles are decades away from becoming a reality. China also leads the way in the manufacturing and sales of surveillance drones; the United States is one of its biggest customers. If this isn’t worrying enough, China recently created an autonomous weapon that, according to reports, “uses explosives to destroy enemy satellites.” As tensions heat up between China and the United States, one shouldn’t be surprised if American satellites become a primary target.
All, of course, is not lost. The United States is still a supreme force. However, its position as a world leader is being tested by the Chinese regime. As we move forward, expect the testing to increase in both frequency and force.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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this is one of the most depressing articles
I love after all the evidence that China is already ahead of us laid out in above article (as they work to control dominate and threaten the entire world
to become their servants)
added is this :
"All, of course, is not lost. The United States is still a supreme force. However, its position as a world leader is being tested by the Chinese regime. As we move forward, expect the testing to increase in both frequency and force."
:roll:
good news , we have Pride month - I bet China doesn't have that .
and we are the leaders in screwing our own people over while go GREEN
no wonder we get our solar panels from CCP
I don't know who is worse,
the DNC or CCP
Gordon Chang is totally wrong about the coming collapse of China.....
he predicted to have occurred by now .
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China crushes LGBTQP because they want a strong society.
this is one of the most depressing articles
I love after all the evidence that China is already ahead of us laid out in above article (as they work to control dominate and threaten the entire world
to become their servants)
added is this :
"All, of course, is not lost. The United States is still a supreme force. However, its position as a world leader is being tested by the Chinese regime. As we move forward, expect the testing to increase in both frequency and force."
:roll:
good news , we have Pride month - I bet China doesn't have that .
and we are the leaders in screwing our own people over while go GREEN
no wonder we get our solar panels from CCP
I don't know who is worse,
the DNC or CCP
Gordon Chang is totally wrong about the coming collapse of China.....
he predicted to have occurred by now .
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18616/biden-china-policy-support
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Fauci Refuses to ‘Stop Funding Chinese’ Research With US Tax Dollars
‘China is the drug he just can’t quit’: GOP Senator slams NIAD head’s remarks
By Eva Fu June 17, 2022 Updated: June 18, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was unable to commit to stop federal funding from going to Chinese scientific research, despite the U.S. intelligence community assessing the regime as America’s top adversary.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), made the remarks while appearing virtually at the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing on June 16, during an exchange with Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).
“The NIH is still funding research in China, at least $8 million since 2020. In the Intelligence Community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Chinese Communist Party is presented as one of the top threats to the United States, along with Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea. To my knowledge, only China is receiving U.S. research dollars,” said the senator during the hearing. “When will you as director of NIAID stop funding research in China?”
Since 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a total of $8.3 million in grants to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and its division National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, along with five top public universities in mainland China and Hong Kong, according to the NIH website.
Although this amount doesn’t capture dollars later funneled to a Chinese institution through a U.S.-based organization, such as New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to perform coronavirus-related experiments that some experts said fit the definition of gain-of-function research, that is, experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a virus.
Fauci, in response to Marshall’s question, said that the U.S. federal agencies “had very productive peer-reviewed highly regarded research projects with our Chinese colleagues that have led to some major advances in biomedical research.”
“So I don’t think I’d be able to tell you that we are going to stop funding Chinese,” Fauci said.
“We obviously need to be careful and make sure that when we do fund them we have the proper peer review and we go through all the established guidelines,” he continued, adding that “grants that go to foreign countries, including China, have State Department clearance.”
“Dr. Fauci’s remarks prove that China is the drug he just can’t quit,” Marshall later told The Epoch Times about the NIAID head’s response.
screenshot senator marshall
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) questions Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate panel on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
“Dr. Fauci told the truth for once after years of repeated dishonesty that has eroded Americans’ trust in our public health institutions. In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, our government should know it’s dangerous and wrong to continue funding research projects supported by the Chinese Communist Party.”
The senator, at the hearing, followed up by asking Fauci if he agrees that the American public lacks records and studies from EcoHealth Alliance’s research.
Fauci’s answer was evasive.
“We have access to an extraordinary amount of information that has gone there,” he said, arguing that the publicly available information in the scientific journals is sufficient.
“Obviously none of us know everything that’s going on in China but if the question at hand is the rather small … peer-reviewed high-priority grant that was given from Eco[Health] to China in a sub-award we have a lot of good information that’s in the publishing.”
The NIH gave a total of $3.1 million grant to EcoHealth over the five years from 2014 to 2019, a fifth of that, $599,000, went to the Wuhan lab, in part for identifying and altering bat coronaviruses deemed likely to infect humans, documents obtained by The Intercept show.
Fauci earlier this week tested positive for COVID-19 and joined the Thursday Senate hearing remotely. His response to Marshall omitted reference EcoHealth’s lack of disclosure over some of its research activities, which would have prompted an NIH review over biosafety measures.
Epoch Times Photo
In this image from video, Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies to a Senate panel via remotelink on June 16, 2022. (The Epoch Times via the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee)
In one experiment at the Wuhan facility, funded by NIH via EcoHealth, mice infected with a modified version of the original bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, an “unexpected result” that was not “something that the researchers set out to do,” Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last October.
He said EcoHealth had violated grant terms by failing to promptly notify the NIH about the finding.
Fauci, at the Thursday hearing, also told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that he believes the outbreak of the virus “is very, very likely a jump in species from an animal host,” and less likely to be the result of a lab leak.
“I believe it’s essential to have cooperation and collaboration with the Chinese,” he said when Braun asked him whether he thinks Beijing will cooperate with him to “get to the thorough bottom of” COVID-19 origins.
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American Business Elites Have Become Lobbyists for China, Expert Says
By Michael Washburn June 15, 2022 Updated: June 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Beijing’s well-documented abusive trade practices, human rights abuses, and territorial aggression have been hard to curb partly because of a lack of alignment between the political and military leadership of democratic nations, on the one hand, and Western business elites engaging in trade with China, on the other, said panelists at a hearing held by the American Enterprise Institute think tank on June 14.
American and European executives tend to allow Beijing’s leaders to lull them into a sense that China’s government is their friend, and changing this false sense is of paramount importance for taking effective action against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggression and protecting the national security and economic and political interests of Western powers, the experts said.
Entitled “Defending Western Economies Against Chinese Unfair Practices,” the hearing featured lengthy testimony from Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Il.), who issued a stark warning about what he sees as the danger China poses to the world.
“China, from my perspective, is an existential threat in many ways—from a national security standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a trade standpoint, from a cyber standpoint. I say this often: China has a plan to replace us, economically, militarily, you can go down the list there,” LaHood said.
But even as Beijing’s rulers harbor ambitions inimical to the interests of the United States, the close economic ties between the powers often prevent some people from seeing the issue clearly, LaHood argued. In the 18th Congressional district in central Illinois that he represents, LaHood said, the livelihoods of his constituents are heavily dependent on trade with China.
“I have the eighth largest agricultural district in the country. About a third of the corn and soybeans that my farmers grow go to China every day. I have the largest concentration of Caterpillar workers anywhere in the world. In my district, we make a lot of engines, tractors, and excavators,” LaHood said.
Caterpillar has 29 manufacturing plants as well as four R&D facilities in China, he pointed out. Given these realities, there is an obvious disconnect between much of the rhetoric heard in Congress, where lawmakers are calling for a Cold War mindset to counter the CCP threat, and the day-to-day reality of a close economic partnership between American laborers and Chinese businesses.
If the arguments made at the time that China gained entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) back in 2001 had proven true, and admittance to the body had ushered in a more rules-based, Western-style trading system for China, then the disconnect between the political and economic stances would not be so severe, LaHood contended. But the promises made at the time that Beijing sought entry to the WTO have proven hollow, he said.
“Overall, they have not adapted to the rules-based system. They continue to steal our intellectual property, they continue to not abide by the same rules and standards that every industrialized country in the world does,” LaHood commented.
The Psychological Dimension
China’s elites have grown highly adept at flattering the egos of American business leaders and representatives and keeping the economic relationship deeply entrenched and at odds with U.S. political goals, said James Palmer, the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, a Washington-based magazine. American entrepreneurs feel drawn by the “gravitational pull” of a Chinese market of 1.3 billion consumers and the enormous commercial potential they see there, and the lure of tremendous profits mutes the reaction of U.S. business leaders to rampant abuses such as intellectual property (IP) theft, he said.
The stealing of IP by Chinese entities has cost the United States an estimated $225 billion to $600 billion per year in recent years, according to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.
“We’ve seen an unwillingness to cooperate with theft, but none of that really dissuades businesses from wanting to get into [the Chinese] market, to get the benefits of cheap labor, and cheap labor unencumbered by unions, because if there’s one thing the CCP hates, it’s unions,” Palmer said.
When American businesspeople travel to China, they often prove susceptible to assurances about the centrality of the U.S.-China economic partnership and to flattery about their own role in sustaining it, Palmer suggested. It is important to look closely at the way the CCP has targeted Western executives for these kinds of psychological ploys, he said.
“You arrive in Beijing, you go to the Shangri-La Hotel or the Mandarin Oriental, you’re in a five-star hotel, and you’re surrounded by pleasant young Chinese people who tell you how important you are, how important the U.S-China relationship is, how critical business is to them, and how there are extremists on both sides but you can be the one who speaks to moderation, who becomes the bridge,” Palmer said.
“And then you come back and you say in [Washington] D.C., oh, the Chinese are really such reasonable people. And you effectively turn yourself into a lobbyist” for the CCP, he added.
Palmer described this kind of soft offensive targeting American businesspeople as difficult to counter because it is of course not possible or, objectively speaking, desirable to prevent friendly conversations between Chinese and visiting Americans. Business and political leaders must put effective tactics to use. Palmer cited the example of the U.S. sanctions placed on smartphone and high-tech equipment maker Huawei in 2019 as an example of an effective means of responding to abusive Chinese practices.
“Huawei provided us with some very useful models for sanctions, and sanction tools that have been revitalized and used against Russia,” Palmer said.
Economic decoupling can also take place as a result of Beijing’s own initiatives, he added. This happens when Chinese officials suffer “internal paranoia” about U.S. influence, or what CCP leaders regard as “American cultural and economic infiltration,” he continued. An example of this is evident in the entertainment industry, where American-made films have a hard time getting past censors screening cinematic product.
“Hollywood for years was a prime example of an American industry that would do whatever Beijing said in order to gain access, but so few movies are getting permission to get into China now that this is starting to have an effect on Hollywood,” Palmer said.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18612/china-new-way-of-war
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Huawei makes amends with Wall Street Journal board
BY RYAN LOVELACE THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Huawei’s new charm offensive to win over skeptics in the free world includes a fresh target: the media.
The Chinese telecommunications giant sponsored an event Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal on “security and safety in an unstable world” after accusing the newspaper of bias against Huawei and a lack of credibility.
Representatives from Huawei and The Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, did not address how the relationship went from hostile to chummy during the event. The virtual discussion included a disclaimer that The Journal’s newsroom was not involved in the event’s planning.
Former Journal editorial board member Mary Kissel sharply criticized her former employer’s decision to join forces with the Chinese company, which many see as a stalking horse for the communist regime.
“So America’s leading business publication makes $ from a genocidal, totalitarian state’s surveillance arm,” Ms. Kissel said in a message on Twitter last week. “Might be legal but certainly not moral. Appalling, really.”
Ms. Kissel served in the Trump administration, which aimed to restrict Huawei’s footprint in the U.S. The
editorial board is not a part of The Journal’s newsroom.
The Journal reported in 2020 that U.S. officials said Huawei had the ability to access back doors in mobile phone networks. The Chinese company responded by accusing the paper of bias and amplifying lies.
During the virtual event Tuesday, Andy Purdy, chief security officer of Huawei Technologies USA, fielded questions from Dow Jones global commercial consulting editor Willem Marx without any hint of lingering resentment.
Mr. Marx asked Mr. Purdy to rate the U.S. government and others’ efforts on cybersecurity and privacy risks. Mr. Purdy replied with praise for the Biden administration.
“Particularly in the areas with cybersecurity I think there’s been a heightened interest and attention and very strong public-private partnership the last couple years,” Mr. Purdy said. “It takes a while to bring those things into fruition. I think they were helped somewhat by President Biden’s executive order on cybersecurity almost a year and a half ago.” Huawei has redoubled its lobbying efforts since President Trump left the White House.
Huawei has spent nearly $4.5 million on lobbying during Mr. Biden’s first two years in office, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets. org database.
Huawei spent just $3.68 million during Mr. Trump’s four years in office. The majority of the lobbying was in 2019. Mr. Trump issued an executive order that year effectively blocking Huawei from U.S. communication networks.
Officials from Huawei and The Journal’s publisher did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the cost of Huawei’s sponsorship and Huawei’s past criticism of The Journal. Mr. Marx and Mr. Purdy ignored a question about the businesses’ relationship during Tuesday’s event
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/29/china-targeted-pentagon-rare-earth-contractor-disi/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=HoWEq0XtWgVy1cSJKg04kWCsFDqxv0PHKdoVlVlOdi2lqJiXevOseQopve4NnDdM&bt_ts=1656523837070
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https://www.voanews.com/a/controversial-confucius-institutes-returning-to-u-s-schools-under-new-name/6635906.html?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Extremist%20Roundup%202022-06-30%20SIB&utm_medium=email
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/07/04/tiktok-confirms-employees-in-china-can-access-american-user-data/
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US-CHINA RELATIONS
TikTok Poses Threat to Every American User: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr
By Hannah Ng and David Zhang July 12, 2022 Updated: July 14, 2022biggersmaller Print
A lot of people view the Chinese app TikTok as a platform for sharing funny videos, but it poses a data security risk, according to Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
“They just see TikTok for what it appears to be on the surface, but that’s just the sheep’s clothing,” Carr recently told Epoch TV’s “China Insider.”
“If you look beneath it, there’s an awful lot of data that’s being pulled from your device, and apparently sent back to China. Underneath that, it’s pulling biometrics, including face prints and voice prints, keystroke patterns and rhythms, search and browsing history, location information.”
Carr referred to a June BuzzFeed report based on leaked audio from 80 TikTok internal meetings that revealed that engineers in China had repeatedly accessed U.S. data. U.S. user data flowing back to the Chinese regime is concerning, according to the commissioner.
“Once data hits China, they have a national security law there that compels all of those entities there to assist them in espionage activity,” he said.
TikTok has repeatedly denied that the Chinese regime can access users’ data.
Inside TikTok Creator's Lab Event
Signage is displayed at the TikTok Creator’s Lab 2019 event hosted by Bytedance in Tokyo on Feb. 16, 2019. (Shiho Fukada/Bloomberg)
Carr said China runs the world’s most sophisticated data analytics operation, meaning that “all sorts of nefarious conduct” could take place should the communist country get its hands on the sensitive data of millions of app users.
“They have a history of business and industrial espionage, blackmail. And so the concern is really when you’re taking that much data on that many international users … that’s really where the threat vector begins,” he said.
Carr also raised concerns about the content transmitted on the Chinese video app.
“Engineers in Beijing are working on the algorithms very actively … deciding what is displayed to users in the U.S. and globally,” he said. “Whether it’s a foreign influence campaign or other content, it’s noteworthy that China does not allow Tik Tok inside of China, but yet they allow these types of influence campaigns to take place globally.”
Countering the Threat
Given that the Chinese app poses an espionage risk, Carr called for a concerted effort to counter this threat.
“We need to go to all fronts there,” he said, referring to a recent request by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to the Federal Trade Commission, urging it to formally investigate the relationship between the Chinese regime and ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based owner.
“The Federal Trade Commission should take up that bipartisan call for a swift investigation. We can’t afford a year-long process. And I’d be encouraged and happy to have Congress step in as well.
“We’ve engaged in a pretty concerted effort to look at entities tied to CCP. … I think TikTok is the next one that we should be focusing on.”
TikTok didn’t return a request from The Epoch Times for comment.
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CCP Continues to Interfere With US Election: Chinese-American Congressional Candidate
By Alex Wu July 15, 2022 Updated: July 15, 2022biggersmaller Print
Following the U.S. State Department’s offer of a $10 million reward for information on foreign election interference, Xiong Yan, who is currently running for Congress in the 10th District of New York, told The Epoch Times that the Chinese communist regime has continued to interfere with his campaign due to his dissident background.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged five men on March 16 for acting as agents of the Chinese regime, collecting information on dissidents, harassing, smearing, and even planning violent attacks targeting a candidate running for congress.
In 1989 he had been a student leader on Tiananmen Square before the movement was violently crushed by the Chinese regime.
One of the men, Qiming Lin, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS). The MSS is the Chinese regime’s “civilian intelligence and secret police agency.”
In September 2021, Lin hired a private investigator (PI) in New York “to disrupt the campaign of a Brooklyn resident currently running for U.S. Congress (the Victim), including by physically attacking the Victim.”
In December 2021, Lin allegedly left a voicemail for the PI where he said, “in the end, violence would be fine too. … Beat him until he cannot run for election. … Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked, right?”
On July 13, Rev. Xiong Yan, a retired major who served in the U.S. Army for 27 years, revealed to The Epoch Times that he was the unnamed congressional candidate that was targeted by the Chinese regime.
He said that fortunately the U.S. government prevented the attacks.
Yan said that after the indictment of the Department of Justice was released, the Chinese regime did not stop interfering with his campaign. His campaign office opened on March 19 with a large dinner party originally scheduled. “The Chinese consulate contacted the leaders of several Chinese American groups and told them not to support me: do not donate money or vote for me,” he said.
“The Fujianese and Cantonese people who were previously confirmed to attend the dinner party told me that the Chinse consulate called a meeting with them before it, saying that they could not support Xiong Yan and could not let him be elected—‘You guys want to go to China to do business, or support him in the election?’ They are too scared to come,” he said.
The tenth congressional district in New York City includes two major Chinese communities, Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue. Some Chinese Americans there also told The Epoch Times that the chairman of a Fujian Chinese expat group said that the Chinese consulate informed the group that it’s not allowed to support Yan’s campaign.
CCP’s Long Arm
As for why the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) interfered with his running for congress, Yan said that it was obvious because he was a leader of the Tiananmen Square democratic movement in 1989 (which was violently suppressed on June 4, 1989, also known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre).
Although he did not highlight this background, and instead downplayed it in order to draw support from as wide a range of people as possible.
Despite that he is still regarded as a dissident by the CCP, and they continue to interfere with his running for office in the United States.
“The arm of the Chinese consulate is too long,” he said.
Epoch Times Photo
Yan Xiong (2nd R), one of the 21 “most-wanted” Tiananmen Square protesters from 1989, speaks with local pro-democracy leaders before taking part in a demonstration on the streets of Hong Kong on May 31, 2009. (Samantha Sin/AFP via Getty Images)
“This kind of interference and manipulation of U.S. elections is felony in the U.S. and will jeopardize the fate of most Chinese Americans,” Yan said.
He said the Chinese agents will run back to China when their term of office expires or when the situation turns bad. Or they will have diplomatic immunity.
However, the Chinese community leaders in the United States who are pro-CCP and who are brainwashed and obey the Chinese consulate will become the ultimate victims Yan said.
“When the Chinese set foot on the land of freedom and democracy in the United States, they chose freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and universal values,” Yan said. “However, many people are still affected by the CCP and [are] under its authoritarian control.
“The CCP takes advantage of the relatively free, democratic, and human rights-oriented social environment in the United States to plant a large number of their agents among the six million Chinese living in the country.”
Yan suggested that overseas Chinese “should cherish the free environment, stand on the side of universal values, cleanse out all the toxins of the CCP and be reborn as a free person.”
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center of the United States warned on July 6 that as tensions between the United States and China grow, the CCP are trying to manipulate state, local and business leaders to support Beijing-friendly policies and advance CCP geopolitical interests.
Lin Dan contributed to the report.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/gates-foundation-funding-china-to-recruit-foreign-scientists_4616121.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-07-24&utm_medium=email&est=1VXs%2FL0AVpDQB0k3NzIqXdW6rdq8DExKOmrNrouaCtqFQt6Q7NwW5xIwsL0DgsgD3rQV
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-internet-giant-could-be-kicked-off-us-stock-exchange-after-sec-adds-firm-to-delisting-watchlist_4630995.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-07-31&utm_medium=email&est=%2BRbmYLPTkgo2FZ%2FBhXaeTXYz1LhVr%2FdJBdt%2B49v%2BGDGU4nXiB2Qpna2JBdYIoqVbrZWa
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https://www.breitbart.com/midterm-election/2022/08/09/liz-cheney-husbands-law-firm-advises-ccp-linked-technology-firm/
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https://www.breitbart.com/midterm-election/2022/08/09/liz-cheney-husbands-law-firm-advises-ccp-linked-technology-firm/
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/14/william-burns-cia-carnegie-cusef-marco-rubio/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=raM4BjwZOa8AgaHL_iu1DYqKsh6zWMIsILO_z_Yy.g9msmDfCgq_TrNdzeXSbOogJdtuyb9k
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China Censors ‘Minions’ Ending; Expert Says Hollywood Under Pressure to ‘Kowtow’ to CCP
By Andrew Thornebrooke August 24, 2022 Updated: August 24, 2022biggersmaller Print
China’s vast censorship efforts are under scrutiny again, after it was revealed on social media that the Chinese version of the new children’s film “Minions: The Rise of Gru” featured an altered ending that supported the communist regime’s policies.
While the global version of the film ends with two anti-heroes riding into the sunset after a heist (MARC: Without knowing more, I cannot say the Chinese do not have a point here), the Chinese version ends with one character going to prison for 20 years and the other renouncing his evil ways. The latter then dedicates his life to raising three children, in an apparent reference to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s three-child policy.
During an interview with NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, long-time Hollywood executive and “Feeding the Dragon” author Chris Fenton said that it was not clear if the censored ending was created by the film’s Chinese distributor or Universal Pictures.
In either event, Fenton said, Universal would likely have had little incentive to go against the wishes of the CCP.
“As far as Universal Studios is concerned, if they want to have that movie released [in China], they have no choice but to comply,” Fenton said.
Fenton said there were likely two overriding motivations driving Universal to comply with the censorship. The first is a desire for access to the Chinese box office. The second is its newly opened Universal Studios theme park in Beijing. NBCUniversal’s Universal Parks & Resorts holds a minority 30 percent stake in the park, while five state-run companies own the remaining 70 percent majority through the Beijing Shouhuan Cultural Tourism Investment Company.
Despite the effort to turn the film into communist propaganda, Fenton said there was a silver lining to the incident insofar as the edits were only made to the Chinese release of the film and that the regime had not successfully encouraged such alterations to the global release.
“We’re noticing that some of these edits just to get a movie into China are basically just for China, which is a positive,” Fenton said. “I’m not feeling like Hollywood is necessarily censoring itself after a movie is made in order to please Chinese censors for the worldwide cut of the movies. It’s being done just for the domestic cut.”
“That said, there’s still a lot of premeditated censorship in Hollywood, in terms of sensitive items that they know China is going to have problems with and possibly blackball not only the studio, but all the individuals involved with the film to begin with.”
Hollywood Caters to the CCP
To that end, Fenton said that Hollywood executives had long catered to the whims of the CCP in pursuit of the expansive Chinese market. Now, he said, the CCP is closing its jaws around those companies operating in the country, taking their ideas and funding to prop up Chinese competitors.
“A lot of people like myself were embarking on this U.S.-China collaborative business model because we thought we were getting our products and services from the United States into a market that was normally closed off to them,” Fenton said.
“We really created our own worst enemies over there,” Fenton said. “And on top of it, we really mitigated our beliefs, our principles, our values, the things that made us Americans and made us part of the democratic world in order to get that access. And I think a lot of us now are regretting it.”
Fenton said that the risk and reward calculus for Western businesses operating in China is changing, underscoring that China is unlikely to open itself back up any time soon. Under Xi’s rule, he said, Western companies, particularly in cultural industries such as film, are increasingly being required to submit to the whims of the Party.
“[Xi] is ruling that country with an iron fist,” Fenton said. “There’s a lot of resentment around the world towards him and his government and that is causing them to retreat even further.”
“I just don’t simply see an opening occur that’s going to make things better for Hollywood nor really any industry that’s trying to gain access to that market without doing some serious kowtowing to that government.”
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US ‘Heavily Dependent’ on China for Rare Earth Elements: Experts
By Andrew Thornebrooke August 24, 2022 Updated: August 24, 2022biggersmaller Print
The U.S. dependency on China for rare earth elements is a security risk and is being exacerbated by the Biden administration’s forced transition to so-called green technologies, according to lawmakers and experts.
The Biden administration’s top-down push toward renewable energy requires an enormous growth in the mining of rare earth elements. Currently, the United States relies on the mining and processing powers of China, which has far worse environmental regulations, to achieve many of its needs.
“We’re heavily dependent on foreign adversarial nations,” Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) said during an Aug. 22 interview with NTD, an affiliate media outlet of The Epoch Times. “If today, the communist country of China stopped selling us their critical and rare earth minerals, we would be in deep trouble from our national defense to our manufacturing across the globe.”
Rare earth elements are a number of elements with unique characteristics that have made them vital to new technologies. Critical minerals are those rare earth elements that have no substitute, are limited in supply, or are economically vital.
Stauber’s comments come just weeks after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the United States would try to end its “undue dependence” on rare earths, which it requires to manufacture various technologies, from solar panels to electric vehicle batteries to smartphones.
“It’s unfortunate that this administration has put their dependency for both critical minerals and rare earth minerals in the hands of the communist country of China,” Stauber said. “It’s simply unacceptable when we have the critical minerals and a few of the rare earths right here in the United States. This administration just won’t let us mine.”
US-RAREEARTHS
Wheel loaders fill trucks with ore at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., on Jan. 30, 2020. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)
According to Stauber, the Biden administration lacks the political will to simply mine the needed elements domestically. For example, nickel, copper, and cobalt are all present at extant mining operations in Minnesota. However, instead of allowing U.S. companies to mine these, the administration is pursuing a policy of “friendshoring,” wherein it merely transfers supply chains for offshored goods from China to more friendly nations, such as South Korea.
“We have the best environmental standards, best labor standards, and the opportunity to secure our supply chain dependency and put the destiny of our great nation in the palm of our own hands,” Stauber said.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. We must have an administration that understands the importance of securing our critical minerals and our rare earth minerals. We have to return this country, the United States of America, to mining and mineral dominance. And we can do that, if we have the political will.”
China Weaponizing Rare Earths
Ann Bridges, a Silicon Valley author and policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, said the fear of China weaponizing its growing power of rare and critical elements isn’t without precedent.
“In 2010, Japan and China actually had a conflict over rare earths,” Bridges told NTD. “China responded by cutting off Japan’s access to the rare earths, which really had an impact on Japan’s manufacturing capabilities.
“So it is not outside of the scope of the imagination to believe that in a time of warfare, indeed, China would leverage this kind of power.”
China is the largest global player in many critical minerals, for which demand is currently skyrocketing because of technological development. To that end, Bridges said the administration’s top-down push for electric vehicles and other global climate initiatives could ultimately threaten U.S. security if it’s not more carefully conducted.
“The current administration is all about climate, right, saving the environment?” Bridges said. “A big part of that is the push into electric vehicles, but that needs a lot of rare earth minerals and elements. And then suddenly, it’s like, well, where are we getting that? China?
“We need to be very careful about how we accept kind of a single worldview, whether it’s coming from communist China, whether it’s coming from the World Economic Forum.”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggayCZN6Tw4
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China-Backed Companies Using Lawfare to Stall Western Satellite Launches, CEO Says
By Andrew Thornebrooke and Paul Greaney August 30, 2022
Corporations with backing from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are waging legal warfare to prevent Western companies from deploying new, state-of-the-art communications satellites, according to one CEO.
Wireless entrepreneur and Rivada Networks CEO Declan Ganley, in an interview with NTD’s “Fresh Look America” program, spoke about how China-backed elements within a company Rivada acquired attempted to sabotage its efforts to deploy a multi-billion-dollar constellation of 600 satellites. The interview will air at 7 p.m. ET on Aug. 31.
Those satellites make use of super high bandwidth ka band frequencies, which overlap with frequencies used by 5G technologies. Vitally, the allocation of ka spectrum covered by the company’s filing is senior to that of other constellations, such as that of Starlink, which means its satellites would take priority in the event the trajectories of satellites from both sides came into the same orbit.
“This is prime real estate,” Ganley said. “This is ultra-high priority rights. This is shared spectrum. It’s thousands of megahertz of shared spectrum.”
“This is one of the highest priority slots … It’s above Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation.”
Ganley’s company, Rivada, has been struck with numerous legal disputes of Chinese origin, however, following its acquisition of Trion Space, the shell company that held the license to use the ka spectrum.
Chinese stakeholders in Kleo, another company acquired by Rivada, also owned a minority stake in Trion, and have attempted to thwart the company’s use of the filings.
Throughout dozens of lawsuits, the Chinese faction with Kleo sought to gain control over the filings in an apparent effort to use the European company to launch Chinese satellites that could “cover every square meter of the planet with high-speed secure communications,” according to Ganley.
“You would have the highest speed network in the world, with the lowest latency covering parts of the world, covering every major city and everything else, but also, every rural area, every stretch of ocean,” Ganley said.
“This is the most state-of-the-art communications network that the planet will have ever seen.”
Strategic Interest
To that end, Ganley said that he believed the sheer scale and tenacity of the Chinese efforts to thwart his company from deploying the satellites signaled that the CCP had some sort of strategic interest in gaining control of the filings.
“The effort that’s been put into it, it does somewhat underline that this must have had some sort of strategic importance for the CCP and their friends,” Ganley said.
“Otherwise, the resources wouldn’t be available to wage the kind of very high profile and public lawfare that they are waging.”
Thankfully for Rivada, the company has its own reserves to draw on, given its financial backing from several high-profile investors like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel.
Ganley said that the company was “moving forward with determination,” had effectively removed the Chinese faction’s claims to the filing, and requested that a U.S. court strike down the Chinese faction’s most recent lawsuit.
“The key thing is that we have amputated the Chinese involvement from those licenses,” Ganley said. “And frankly, they’ve got no bridge back to it as much as they might try to create one.”
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/07/john-podesta-joe-biden-tung-chee-hwa-cusef/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=5rA7Ci5CLL0HxOGcvC_qHJ_VsAqiUIBtdretn_k0.xJmj8jEzJVQg6JQJtcE1pGhkDxiYbhS
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I have no doubt the PRC has blackail material on John "Pedo" Podesta.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/07/john-podesta-joe-biden-tung-chee-hwa-cusef/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=5rA7Ci5CLL0HxOGcvC_qHJ_VsAqiUIBtdretn_k0.xJmj8jEzJVQg6JQJtcE1pGhkDxiYbhS
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/4/wikileaks-john-podesta-invited-to-spirit-dinner-ho/
I have no doubt the PRC has blackail material on John "Pedo" Podesta.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/07/john-podesta-joe-biden-tung-chee-hwa-cusef/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2680&pnespid=5rA7Ci5CLL0HxOGcvC_qHJ_VsAqiUIBtdretn_k0.xJmj8jEzJVQg6JQJtcE1pGhkDxiYbhS
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Proves nothing with regard to John, but IIRC Tony made over a million representing the Russians/a Russian bank or something like that.
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Proves nothing with regard to John, but IIRC Tony made over a million representing the Russians/a Russian bank or something like that.
Yeah, the FBI will be right on the Podestas right after they do a forensic exam of Hunter's laptop.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/pentagon-suspends-deliveries-of-f-35-fighters-after-finding-engine-part-came-from-china_4718220.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-09-09&utm_medium=email&est=1RT2jkA6U%2FWECfnkmj2eNVHxx8whIWDqYDSg%2Foqcr9cCIRFMXgBUcH5MBMWNPC75XYyh
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/12/cia-william-burns-lance-gooden-carnegie-endowment-chinese-communist-party/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=u7dsAntCJfsYwKHKqiy2SZGU4En_VYp_PeXlne1pr0dmc7hsVjCdoahQ6AZv.ucyl4IOmeKT
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https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6312261374112#sp=show-clips
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US Green Initiatives Benefit Top Officials’ Family Members With Ties to China: Cybersecurity Expert
By Hannah Ng and Tiffany Meier September 14, 2022 Updated: September 14, 2022biggersmaller Print
As the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) (pdf) seeks to spend some $369 billion toward energy and climate programs over the next 10 years, those green initiatives will mostly benefit family members of top officials with ties to the Chinese regime, according to Rex Lee, a cybersecurity adviser at My Smart Privacy.
“There’s concern … that potentially lawmakers and or their family members stand to benefit [greatly] from legislation that they have influence over and are creating policy and making laws in Washington DC,” Lee told the “China in Focus” program on NTD News, the sister media of The Epoch Times.
To prove this argument, he pointed to Tony Podesta, the brother of former Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta who recently joined the Biden administration to serve as a senior adviser on “clean energy innovation and implementation.”
John Podesta was tapped to “oversee implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act’s expansive clean energy and climate provisions and will chair the President’s National Climate Task Force in support of this effort,” the White House said on Sept. 2.
Yet, Tony Podesta, Lee said, “represents Huawei and their lobbying efforts go directly back to the White House, which means that … he has a direct line to [President] Joe Biden.”
“Huawei … is allowed to market in the United States as a result of having some of Trump and Obama’s executive orders repealed by the Biden administration,” he added.
The U.S. Department of Commerce officials in 2021 granted applications worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Chinese tech company Huawei—which was blacklisted under the Trump administration over national security concerns—to buy chips for its auto supply business.
“I think this is happening with green technology, as well … if you look at the lobbying efforts from the solar panel, panel manufacturers out of China, as well as the battery manufacturers out in China,” Lee opined.
The other conflict of interest that Lee further pointed out, arises from a lithium refining company in Pittsburgh, which has Paul Pelosi Jr., the son of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as a member of its Advisory Board.
Another company named by Lee is BHR, a Chinese private equity firm, in which Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden held a 10 percent stake as of last May, according to company records.
BHR is reportedly backed by major state financial institutions such as the Bank of China and the China Development Bank Capital.
Lee said that it is concerning when “these family members are going to benefit or these families or these lawmakers are going to benefit financially from the laws that they’re legislating.”
Energy Dependence
With Democrats rolling out plans to ban gas-powered cars, the demand for materials to produce EV batteries such as lithium and cobalt, is expected to surge.
That increasing demand would make America become even more energy dependent on China, according to the expert.
“Ninety-five percent of cobalt mining is done in Africa through Chinese companies that have worked with the governments in Africa to mine the cobalt over there,” Lee said.
“Sixty-two percent of lithium will flow back through China as well,” he added.
BYD Company, the Chinese electric car and battery giant, had reached an agreement to acquire six lithium mines in Africa, according to a May 2021 report from China’s The Paper.
Lee further called for Americans to raise the issue of these lobbying efforts with their lawmakers.
“You can look up what companies are lobbying what laws and then write your lawmaker about these things … and hold your lawmaker accountable,” Lee said.
“We shouldn’t allow any foreign company … any companies from other countries to lobby. And that in itself is a threat to the United States and our ability to compete, much less let companies from adversarial nations such as China and Russia,” he said.
The Epoch Times reached out to Pelosi’s office and the Biden administration for comment.
Anne Zhang and Dorothy Li contributed to this report.
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Former Los Alamos nuclear scientists aid China’s advanced weapons, private study says
By Bill Gertz - The Washington Times - Thursday, September 22, 2022
The Chinese government targeted scientists at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory for recruitment, with more than 160 researchers returning to China over more than three decades to help nuclear and other advanced weapons programs there, according to a new report by a private security and intelligence firm.
According to the report released Thursday by Strider Technologies, between 1987 and 2021, an estimated 162 scientists who once worked at Los Alamos returned home to China and took part in a variety of domestic research and development programs.
“Former Los Alamos scientists have made, and continue to make, considerable contributions to the PRC hypersonic, missile and submarine programs that present an array of security risks for the United States and the entire free world,” says the 32-page report, “The Los Alamos Club: How the People’s Republic of China Recruited Leading Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Advance Its Military Programs.”
“Our research shows the PRC has seen a significant return on their investment with advances in critical military technologies. Now, more than ever, it is a national security imperative for the U.S. and our allies to identify and protect leading talent in both the public and private sectors,” said Greg Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Strider.
Ken deGraffenreid, a former senior U.S. counterintelligence official, said that Congress has ignored for decades repeated cases of Chinese communist successes in stealing sensitive U.S. secrets.
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"According to the report released Thursday by Strider Technologies, between 1987 and 2021, an estimated 162 scientists who once worked at Los Alamos returned home to China and took part in a variety of domestic research and development programs."
our rights to privacy
and rights against discrimination make this very tricky to do anything about it.
How the Heck to do protect ourselves from the Han who are traitors to us?
Without discriminating against those who are not .
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Pursue each individual case on its individual merits.
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/24/natl-black-farmers-assn-pres-were-losing-farmland-to-china-that-were-never-going-to-get-back-biden-hasnt-done-enough-to-help/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11254713/China-threatens-national-security-land-military-base-51-Republicans-tell-Biden-cabinet.html
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/09/27/joe-and-hunters-fang-fang-problem-n1632746
Probably literally at some point.
Don't be surprised if China has a half Chinese Biden grandchild as a pressure point.
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/09/27/joe-and-hunters-fang-fang-problem-n1632746
Probably literally at some point.
Don't be surprised if China has a half Chinese Biden grandchild as a pressure point.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401146.php
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https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-opened-overseas-police-stations-us-canada-monitor-chinese-citizens?fbclid=IwAR3DPO7U7CXIAXQYim6aE5U-z0thSxqZ_i-0V__0JGpwTpkr2GLEAEtjYek
https://traffic.americanmilitarynews.com/2022/09/report-chinese-police-set-up-covert-station-in-nyc-31-others-around-the-world/?utm_source=fbchat&utm_campaign=alt&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2JHRivPzNo42iqcwlySvnhsTQVpWuwNsL_BrMyilkXAo2ZN9tGfDJ5pJ0
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https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-opened-overseas-police-stations-us-canada-monitor-chinese-citizens?fbclid=IwAR3DPO7U7CXIAXQYim6aE5U-z0thSxqZ_i-0V__0JGpwTpkr2GLEAEtjYek
https://traffic.americanmilitarynews.com/2022/09/report-chinese-police-set-up-covert-station-in-nyc-31-others-around-the-world/?utm_source=fbchat&utm_campaign=alt&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2JHRivPzNo42iqcwlySvnhsTQVpWuwNsL_BrMyilkXAo2ZN9tGfDJ5pJ0
Highly illegal under US law, but the FBI is busy hunting down conservatives and Biden doesn't want Xi to leak what they have on Hunter.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/3/report-details-chinas-covert-overseas-police-opera/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=tGyaHTYkmsJReL1RsnaiISv1RRkjMJ1pLcuf48%2BTcibz6Ylx4GEAFFLLg43L5%2BgQ&bt_ts=1664876739925
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China Used American Tech to Create Hypersonic Missile: McCaul
By Andrew Thornebrooke October 3, 2022 Updated: October 4, 2022biggersmaller Print
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A leading Republican said the Chinese communist regime is using American technology to develop its new weapons systems, and leveraging predatory international deals to secure access to vital trade infrastructure.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said that Chinese weapons, including the hypersonic missile tested by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) last year, have been built using American technology.
“What’s probably the biggest highlighted example of this? The hypersonic missile,” McCaul said during a fireside chat with the Atlantic Council, a D.C.-based think tank. “The weapon that we saw China launch with great precision … and can actually carry a nuclear warhead.”
“When you study it, you realize that that was actually built on the backbone of American technology.”
Epoch Times Photo
The US Navy, in collaboration with the US Army, conducts a static fire test of the first stage of the newly developed 34.5″ common hypersonic missile that will be fielded by both services, in Promontory, Utah, U.S., in this handout image taken on Oct. 28, 2021. (Northrop Grumman/Handout via Reuters)
McCaul’s comments follow closely behind the release of a report by intelligence firm Strider Technologies, which found that at least 162 researchers from the United States’ top nuclear facility have since worked for China, many of them in a military capacity, including hypersonics.
Infiltrating the West
McCaul and the report both said that many of the CCP’s foreign outreach programs, such as its 1,000 Talents program, were explicitly designed to harvest intellectual property from the United States.
“What they do is they infiltrate our researchers, and they give them a lot of money,” McCaul said.
“And some, in the 1,000 Talents program, they will give the mothership back in China this research and development.”
McCaul, who is now the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he first became concerned about the CCP threat back in 1996. At that time, he said, he was a federal prosecutor working on campaign finance cases.
Among those cases, he said, was that of Johnny Chung, who was caught up in a campaign finance lawsuit after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee. At least $35,000 of that money, Chung later said, came directly from China’s military intelligence apparatus and was intended to influence U.S. elections.
“It really exposed this plan to influence our elections,” McCaul said.
By interfering in U.S. elections, McCaul said, the CCP sought to ensure that U.S. policies were favorable to China, even at the cost of eroding U.S. national security.
A similar process was repeated in New York City last year, as revealed by a Justice Department lawsuit alleging that CCP intelligence agents plotted to attack or otherwise silence a U.S. Army veteran running for state office.
Global Expansion
Beyond the United States, McCaul said that the CCP has weaponized its diplomatic and economic relationships, creating supply chain dependencies in nations where it does business to exploit the relationship and gain access to new ports and airfields.
“China is in Afghanistan signing leases as we speak and, true to form, I predict they will get access to Bagram Air Base,” McCaul said.
Epoch Times Photo
Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers walk inside the Bagram US air base after all US and NATO troops left, some 43 miles north of Kabul on July 5, 2021. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
“Give them credit. We can’t just say, ‘They’re bad’,” McCaul added. “They’re very smart and they are a worthy adversary. We just have to compete with them.”
To counter that effort, McCaul said, the United States will need to reinvigorate its diplomatic and economic deals with nations throughout the world, to ensure that those nations know the United States cares more for their wellbeing than the CCP.
By the United States letting the CCP have unmitigated access to do as it pleased on the world stage for the previous thirty years and by not actively maintaining relationships throughout the globe, he said, the Chinese regime has been able to take advantage of the international system.
To that end, McCaul cited the perspective that a senior U.S. military officer gave to him some years ago.
“We really tried to bring [China] into the family of nations, we wanted them to move forward and be more of a democracy,” McCaul recalled the officer as saying.
“It just didn’t work.”
Andrew Thornebrooke
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****To that end, McCaul cited the perspective that a senior U.S. military officer gave to him some years ago.
“We really tried to bring [China] into the family of nations, we wanted them to move forward and be more of a democracy,” McCaul recalled the officer as saying.
“It just didn’t work.”****
no kidding
****
“China is in Afghanistan signing leases as we speak and, true to form, I predict they will get access to Bagram Air Base,” McCaul said.****
:x
****
"“Give them credit. We can’t just say, ‘They’re bad’,” McCaul added. “They’re very smart and they are a worthy adversary. We just have to compete with them.”
I give them no credit. Our leaders are just stupid :x
****"McCaul, who is now the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he first became concerned about the CCP threat back in 1996. At that time, he said, he was a federal prosecutor working on campaign finance cases.
Among those cases, he said, was that of Johnny Chung, who was caught up in a campaign finance lawsuit after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee" ***
gee who was the Pres back then and who was head of the DNC
they would do anything for. buck
and now his wife wants to lead the nation
:roll:
****
"To counter that effort, McCaul said, the United States will need to reinvigorate its diplomatic and economic deals with nations throughout the world, to ensure that those nations know the United States cares more for their wellbeing than the CCP" ****
well with 'only' 31 trill in debt this should be very "manageable". I mean our GDP is so massive..... :roll:
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****To that end, McCaul cited the perspective that a senior U.S. military officer gave to him some years ago.
“We really tried to bring [China] into the family of nations, we wanted them to move forward and be more of a democracy,” McCaul recalled the officer as saying.
“It just didn’t work.”****
no kidding
****
“China is in Afghanistan signing leases as we speak and, true to form, I predict they will get access to Bagram Air Base,” McCaul said.****
:x
****
"“Give them credit. We can’t just say, ‘They’re bad’,” McCaul added. “They’re very smart and they are a worthy adversary. We just have to compete with them.”
I give them no credit. Our leaders are just stupid :x
THIS!
****"McCaul, who is now the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he first became concerned about the CCP threat back in 1996. At that time, he said, he was a federal prosecutor working on campaign finance cases.
Among those cases, he said, was that of Johnny Chung, who was caught up in a campaign finance lawsuit after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee" ***
gee who was the Pres back then and who was head of the DNC
they would do anything for. buck
and now his wife wants to lead the nation
:roll:
****
"To counter that effort, McCaul said, the United States will need to reinvigorate its diplomatic and economic deals with nations throughout the world, to ensure that those nations know the United States cares more for their wellbeing than the CCP" ****
well with 'only' 31 trill in debt this should be very "manageable". I mean our GDP is so massive..... :roll:
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CCP Runs Police Outpost in New York City, Part of Global Network of Transnational Repression: Report
By Dorothy Li October 5, 2022 Updated: October 6, 2022biggersmaller Print
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Chinese authorities have opened at least one “overseas police service station” in the United States as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) global transnational repression, according to human rights group Safeguard Defenders.
“These operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law, and may violate the territorial integrity in third countries involved in setting up a parallel policing mechanism using illegal methods,” the Spain-based group said in a recent report.
The report, titled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” examined the initiative first launched by ten “pilot provinces” in 2018. These stations were also called 110 Overseas, named after the country’s police emergency services phone number.
An outpost in New York City was among the “first batch” of 30 overseas police service stations in 21 countries set up by the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou city, the capital of the southern coastal province of Fujian. Other Chinese cities also set up their own outposts abroad.
The Chinese police authorities’ division in New York was opened on Feb. 15, according to Dongnan News, a media outlet backed by Fujian provincial government. The center, called Fuzhou Police Oversea Service Station, is located at 107 East Broadway, inside the headquarters of the American ChangLe Association (ACA), a non profit with close ties to the Chinese regime.
Safeguard Defenders identified 54 overseas police service stations across five continents, including in cities from Toronto to Dublin.
Yet the total number of such stations is unclear. “There is no complete list of such “110 Overseas” police service stations available,” the report stated. “[T]he number is undoubtedly larger and such stations more widespread,” it added.
ACA
Established in 1998, the ACA is one of the most influential communities for immigrants from Fujian Province in the United States, according to its website.
The ACA cooperated with Fuzhou city’s Public Security Bureau to set up the Fuzhou police service station this year, the association’s chairman said at an April event at the group’s office hosting the deputy Chinese consulate general in New York, Wu Xiaoming, Dongnan News reported at the time. Wu, according to the report, recognized the association’s contribution to “promoting Sino-U.S. friendship and supporting China’s peaceful reunification.”
The New York community group, like many purportedly grassroots Chinese organizations, is linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s sprawling “united front” system. This refers to a network of thousands of overseas groups loosely overseen by the United Front Work Department, a powerful Party agency, that work to advance the regime’s interests abroad, including by carrying out foreign influence operations, suppress dissident movements, gather intelligence, and facilitate the transfer of technology to China.
The ACA has maintained close ties to the regime and has been praised for its efforts in supporting CCP and its leaders. Photos displayed on its website include the certificate of appreciation from the Chinese consulate in New York in 2015. The consulate praised the ACA for playing an active role in organizing overseas Chinese nationals to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping when he traveled to New York to attend the United Nations meetings at that time.
The group’s former president Zhang Zikuo in 2019 attended an official ceremony in Beijing marking the 70th year of CCP rule over China as a representative of overseas Chinese nationals in the United States, according to a 2020 report by the Fuzhou City Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese.
In May 2020, Zhang, then-president of the ACA, attended an online seminar organized by the United Front Department of Fuzhou city’s Changle District, during which they had an “in-depth study of the spirit of the two sessions,” read the report. “Two sessions” refers to annual meetings held by the regime’s rubber-stamp legislature and political advisory body.
‘Sinister Goal’
Ostensibly, the overseas police service stations serve administrative purposes, with many tasks the report said that would be “traditionally considered of a consular nature.”
For example, the New York station’s most popular service was assisting overseas Chinese in renewing driver’s licenses without returning to the country, according to an August report by Dongnan News. The report said that between March 1 to April 27, 36 applications completed an online physical examination at the station and got their driver’s licenses renewed.
The stations make overseas Chinese feel the “care and love” of the motherland, Lu Jianshun, the ACA chairman, told Dongnan News. The report mentioned that Lu is also a staff member of the New York police service station.
Safeguard Defenders, however, said such 110 overseas have a “more sinister goal as they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.’” Some of the stations have already been “implicated in collaborating with Chinese police in carrying out policing operations on foreign soil,” the group said.
One example provided in the report was the successful return of a Chinese fugitive surnamed Xia, who was accused of fraud and fled to Serbia.
Related Coverage
CCP Runs Police Outpost in New York City, Part of Global Network of Transnational Repression: Report‘A Global Regime of Political Terror’: Beijing Forcibly Brought Back 10,000 Citizens From Overseas Since 2014, Report Says
After identifying Xia’s location in Serbia’s Belgrade, Chinese police authorities “successfully [got] in touch” with Xia through its overseas service station, the report stated, citing a 2019 article by Chinese state media. Police in Qingtian city then “directly carried out persuasion to return” through the Chinese social media app Wechat and video calls with the support of staff members of the overseas service. Chinese police, the report stated, educated Xia about “relevant policies, laws and cases” at least once every week before Xia finally actively cooperated with the police to return to China in October 2018.
From April 2021 to July 2022, an estimated 230,000 overseas Chinese nationals have been “persuaded to return” to the country to face criminal charges, according to a Chinese state media report.
Safeguard Defenders noted such “persuasion to return” involves harassment and intimidation of the target’s relatives in China. If the target refused to comply, their families could face punishment, such as their children being denied education.
“These methods allow the CCP and their security organs to circumvent normal bilateral mechanisms of police and judicial cooperation, thereby severely undermining the international rule of law and territorial integrity of the third countries involved,” the report stated.
“It leaves legal Chinese residents abroad fully exposed to extra-legal targeting by the Chinese police, with little to none of the protection theoretically ensured under both national and international law.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the ACA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the New York attorney general’s office for comment.
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China’s Threat to Taiwan Semiconductors
Why aren’t American asset managers paying attention to the risks from an invasion of the island?
By Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pompeo
Oct. 10, 2022 1:28 pm ET
Xi Jinping’s all-but-certain installation for a third term as leader of the Chinese Communist Party marks an important milestone in the party’s progress toward annexing Taiwan. That creates significant risks for U.S. investors—many of which have been overlooked.
Mr. Xi has unambiguously stated that reacquiring Taiwan is a pillar of his national rejuvenation platform and a vital national objective. It’s also critical to his personal legacy. Mr. Xi’s ambitions have been checked by his need to secure a third term, as he likely feared international backlash that could threaten his grip on power. After this month, his calculus may change. Taiwan’s annexation could allow him to assert dominance and divert attention away from China’s domestic problems. Mr. Xi may be disinclined to wait, given the risk of a more assertive president in Taipei in May 2024 or Washington in January 2025. Beijing’s recent rhetoric has been consistent with this hypothesis.
Taiwan’s primary defense is its economic influence, not its military. The country’s dominant position in the semiconductor industry—what President Tsai Ing-wen calls Taiwan’s “silicon shield”—serves as a useful protection against Chinese aggression. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. produces more than half of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 90% of the most advanced chips. TSMC is the exclusive producer of the most advanced semiconductors that power Apple’s iPhones, AMD’s advanced CPUs and Qualcomm’s snapdragon chip used in many Android phones.
If China were to invade Taiwan, TSMC’s lights would likely go out. “If you take a military force or invasion, you will render the TSMC factory inoperable,” TSMC chairman Mark Liu told CNN in July. A material disruption to the industry would send shock waves across global supply chains, rendering manufacturers unable to make everyday products.
Though financial analysts and think-tank experts have suggested this could deter China from invading Taiwan, there are other ways for Beijing to achieve its aims without jeopardizing TSMC’s capabilities. A naval blockade, for example, could bully Taiwan’s leadership into surrendering without Chinese troops setting foot on the island.
No matter how it is achieved, the annexation of Taiwan would spell disaster for U.S. interests. If TSMC can’t produce chips, the global economy will tank. If TSMC is still able to produce chips but China dictates the terms of access, companies that rely on TSMC and other Taiwanese semiconductor companies will be left at the mercy of Beijing’s demands.
The U.S. has already experienced the pain of such scarcity. A chip shortage in 2021 cost the auto industry an estimated $210 billion in revenue. A recent study estimates that a one-year disruption in the production of semiconductors in Taiwan would lead to a $490 billion drop in revenue for electronic-device makers, not counting fallout for sectors that aren’t directly reliant on semiconductors.
U.S. semiconductor stocks may offer a reasonable hedge for investors, but only if the companies are sufficiently prepared. U.S. companies should invest in semiconductor technology now to meet the demand that’s expected to grow 80% by 2030. If China annexes Taiwan, U.S. manufacturers could seize on a market dislocation by increasing domestic production while chip prices soar. Though America’s semiconductor industry isn’t as advanced as Taiwan’s, increased investments could change that. And if China bides its time until the U.S. Navy retires more ships as part of its “divest to invest” strategy in the coming years, that will afford U.S. manufacturers even greater flexibility to prepare.
If such investments aren’t made and China annexes Taiwan, U.S. semiconductor firms will face pain in the market and punishment from plaintiffs’ lawyers for failing to act on a known material risk factor.
The better prepared U.S. semiconductor companies are to fill the supply gap created by Chinese annexation of Taiwan, the more reluctant China may be to follow through on its plans. Mr. Xi’s motivations aren’t principally economic, but a rational leader weighs costs and benefits before taking action.
Yet amid rising tensions, the world’s largest asset managers, many of which regularly warn U.S. portfolio companies about risks relating to climate change and board diversity, are conspicuously silent about Taiwan-related risks. The most notable example is BlackRock, whose website raves about the importance of Chinese investments with little mention of Taiwan. In July the firm told investors that “geopolitical events typically have a modest and short-lived impact on markets and economies” and that “we do not see a military confrontation [between China and Taiwan] as imminent.” This came even as China announced military exercises in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan.
BlackRock’s behavior is unsurprising and may itself be part of China’s long-term strategy of influencing U.S. companies to advance its geopolitical goals. BlackRock has been eyeing the lucrative Chinese asset-management market for years. In 2019 CEO Larry Fink described China as “one of the largest future growth opportunities for BlackRock” and said the firm is “focused on building an onshore presence.”
But access doesn’t come cheap. Following Mr. Fink’s comments, BlackRock lobbied the U.S. government for policies favorable to China, such as lower tariffs. In August 2020, BlackRock became the first foreign company to win preliminary approval to offer mutual funds in China. In summer 2021, at the height of the selloff in Chinese stocks, China’s securities regulator summoned BlackRock executives to a meeting, after which BlackRock urged investors to triple their assets allocated to Chinese companies. Two weeks later, BlackRock launched its Chinese mutual funds. BlackRock would endanger its business if it alienated the Chinese government by openly warning U.S. investors and companies about Taiwan-related risks.
The effect of these admonitions is subtle but real. BlackRock is the second-largest shareholder of Intel, one of America’s largest and most advanced semiconductor companies. BlackRock includes Intel in its “Climate Focus Universe”—a selection of companies that BlackRock has targeted to demand “climate adaptation strategies” and “rigorous GHG [greenhouse-gas] emissions reduction targets.” This campaign has proved fruitful: Intel regularly touts its sustainability efforts, including committing to net-zero emissions by 2040, but it says little about the company-specific risks and opportunities posed by Taiwan’s potential annexation.
BlackRock’s silence demands a market response. While the consequences of China’s annexation of Taiwan would go far beyond stocks or the economy, market actors can make a difference. U.S. semiconductor companies and their investors can protect against Taiwan-related risks now by investing in a silicon shield of their own.
Mr. Ramaswamy is executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, which holds semiconductor companies through its new U.S. Semiconductor ETF, SHOC. Mr. Pompeo served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2017-18) and secretary of state (2018-21).
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https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/10/17/u-s-military-bases-sell-chinese-govt-made-smart-devices-with-privacy-policies-stating-data-can-be-sent-to-china/
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7 Indicted in Alleged CCP Plot to Force US Resident to China
By Andrew Thornebrooke October 20, 2022
Seven people, including two New York residents, have been indicted in connection with an alleged plot by the Chinese regime to coerce a dissident in the United States to return to China, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced on Oct. 20.
An Quanzhong, 55, and his daughter An Guangyang, 34, of Roslyn, New York, were arrested on the morning of Oct. 20 and were due to appear before the District Court for the Eastern District of New York for an arraignment hearing in the afternoon, according to DOJ. The remaining five defendants are at large in China; the United States doesn’t have an extradition treaty with China.
Six of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents for China.
The group allegedly worked at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to illegally force a Chinese national living in the United States to return to China, according to an indictment (pdf) unsealed on Oct. 20.
The lead defendant, An Quanzhong, allegedly acted under the direct orders of various CCP officials in order to conduct surveillance on the Chinese national and engage in a campaign to harass and coerce the individual back to China as part of an extralegal effort known as “Operation Fox Hunt.”
“As alleged, the defendants engaged in a unilateral and uncoordinated law enforcement action on U.S. soil on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China, in an effort to cause the forced repatriation of a U.S. resident to China,” Breon Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in the statement, using the official name of communist China.
“The United States will firmly counter such outrageous violations of national sovereignty and prosecute individuals who act as illegal agents of foreign states.”
Operation Fox Hunt is a widespread effort by the CCP to locate and repatriate alleged fugitives and dissidents who have left mainland China. The regime frequently uses extralegal means, including the harassment and detention of family members, to coerce such individuals to return to China, where they face punishment.
The CCP’s actions are done unilaterally, often illegally, and without any communication with or support from the U.S. government.
An FBI representative involved in the case said the targets of this most recent effort had fled persecution in communist China.
“The victims in this case sought to flee an authoritarian government, leaving behind their lives and family, for a better life here,” FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Michael Driscoll said in a statement.
“That same government sent agents to the United States to harass, threaten, and forcibly return them to the People’s Republic of China. The actions we allege are illegal, and the FBI will not allow adversaries to break laws designed to protect our nation and our freedom.”
The indictment states that the efforts went back to at least 2017 and that in the early 2020s, the CCP went so far as to transport a relative of the victims to the United States to personally convey the regime’s threats.
In 2018, two of the defendants traveled from China to New York City to spy on the victim, prosecutors said. Surveillance footage recorded them looking through windows, going through mail, and attempting to enter the victim’s home, the DOJ said.
An Quanzhong allegedly told the victims that the CCP would “keep pestering you [and] make your daily life uncomfortable,” and said that “it is definitely true that all of your relatives will be involved,” according to the indictment.
An Quanzhong also brought frivolous lawsuits against the victim in New York as part of a CCP effort to make the victim’s life miserable enough to return to China, according to the indictment. In one recorded conversation, An Quanzhong explicitly told the victim that the lawsuits were frivolous and that the CCP could spend a billion dollars to harass them into returning, the document stated.
The indictment also alleged that An Quanzhong and An Guangyang engaged in a money laundering scheme. The scheme used a hotel in Queens, New York, to launder millions of dollars of funds from China into the United States in an effort to fund the CCP’s illegal activities while concealing its true origin, prosecutors alleged. Both defendants were also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.
When contacted by The Epoch Times, An Quanzhong’s lawyer Michael Horn said that they “were surprised by these allegations.”
“We’ll spend the next few weeks attempting to understand why the US Attorney’s Office has jumped to such an unjustifiable conclusion. Mr. Ahn is a well established and legitimate New York businessman and Chinese American community advocate. [He has] never worked for the Chinese government. That’s it,” Horn said.
Horn added An Quanzhong has entered a plea of not guilty, and will shortly make a bail application before the judge.
The charge of acting as an agent of the CCP carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The money laundering conspiracy charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The remaining charges, including conspiring to commit interstate and international stalking, carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
This article was updated to add comments from An Quanzhong’s lawyer.
Hannah Cai contributed to this report.
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Chinese Lab’s Purchase of US Land for Primate Breeding Facility Draws Scrutiny
By Eva Fu October 20, 2022 Updated: October 21, 2022biggersmaller Print
A Chinese firm’s purchase of land in Florida to build a lab monkey breeding facility is drawing scrutiny over the company founders’ ties to the Chinese military.
JOINN Laboratories CA Inc., the California subsidiary of a biotech firm headquartered in Beijing, in July purchased more than 1,400 acres of land for building a primate facility in Florida’s Levy County, county records show.
With a combined value of $5.5 million, the 10 parcels of land purchased from L & T Cattle & Timber represents one of the largest known Chinese acquisitions of U.S. land in recent years. While construction has not begun, the deal has attracted public attention at a time of heightened concern about Chinese investments in the United States over security and other risks.
The purchaser’s parent company JOINN Laboratories describes itself as a leader in non-clinical drug screening in China. According to its website, the company was founded in 1995 and employs over 1,500 staff. It has wholly-owned subsidiaries in major Chinese and U.S. cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Boston.
Zhou Zhiwen and Feng Yuxia, the couple who founded and control JOINN Laboratories, both graduated from China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. The school is the Chinese military’s top medical institute, which was added to a U.S. trade blacklist last year for supplying biotechnology to the Chinese military.
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After graduating, both Zhou and Feng went on to work as researchers at the academy before establishing their business venture, according to Chinese media reports. Zuo Conglin, a board member of JOINN Laboratories, also graduated from the same academy.
These links with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should raise red flags, according to Rep. Scott Franklin (R-Fla.).
“The idea that we would permit a … biotech firm with ties to the Chinese military to breed lab monkeys on U.S. soil is baffling, especially after China unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic on the world,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The Biden administration allowing Chinese Communist Party affiliated companies to buy up American land is unacceptable, especially for these purposes. If the President won’t put his foot down to protect American interests, Congress will.”
Future of Project Uncertain
It’s unclear if JOINN Laboratories can proceed with its plans in Levy County. Because the purchased land is currently zoned for forestry and rural residential, the company would need to rezone the land to industrial to build its lab facility, the county said in a Sept. 22 statement.
The county said that it had been asked about a possible rezoning of the land, and that it replied that “such a request would not receive a favorable staff recommendation” because of “compatibility” issues and that it would create “spot zoning,” referring to the controversial practice of singling out a piece of land for special zoning laws different from the zoning laws around it.
THAILAND-HEALTH-VIRUS-ANIMAL-VACCINE
A laboratory monkey interacts with employees in the breeding centre for cynomolgus macaques (longtail macaques) at the National Primate Research Center of Thailand at Chulalongkorn University in Saraburi, on May 23, 2020. (Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images)
County officials, when reached by The Epoch Times in early October, said it hasn’t received such a formal rezoning request from JOINN Laboratories.
The company did not publicly announce the sale and not much is known about the proposed breeding facility. JOINN Laboratories didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Epoch Times regarding the purchase and its plans for the site.
It’s unclear whether the company intends to sell the lab monkeys in the United States, China, or elsewhere. Both countries have a high demand for primates for experimental use, and the United States exports a large portion of monkeys from China.
According to Chinese media reports, the average cost for a long-tailed macaque, commonly used for lab research, paid by the Chinese regime has soared from around 30,000 yuan ($4,153) in 2019 to over 130,000 yuan (around $18,000) in early 2022.
JOINN Laboratories currently owns about 18 acres of animal testing facilities in Beijing and Suzhou, a major city in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, according to its 2021 annual report. It is also building another primate breeding base with the capacity of raising 15,000 large animals in Wuzhou of southern China’s Guangxi Province. The quarantine station for the base is now complete, the report stated.
Epoch Times Photo
Another sign spells out the concerns many residents have over a proposed corn mill in Grand Forks, N.D. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Chinese Deals Under the Spotlight
Around the time JOINN Laboratories inked its Florida land deal, another Chinese firm’s farmland investment near the northern border was also drawing scrutiny.
Fufeng Group, a Chinese agricultural firm, acquired 370 acres of land near the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, where it plans to build a corn mill.
But such proximity to a sensitive U.S. military base has alarmed residents and lawmakers alike, who fear that the location could be used for foreign espionage.
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Construction on the land was halted in September when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a federal interagency panel tasked with conducting national security reviews of foreign investments, sought more information about the project.
A local group opposing the Fufeng project is appealing to the state’s highest court to allow a public vote on the plan. The city had earlier denied a local petition that had collected over 5,300 signatures to bring the project to a referendum vote.
Florida, meanwhile, is also paying attention to the Fufeng case. Standing behind a “Stop CCP Influence” sign, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis last month proposed a legislative measure to bar Beijing-affiliated companies from buying land surrounding military bases, of which the state has 21.
“There’s the danger of having this land misuse for intelligence or military purposes. But put that aside, we saw what happened with COVID, when almost all this stuff was made in China, why would you want them to be involved in our own food supply in our chain supply chain here in the United States?” Desantis told the audience at Miami Dade College on Sept. 22.
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Every State But One Uses Federally Banned Foreign Tech, Report Says
More than 1,600 state and local government entities have purchased products or services from blackballed Chinese companies, CSET report finds.
Edward Graham
BY EDWARD GRAHAM
U.S. policymakers have moved to prevent federal agencies and critical networks from using some foreign-made technologies that they say threaten national security. But state and local government entities in nearly every state have purchased technologies from banned companies in recent years to support a host of public services, according to a report from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology released on Wednesday.
The report, which examined public government procurement records provided by GovSpend, found that at least 1,681 state and local entities in 49 states purchased information and communications technology and services, or ICTS, from five banned Chinese companies between 2015 and 2021.
“Collectively, these entities conducted nearly 5,700 transactions involving a wide range of covered equipment, including but not limited to smartphones, surveillance cameras, temperature scanners, handheld radios and networking equipment,” the report said, adding that the acquired technologies have been deployed “in schools, hospitals, prisons, public transit systems and government offices around the country.”
Jack Corrigan, a research analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology who co-authored the report, told Nextgov that the 1,681 state and local entities identified in the report likely represents “a lowball estimate,” since the public procurement records analyzed for the report were not standardized in terms of listed information.
Corrigan's co-authors were Michael Kratsios, a managing director at Scale AI who served as chief technology officer during the Trump administration; and Sergio Fontanez, an associate at the Holland & Knight law firm.
Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act forbids federal agencies to use technologies or services provided by five Chinese companies—Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Dahua and Hytera—and to work with contractors that use equipment from those firms. As the report noted, Section 889 “is the first and most well-known regulation targeting foreign ICTS on the grounds of national security.”
“If we see untrustworthy foreign technology as a national security issue, then it needs to be handled by every level of government,” Corrigan said.
Although five states—Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Vermont—have also “adopted measures to restrict the purchase of untrustworthy ICTS on national security grounds,” the report said that “these regulations are generally not structured to deal with foreign technology threats effectively.” Only Vermont was found to not have any state or local government entities that purchased banned ICTS covered under Section 889 during the examined time period.
Congress and the federal government have moved in recent years to further prohibit the use of some foreign-made technologies and equipment, particularly those from Chinese and Russian companies. These legislative and regulatory efforts have largely been enacted over concerns that “covered technologies could contain secret backdoors or vulnerabilities that are deliberately baked into the technologies.”
“For U.S. national security leaders, the broad reach of these firms—and their integration into the networks of the United States and its allies—presented major national security and economic threats,” the report said. “If the [Chinese Communist Party] wanted to use the Chinese tech industry as a conduit for espionage and other nefarious activities, it could potentially gain access to all these global networks.”
While efforts to purge foreign ICTS have largely focused on federal services and agencies, the report said that the federal laws and regulatory measures already in place could be broadened to focus more on state and local government procurement processes, since “the U.S. government is in the best position to identify vulnerable ICTS and develop strategies to eliminate them from nationwide supply chains.”
The report noted, for example, that the Commerce Department’s ICTS rule—which restricts the procurement of technology and equipment from untrustworthy foreign companies—”has the potential to significantly strengthen the federal government’s ability to crackdown on foreign technology threats across the broader U.S. market, but only if the Commerce Department implements the authority effectively.”
And the Federal Communications Commission also has the authority to determine what foreign ICTS can be legally sold in the U.S. under the Secure Equipment Act of 2021, allowing the agency to “keep untrustworthy foreign technologies from entering the U.S. market,” according to the report.
“Given their resource constraints and limited mandate, state and local governments should not be expected to independently grapple with the national security implications of foreign ICTS,” the report said. “However, by adhering to federal rules on foreign ICTS procurement, state and local governments can protect their digital infrastructure and keep procurement practices up to date without constant regulatory, administrative or legislative interventions.”
As for state and local entities that are already using foreign-made technologies and equipment deemed a national security risk, the report said that the federal government should continue to support programs that replace “compromised ICTS with more trustworthy alternatives.” These so-called rip and replace programs include the FCC’s Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, which covers the cost of removing and replacing equipment from Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE. As Corrigan noted, however, in just the first round of applications for the program, “the requests far exceed the available funds.”
“It's likely impossible to replace every deployment of untrustworthy foreign technology across the U.S., so policymakers should allocate these funds to the areas with the greatest potential security risks,” Corrigan added.
A Russian Tactical Nuke Wouldn’t Confer Much Battlefield Advantage, Experts Say
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Russia’s military is practicing responding to a nuclear attack with a planned exercise known as Grom (or “thunder”) 2022, featuring ballistic and cruise missile tests, according to state-run media TASS. For the U.S. military, there’s no need for anxiety since, as Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters Tuesday, “The U.S. was notified, and, as we’ve highlighted before, this is a routine annual exercise by Russia.”
But the nuclear rhetoric from Russian officials has been escalating since Sunday, when Moscow’s military chief called his counterparts in the U.S., the UK, France, and Turkey to accuse Ukraine of using a dirty bomb in the days to come. Russian diplomats took their case to the United Nations on Tuesday, though they do not seem to have convinced anyone on the merits of their argument, as Ankit Panda’s reaction to Russia’s letter suggested Tuesday.
For POTUS, when it comes to the dirty bomb allegations, “I spent a lot of time today talking about that,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters Tuesday. “Let me just say: Russia would be making an incredibly serious mistake for it to use a tactical nuclear weapon. I’m not guaranteeing you that it’s a false-flag operation yet; I don’t know. But it would be a serious, serious mistake.”
The view from Brussels: “Russia often accuses others of what they intend to do themselves,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday. “We have seen this conduct before, from Syria to Ukraine.”
“President Putin is failing on the battlefield,” Stoltenberg said Wednesday in Brussels. “He’s responding with more indiscriminate attacks on Ukrainian cities, against civilians, and against critical infrastructure—and with dangerous nuclear rhetoric.”
“We’ve also seen Russia accuse Ukraine of preparing to use a radiological dirty bomb. This is absurd,” said the NATO chief. “Allies reject this blatantly false allegation, and Russia must not use false pretexts to escalate the war further.”
BTW: Stoltenberg on Tuesday visited the U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier USS George H.W. Bush during the alliance’s Neptune Strike 2022.2 exercise happening this week in the Mediterranean Sea. Nineteen different nations are represented during these drills, which are intended to help alliance members (and in this case, Finland also) “plan and execute multi-domain real-world vigilance activities” using “carrier strike and amphibious strike capability,” NATO says. More, here.
NATO is still in the midst of its long-planned nuclear exercises known as “Steadfast Noon,” which are expected to end on Sunday. “Training flights will take place over Belgium, which is hosting the exercise, as well as over the North Sea and the United Kingdom,” the alliance said two weeks ago in a preview.
New: Australia is sending 30 more Bushmaster vehicles to Ukraine, which would raise that particular total to 90 so far on behalf of Canberra. And “sometime in January,” it’s sending as many as 70 military trainers to the UK to help train Kyiv’s forces there, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Wednesday. On top of the Bushmasters, the country “has donated six M777 towed howitzers and ammunition, 28 M113 armored vehicles as well as anti-armour weapons and other weapons,” according to Australia’s ABC news.
Norway just arrested an accused Russian spy who studied “hybrid threats” at the University of Tromsø. Turns out, this alleged spy’s gig didn’t last long—he first showed up at the Norwegian institution this past December, posing as a Brazilian researcher named José Assis Giammaria. According to The Guardian, “Giammaria’s behaviour had raised suspicion among colleagues at the university, [one] source said, and he once made a joke to Giammaria, asking him whether he was a spy.” (By the way: Several recently alleged Russian spies have been using South America as a cover, as Bellingcat’s Aric Toler pointed out Tuesday on Twitter.)
Also new: The identity of several alleged Russian soldiers responsible for cruise missile strikes inside Ukraine have been revealed this week by investigators at Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel. The three outlets published a deep-dive into the alleged unit of missile programmers after some creative digging by Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev.
For your eyes only: PBS/Frontline just turned in a nearly 90-minute documentary on the necessary task of documenting war crimes in Ukraine, a project produced with journalists from the Associated Press. Check it out, here.
So far, AP and Frontline have documented 539 incidents involving potential war crimes inside Ukraine, including 176 direct attacks on civilians. Read more at AP’s war crimes watch hub, here.
Snapshots of an occupying army in disarray: More than 1,000 pages of Russian military documents were left behind at an abandoned military base in northeastern Ukraine, near the city of Balakliia, southeast of Kharkiv. Reuters journalists obtained the documents recently, and explained their apparent contents in a special report published Wednesday. According to the papers, some of which were found half-burned in a furnace, the Russians fretted over U.S.-provided HIMARS long-range artillery, and officers struggled with desertions and casualties on the front lines.
“Morale was deteriorating,” Reuters’ Mari Saito discovered. What’s more, “An officer wrote on July 24 that someone called Shtanko was a ‘bastard’ facing disciplinary action because he ‘pulled back his platoon.’” Saito says he was able to locate Shtanko and his dad, who said Shtanko refused an order to “send his men into artillery fire.”
Amid a wave of HIMARS strikes, one battalion is revealed to have had only 49 personnel instead of the usual 240. Reporters also found spreadsheets and documents describing in detail certain pay discrepancies between Russian troops and those taken from the local population in formerly-occupied Balakliia. More to that story, here.
From the department of desperate Russian personnel needs, Afghan commando veterans are reportedly being offered gigs fighting for Moscow inside Ukraine, Foreign Policy’s Lynne O’Donnell reported Tuesday. Story, here.
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https://global.uchicago.edu/news/pritzker-school-medicines-collaboration-wuhan-university-boosts-innovative-medical-education?fbclid=IwAR0JinxB1g1d7-XqNBJPv4xAldmgQR5skcgaQ1z6R96VPM5Ut2_TWNY9J64
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FINANCE & BUSINESS TIES
Gov. Whitmer Defends Offering $715 Million to CCP-Linked Company
By Andrew Thornebrooke October 28, 2022 Updated: October 30, 2022biggersmaller Print
The governor of Michigan did not contest an accusation by her challenger that she cemented business ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as part of her effort to develop Michigan’s economy and defended the move as an effort to increase economic development.
The exchange between Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Republican challenger Tudor Dixon occurred during a televised debate on Oct. 25, which aired on WXYZ-TV.
“I will fight for every dime to come to Michigan so I can make your life better,” Whitmer claimed.
Dixon was quick to retort, however, and accused the Whitmer of offering massive amounts of taxpayer monies to CCP-controlled companies in order to get them to develop facilities in Michigan.
“You should be careful of where all of your dimes go if Gretchen Whitmer is in charge,” Dixon said. “Because she just offered $715 million of your taxpayer dollars to a Chinese corporation to come to the state of Michigan.”
The accusation was an apparent reference to the Whitmer administration’s approval of $715 million in grants and tax exemptions for Gotion Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of China-based Guoxuan High-Tech Power Energy Company.
Guoxuan’s chief executive is one Li Zhen, a Chinese billionaire who served in a leadership role for a regional affiliate of the CCP, which is believed to be a part of the regime’s propaganda-oriented United Front Work Department.
The U.S. taxpayer monies handed over to the company by the Whitmer administration are expected to result in the creation of a new EV battery plant on a 523-acre parcel of land in Michigan.
Though the administration has promised the factory will bring 2,000 new jobs to Michigan over 10 years, there is no guarantee that that will happen, nor that the jobs will go to the people of Michigan or even American citizens.
“She can tell you all she wants that she is improving economic development and keeping automotive jobs here,” Dixon said, “but we’re hearing that battery plants are going outside of Michigan unless they’re owned by the Chinese and have strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”
“Your tax payer dollars are not safe with Gretchen Whitmer.”
Dixon’s claim is in line with laws (pdf) in communist China which require that Chinese companies or foreign companies with a majority stake owned by Chinese interests must maintain a CCP cell within the company to advocate for the Party.
Whitmer did not deny the accusation but instead said that her administration was “making historic progress when it comes to economic development” by creating such incentives.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/communist-chinas-sprawling-plan-to-infiltrate-american-college-campuses_4757143.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-11-02&src_cmp=uschina-2022-11-02&utm_medium=email&est=pT6auFKeNOn2MCkGO5RZFLpulb0FZXfHv4avmBVpRW0%2FCV6cTPDg5VA%2FN7DG7Ue5oABt
Communist China’s Sprawling Plan to Infiltrate American College Campuses
By Venus Upadhayaya November 1, 2022 Updated: November 2, 2022biggersmaller Print
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The Chinese regime is ramping up efforts to infiltrate U.S. universities to gain access to valuable research and mold the minds of the next generation of America’s thought leaders, advocates and experts warn.
American colleges’ ties to China have drawn heightened scrutiny in recent years, in particular over Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes that have been criticized for spreading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and stifling academic freedom, and the revelation that universities received nearly $1.5 billion in gifts and contracts from China from 2014 to 2020.
But these examples form a small part of a multifaceted campaign to subvert the institutions that foster America’s technological and intellectual elite.
“The CCP sees the openness of our leading universities as a weapon that it can turn against us,” said John Metz, president of the Athenai Institute, a student-founded nonprofit focused on removing CCP influence from college campuses.
“It aims to use espionage and its financial influence over universities not only to control discourse and censor its critics, but also to acquire the advanced technology it needs to expand its military might and further its genocidal policies,” Metz told The Epoch Times in an email.
Meanwhile, Chinese influence operations targeting universities are but one aspect of the CCP’s global efforts to subvert all aspects of Western society to benefit the regime. And since the Communist Party wants to overtake the United States as sole global superpower, the United States takes a major focus of its operations.
“In a very literal sense, the CCP’s access to our universities endangers American lives,” said Metz.
“The CCP is targeting young people because it wants to control the minds of the next generation of leaders. We risk losing not just in the present, but in the future as well.”
Epoch Times Photo
A human rights group urges Tufts University to close its Confucius Institute in Somerville, Massachusetts on March 13, 2021. (Learner Liu/The Epoch Times)
Silencing Dissidents
A major part of Chinese influence operations in U.S. universities involves controlling public opinion about the CCP. This has always involved silencing those who speak out against the regime and its abuses.
To this end, Chinese international students themselves and Chinese student associations have become tools by which the regime can suppress dissenting voices on campus. Over the years, there has been a spate of incidents where Chinese student groups with links to the Chinese consulate have successfully or attempted to suppress voices critical of the Party at American universities.
“In my view, the newer generation of international students from China seem to be a lot more nationalistic than the ones I have met in college,” said Se Hoon Kim, director of the Captive Nations Coalition of the Committee on Present Danger: China, an advocacy body representing groups victimized by the CCP.
By nationalistic, Kim meant that these students deemed anything critical of the CCP as anti-nationalistic.
According to Kim, if one talks to Chinese international students on U.S. campuses about the CCP, they generally say, “Party is the people and we are the Party”—a propaganda line repeatedly espoused by the CCP in which it claims to be the sole representative of China and the Chinese people.
“If you have individuals like that occupying U.S. universities and who go taking part in everyday classes and taking part in everyday university activities, what tends to happen is that any type of discussion about the criticism of the Chinese Communist Party actually comes into jeopardy,” said Kim.
FBI Director Christopher Wray in a speech early this year gave an example of the Chinese regime threatening and harassing students at U.S. universities for merely exercising their right to free speech.
“In a recent incident at one Midwestern university, for example, a Chinese-American student posted online praise for those students who were killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. And almost immediately, his parents called from China, saying that Chinese intelligence officers had shown up to threaten them because of his post,” he said.
Wray was talking about a 2020 incident involving Kong Zhihao, a Chinese graduate student at Purdue University in Indiana who was subsequently accused by other Chinese students on campus of being a “CIA Agent.” Due to harassment received from the CCP, Kong reluctantly decided to cancel a planned speech for an event commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“I think some of the Chinese students in my school are CCP members. I can tell they are not simply students. They could be spies or informants,” Kong told ProPublica at the time.
Epoch Times Photo
The Confucius Institute building on the campus of Troy University, in Troy, Ala., on March 16, 2018. (Kreeder13/Wikimedia Commons)
Confucius Institutes Simply Rebranded
Confucius Institutes, Beijing-funded language centers criticized as conduits of propaganda, have drawn considerable pushback in recent years, resulting in 104 of the 118 centers across U.S. colleges and universities to close down.
But the National Association of Scholars said in a June report that many of these closures have simply resulted in a re-branding of the programs. Confucius Institute-like programs have since emerged under other names or have reappeared in other forms, the report said.
Universities are generally eager to replace their Confucius Institutes with similar programs. According to the report, out of those closed, 28 have replaced their institutes with a similar program, 58 have maintained close relations with the former Confucius Institute partner university, and five have kept their Confucius Institutes alive by transferring the center to a new host.
The report said after the closure of the institutes, some host institutions were made to refund money to the Chinese regime, and in certain cases, this was in excess of $1 million.
Espionage
China’s theft of research and technology from American universities has been a direct assault on American innovation leadership. Recently there has been more clamor about the theft of sensitive technology adding another angle to China’s meddling in U.S. universities.
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, last year voted unanimously to approve its final report (pdf) to Congress recommending that American universities take steps to prevent the theft of sensitive technology by the Chinese military.
“On a level playing field, the United States is capable of out-innovating any competitor. However, today, there is a fundamental difference in the U.S. and China’s approaches to AI innovation that puts American AI leadership in peril,” said the report, adding that unlike China, the U.S. innovation model is based on the open exchange of ideas, free markets, and limited government involvement.
“China is executing a centrally directed systematic plan to extract AI knowledge from abroad through espionage, talent recruitment, technology transfer, and investments. It has ambitious plans to build and train a new generation of AI engineers in new AI hubs,” it said.
During the Cold War, technology competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was characterized by research and development programs that were divorced from one another. But in today’s interconnected world, U.S.-China competition is more complicated because both countries’ research ecosystems are deeply connected through shared research projects, talent circulation, and commercial linkages that include supply chains, markets, and joint research ventures, according to the report.
Growing awareness of the threat of technology theft rose amid the Trump administration, which launched the China Initiative, a Department of Justice program aimed at combating economic espionage and other malign actions emanating from the communist regime.
Harvard University professor Charles Lieber
Harvard University professor Charles Lieber leaves federal court following his arrest in Boston, Mass., on Jan. 30, 2020. (Charles Krupa/AP Photo)
Dozens of U.S. or Chinese researchers or academics have been prosecuted or convicted under the initiative, with charges ranging from theft of trade secrets to grant fraud.
Late last year, former chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department Charles Lieber was convicted by a jury of lying to federal agencies about his ties to the Thousand Talents Plan, the Chinese regime’s talent recruitment plan accused of facilitating the transfer of American know-how to China.
However, the Biden administration ended the China Initiative in February amid allegations of racial discrimination. While an internal review found no racial bias in the department’s approach, the program was shuttered over the concern of a perception of bias, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Division Matthew Olsen said at the time.
Chinese Funding
Ian Oxnevad, a program research associate with the National Association of Scholars and one of the authors of the above-mentioned report on Confucius Institutes, told the Epoch Times that China’s influence operations on U.S. universities align with the CCP’s goal of becoming a global superpower.
“Part of China’s sort of grand strategy is not only stealing economic and security-related secrets, specifically in technology from around the world, but it’s also shaping how China is viewed,” said Oxnevad. This means that discussions on subjects like human rights violations, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and atrocities like the Great Leap Forward will continue to get censored. This concern has brought up a louder debate about Chinese funding to U.S. universities.
Metz said that Chinese funding is a “massive source” of university funding, and it is attractive because it deceptively appears to be freely given and there’s a need to root it out by preventing universities from accepting such funding.
He pointed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as one example of Chinese money flowing to American colleges. The university received over $100 million in contributions from various Chinese sources between 2015 and 2019, according to a 2020 Department of Education report.
Last year, Michelle Bethel, a board member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, resigned over ethical concerns about the institute’s partnerships with Chinese research bodies.
“By conducting research with institutions in China, the McGovern Institute unwittingly could be aiding the country’s repressive security apparatus or its military, whose officers have published articles declaring biology a new domain of warfare,” Bethel wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining her resignation.
“My concerns about how Beijing might be using our findings were dismissed as racist and political,” she wrote.
To Metz, American universities’ collaboration with Chinese institutions and their financial links to China is an untenable situation.
“That vast financial leverage creates an incentive for universities like MIT to look the other way while the CCP abuses human rights and threatens U.S. national security,” he said.
Epoch Times Photo
In this April 3, 2017 file photo, students walk past the “Great Dome” atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
An MIT spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the MIT has “strong processes for evaluating and managing the risks of research involving countries, including China, whose behavior affects U.S. national and economic security.”
Earlier in response to Bethel’s op-ed, the university issued a statement jointly by Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Nergis Mavalvala, dean of MIT’s School of Science, and Maria T. Zuber, vice president for research at the university.
They said that of the dozens of research projects at McGovern Institute, only one on developing treatments for severe forms of autism or neurological disorders is with China, and MIT receives no funding from China for it.
“Every proposed engagement that involves an organization or funding source from China, once it has been evaluated for compliance with U.S. law and regulation, is further reviewed by committees of senior administrators to consider risks related to national security, economic competitiveness, and civil and human rights,” the statement said.
What Should the US do?
The question of how the United States should respond to the Chinese regime’s interference on U.S. campuses has prompted varying recommendations from experts, ranging from cutting federal funding to universities that partner with the Chinese regime to stepping up information sharing with like-minded countries.
Greg F. Treverton, a professor at the University of Southern California and the former chairperson of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, told The Epoch Times that incidents of the CCP trying to censor criticism on U.S. campuses are “occasional, worrisome, but not worth cutting off cooperation” with China.
“I think there are two sorts of cooperation that ought to be beefed up, there ought to be more and more explicit cooperation between universities and for instance, the FBI,” he added. Treverton said such cooperation doesn’t come “naturally” because generally many people in the universities are skeptical of the government.
The second kind of cooperation should be between the United States and its “friends around the world” like Australia, another popular country with Chinese international students. Treverton said this is important because if the U.S. closes its doors to Chinese students, they’ll go elsewhere.
“We can share information about what’s happened with various countries, by way of connections between China, Chinese authorities and their students,” he said.
The National Association of Scholars report recommended that, in the short term, the federal government should amend the National Defense Authorization Act to target Confucius Institute-replacement programs, and should institute “new limits on other sources of federal funding to institutions that maintain a [Confucius Institute] or similar program.”
In the long term, the report said that authorities should levy tax on the Chinese funds and contracts received by U.S. institutions, and take other measures to build transparency in funding processes.
This will cap the “amount of Chinese funding a college or university may receive before jeopardizing eligibility for federal funding, and prohibiting funding to colleges and universities that enter research partnerships with Chinese universities involved in China’s military-civil fusion,” the report said.
Metz of Athenai said that he has started to witness a shift in that universities, for the first time, are starting to reconsider their investments in China.
“Universities like CUA [The Catholic University of America] and Yale are already investigating their endowments links to the Uyghur genocide; others, like Harvard, are rolling back these investments more quietly,” he said.
“By the end of the 2022-23 school year we expect other universities to begin to divest at an accelerating rate,” said Metz, adding that university leaders including trustees and other administrators are reaching out to Athenia asking how they can reduce their exposure to the worst actors in China.
Athenia plans to launch a new, interactive online tool that will help students, policymakers, and other stakeholders actually begin to measure their universities’ exposure to China.
Metz said this online tool will look at everything from gifts and research partnerships to Confucius Institutes, investments, and state-supported harassment and censorship of students.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/11/cia-william-burns-carnegie-endowment-alex-joske-china/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=7qd3Vi0fJPgI26PGoDvtAsyepAuwBMduM_y1ke9svkJmHGTwMOreQb2iChmYadobpYVRYN1H
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/14/lab-leak-proximal-origin-paper-covid-19-coronavirus-wuhan-china/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=u6ltVTUaLb1A2KaRryiuE5fSphGkCptnPbm7mudy90dmR_uZ2ljgokouGz8U5nx2DrfAr_IK
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Communist China Is the Primary Profiter From Biden Admin’s Policies
Stu Cvrk
Stu Cvrk
November 17, 2022 Updated: November 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
The video clip of the handshake between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden in advance of the G20 meeting in Bali is an interesting study. One could argue in observing the body language that things are going according to plan—Xi’s plan, that is.
We know what Xi’s plan is; after all, he has been conveying the elements of his plan for a decade now. That plan involves the assertion of communist Chinese supremacy over the planet. To do so necessarily involves displacing the United States as the world’s only economic and military superpower. His grandiose initiatives, such as the Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative, are roadmaps to achieving that goal just as Beijing’s corruption of international institutions, U.S. and other foreign diplomats, and others are hollowing out the current global order and undermining Washington at every turn to aid the process.
In a perfect and transparent world, Biden would have provided a status report to Xi at that G20 pre-meeting on the actions by his administration (and the Democratic Party) in undermining U.S. national and economic security in favor of Beijing. That is exactly what Biden’s policies are accomplishing, as most executive orders signed by Biden and most bills passed by Congress since January 2021 have been bad for America and good for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Let us examine the premise in detail.
As China pursues Xi’s political, military, and economic hegemony goals, any U.S. policy that diminishes national and economic security and/or the cohesiveness of American society, in general, is bad for the United States. The following policies implemented by the Biden administration and Democrat-run Congress have trashed the United States in one or more important ways.
Open Border
Biden’s open-door policy on the U.S.-Mexican border has resulted in the invasion of over 2 million illegal aliens and counting since January 2021. The results are disastrous for the United States: soaring crime rates (including drug and human trafficking and gang-related violence), astronomical social services costs in absorbing those illegals, diversion of scarce law enforcement resources away from public safety and other police missions, and tens of thousands of fentanyl deaths per year (most fentanyl and its precursors are manufactured in China).
Green New Deal
Biden’s executive orders that shut down the Keystone XL pipeline and U.S. domestic oil and gas production, as well as the passage into law of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, have essentially implemented significant parts of the Democrats’ Green New Deal. The goal is a complete replacement of hydrocarbon-based energy production in the United States with so-called “clean energy” sources, such as solar and wind, through federal mandates, uneconomic green subsidies, and coercion of U.S. industry to rapidly achieve arbitrary green goals through Marxist “environmental, social, and governance” standards.
What are the results of these disastrous policies?
A reversal of the United States from a net exporter of oil and gas under former President Donald Trump to a net importer under Biden.
Sky-high energy costs, including a doubling or tripling of gasoline prices in some states from those in December 2020 (average costs in California are currently $5.31 per gallon, with some gas stations charging over $7 per gallon).
A depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the lowest level since 1984 for political reasons to artificially depress gasoline prices ahead of the midterm elections (the SPR is a national security asset to be used in an emergency; its depletion, by definition, reduces U.S. national security).
A shortage of diesel fuel, according to the Energy Information Administration, will drastically reduce long-haul trucking and contribute to gasoline shortages across the United States and even higher prices for food and other basic commodities.
Further incentives to import Chinese-made green tech and add to the U.S.-China trade deficit (China is the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels).
The bottom line: massive disruption in the U.S. economy and energy production industry, and subsidization of green imports from China.
Gargantuan Spending Bills
Over the past 21 months, the Biden-Democrats have added nearly $4.8 trillion to U.S. national debt, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by passing into law the following bills: the America Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), the Inflation Reduction Act ($740 billion), and other unfunded commitments.
The GOP establishment was complicit, as these bills would not have been possible without their assistance in twice extending the debt ceiling by over $2.5 trillion, as well as some Republican votes for the bills themselves (less the ARP).
The result? Skyrocketing inflation (unfunded government spending being the prime cause for inflation), an economic slowdown (two consecutive quarters of declining GDP growth), and a future debt service that will consume future GDP as interest rates continue to rise. All of those bills have little-known embedded provisions that are deleterious to the U.S. economy in the future.
For example, the Tax Foundation estimates that a single provision in the Inflation Reduction Act—the 15 percent minimum tax on corporate book income—“is the most economically damaging provision in the bill, reducing GDP by 0.1 percent and costing about 20,000 jobs.”
Woke Military
Biden’s policies are transforming the U.S. military in the worst possible way by creating divisiveness and destroying unit cohesion and readiness. These actions range from continuing misguided Obama-era policies, such as “making diversity the mission,” to the Defense Department standdown in February 2021 to supposedly address “extremism in the ranks,” to COVID-19 jab mandates that weakened medical readiness and forced resignations, to the promotion of “transgender” rights over religious liberty in the military.
The results? Declining military effectiveness and combat readiness, the resignations of mid-career officers and enlisted, and the growing recruiting/retention deficit. China’s People’s Liberation Army generals must be laughing as they watch the U.S. military implode through disastrous personnel and administrative policies.
Adoption of Cultural Marxism
Through executive orders, the Biden administration has promoted the principles of critical race theory (CRT) and diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) and their advocacy throughout the federal government.
The purpose of CRT and DEI is to employ racialism to “abolish the nuclear family, abolish gender, defund the police, abolish the border, abolish prisons, abolish the Senate, abolish the Electoral College, abolish ICE, abolish voter ID, abolish capitalism, abolish private/charter schools, abolish religious freedom, abolish free speech, abolish rights, abolish objective truth, abolish reality,” according to Newsweek.
In short, their goal is to destroy America’s institutions and culture from within. The CCP couldn’t be more pleased with the results.
LGBTQI+ Advocacy
Biden signed an executive order and a memorandum that advanced the controversial LGBTQI+ agenda at the expense of most Americans who do not suffer from sexual dysphoria. With the stroke of a pen, his actions wiped out over 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian history, morals, and beliefs that undergird American culture and our Republic.
The result is a continued substitution of identity politics over merit, along with the exacerbation of divisiveness among Americans and the deterioration of moral standards in our institutions. Worst of all is the Democratic Party’s support for the sexualizing and grooming of children by the public education system.
Ukraine Aid
With the lockstep support of Democrats in Congress and many establishment Republicans, the Biden administration continues to pour taxpayer money down the Ukraine rathole to the tune of $52.2 billion through the beginning of October with more in the queue (see here and here).
The result? An ongoing depletion of U.S. weapons and ammunition stores in the face of the rising threat posed by the Chinese regime, and the distraction caused by a regional war in Europe away from the hybrid war that China has been conducting against the United States for years.
An even greater benefit to the CCP are the revelations stemming from the FTX cryptocurrency scandal that is unfolding. As reported by The Post Millennial, “FTX had partnered with Ukraine to process donations to their war efforts within days of Joe Biden pledging billions of American taxpayer dollars to the country. Ukraine partnered with FTX as the Biden administration funneled funds to the invaded nation, and FTX then made massive donations to Democrats in the US.”
No wonder the U.S. Senate refused to pass Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) amendment requiring mandatory aid audits to Ukraine. With the potential political paralysis that may ensue in Washington as the scandal unravels, Beijing stands much to gain.
Concluding Thoughts
The above list of “Biden administration and Democratic Party accomplishments” should have been presented by Biden (servant) to Xi (master) on Nov. 14 in advance of the G20 summit in Bali. After all, the results from that list could not have been more in Beijing’s long-term interests if Xi had drawn it up: high inflation, economic slowdown and chaos, a weakened U.S. military, divisiveness among Americans, and a looming sovereign debt crisis.
The communist Chinese are reaping massive dividends on their investments in and corruption of the Biden family and many others in the U.S. political class. Meanwhile, Americans are getting the (very) short end of the stick.
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An overseas Chinese police outpost is located inside the America ChangLe Association building in New York, pictured on Oct. 6, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
INFILTRATING THE WEST
China’s Secret Police Station in NYC ‘Violates Sovereignty’ of US: FBI Director
By Andrew Thornebrooke November 17, 2022 Updated: November 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is violating the sovereignty of the United States through the creation of secret police stations on U.S. soil, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“I’m very concerned about this,” Wray said during a Nov. 17 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We are aware of the existence of these stations.”
“I have to be careful about discussing our specific investigative work, but to me it is outrageous to think that the Chinese police would attempt to set up shop—you know, in New York let’s say—without proper coordination. It violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial and law enforcement cooperation processes.”
Wray’s comments focused on the creation of China’s so-called “service stations,” which effectively act as overseas police stations for the CCP, which rules China as a single-party state.
The overseas police stations ostensibly serve administrative purposes normally entrusted to an embassy, including assisting Chinese immigrants with renewing driver’s licenses without having to leave the country.
But a September report by the nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders revealed that these stations also serve more sinister purposes, such as tracking down, arresting, and extraditing people wanted by the CCP, including dissidents against the regime and its leader Xi Jinping.
Wray refrained from commenting on the legality of such outposts, but said that they were part of the CCP regime’s campaign of global transnational repression. Relatedly, the Netherlands previously closed two such stations for illegally conducting Beijing’s campaign to repatriate critics of the regime back to China to be imprisoned. Likewise, Ireland shut down two similar operations in October for illegally acting on behalf of a foreign state.
Concerning the United States, Wray said the stations—one of which is in New York City—were part of a wider effort undermining the United States’ sovereignty.
“The reason this is so important is because we have seen a clear pattern of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, exporting their repression right here into the U.S.,” Wray said.
“We have seen plenty of situations … where the Chinese government, under the pretext of going after corruption, have essentially used that as a vehicle to surveil. We’ve had situations where they’ve planted bugs inside Americans’ cars.”
Wray explained that Chinese communist intelligence agents, acting both in person and through proxies hired in America, systematically engaged in “harassing, stalking, surveilling, blackmailing people who they just don’t like or who disagree with the Xi regime.”
“It’s a real problem and it’s something that we’re talking with our foreign partners about as well, because we’re not the only country where this has occurred,” Wray said.
While Wray did not comment on the future of the outpost in New York City or what the FBI’s current investigations into it had revealed, he warned that Chinese immigrants and visitors to the United States needed to be wary of the existence of such stations and immediately report any efforts made by such a station to surveil or detain them.
“This is something we’re trying to call out and it’s important that Chinese Americans and Chinese dissidents who are here know to call the FBI to report when they think they may have been been targeted with this conduct,” Wray said.
“I’m deeply concerned about this and I’m not going to just let it lie,” he said.
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/22/bidens-green-agenda-sending-taxpayer-cash-chinese-owned-mines-canada/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=u6g3Vz5CbrFK06ad.zm9Fc2Wuhi.UYBwP_vgzuw4qgBm2aBJYofYxqIZdmCfERxEcnz.meR5
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/25/carnegie-endowment-for-international-peace-william-burns-cia-ccp-ministry-of-state-security/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=s7BkVigWP.xC26DB_2mmQovVvkOySIEqLei5neBz9E1mxXW9ptn9DgCp117LI005ztRkbLCH
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-turns-over-american-sovereignty-to-china/?fbclid=IwAR16tVqeKxc9_ahSYneSez67dY8nN6itXU1CXso2JJOA_tbClEKH6kxOOMk
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/30/gop-lawmakers-investigation-ganfeng-lithium/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=6bt2ESFfO64E0PLMozK5So7Ts0_vBYdoIrLhy_I5rABm385KuJM9LPwBYtg1JDo5UV4ElG9o
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/30/cia-william-burns-carnegie-alex-joske-spies-and-lies-congressional-staffer/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=tr87BnQWMv5FyPWdoyWoA5SQswqrTMN1N_emyuRk8AZmbXdQBM3OZL6bCOWEeNIyomwRF31f
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https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/20/congress-spending-huawei-ban-banking-system/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=6at.AyZEJPIB0KTMqG7oGpGN5gi2CsFqd7ag2rZ5v0ZmVnno5Ac4ZQ2qx_gCARH3QbNAkKjD
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https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/tiktok-just-gave-itself-permission-to-collect-biometric-data-on-u-s-users-including-faceprints-and-voiceprints/
https://www.boredpanda.com/tik-tok-reverse-engineered-data-information-collecting/?utm_source=search.brave&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3258125/drugs-drying-up
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19260/china-sabotage-north-dakota
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19260/china-sabotage-north-dakota
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/us-chip-ban-on-china-requires-strict-enforcement-to-thwart-circumvention-by-beijing-experts_4915905.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-12-30&src_cmp=uschina-2022-12-30&utm_medium=email&est=rZXauNXhtFvuTxyxwNxKlmDUBo%2FqjsmN5Pu08ijNQH22EExGauLrVazLet4j%2Ff8zilR3
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/mind-dominance-the-ccps-disinformation-war-on-us-social-media_4933312.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-01-01&src_cmp=uschina-2023-01-01&utm_medium=email&est=FmRdyAKBqtTC7VbKV4Gqa%2F11vvt6jCG4m8wanpclS%2B2UokQ2Ys6eMtwk2MmjXkRfqngz
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/apple-kisses-up-to-china-again_4966987.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-01-08-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-01-08-1&utm_medium=email&est=g33P0C7G9uMuuZYfetpzIsWEvilBS9h9%2F3DYw%2FNdb7vVVglsbZ2UHyVxWmX5E6387B%2FL
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-select-china-committee-approved-by-house-on-bipartisan-vote_4974948.html
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https://www.newsweek.com/how-us-scientists-are-collaborating-chinas-military-wake-call-1773079?fbclid=IwAR29PP6gwoeu705xepd6hviTJfhoEWgpFB6xlZq-KL76vd8AoWg10ecQUi8
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https://nypost.com/2020/12/08/professor-claims-china-has-people-in-americas-core-inner-circle/
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U.S.: White House May Narrow Scope of Outbound Investment Screening Mechanism for China
2 MIN READJan 12, 2023 | 17:34 GMT
What Happened: The U.S. Biden administration is considering narrowing the scope of outbound investments in Chinese industries subject to a national security review in order to reduce domestic opposition to the proposed mechanism, Axios reported Jan. 12. The White House is reportedly considering focusing on investments in semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence, not batteries or biotechnology.
Why It Matters: By narrowing the scope of investments subject to a review, the White House is likely to break down some of the domestic and business opposition to the rules, particularly as the Biden administration already targeted China's semiconductor, quantum computing and artificial intelligence industries with broad export controls in October 2022. The Biden administration hopes these reviews will further restrict the growth of those Chinese sectors by choking off Western financing and investment by Western companies. Congress has also considered a similar outbound screening mechanism, but for now, the White House appears to be moving forward with an executive order. No formal announcement on the mechanism is expected prior to Secretary of State Antony Blinken's planned visit to China, which is expected to occur sometime in February.
Background: Several weeks before the United States implemented the most recent export controls on China's semiconductor, quantum computing and artificial intelligence industries, the U.S. Commerce Department announced new regulations to block China's access to chipmaking technology and gear that can be used to manufacture cutting-edge logic and memory chips.
Read More:
The U.S. Deals China's Semiconductor Sector With Its Biggest Blow Yet (Oct. 21, 2022)
The CHIPS Act Won't Reduce the U.S.'s Strategic Reliance on the Global Semiconductor Sector (July 28, 2022)
To Slow China's Semiconductor Sector, the U.S. Eyes More Export Bans (July 11, 2022)
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/13/fbi-america-changle-overseas-chinese-police-station/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=sKB6WXVVL.hE3vTfuTatGZHWtkPyRp0uMrLg2exv9kRmuyynxpJ_ntB_AuaO0zYoS_5Ih8wz
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19295/tiktok-ban-us
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moving from China - US thread:
I would imagine it would not take much Chinese money to put the half the state on the payroll....
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/01/20/exclusive-special-interests-intervene-south-dakota-attempt-slow-noem-proposal-restricting-chinese-land-purchases/
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TikTok Is Bad, but WeChat Is Worse
Beijing uses the popular app to steal data, censor, propagandize and spread disinformation in the U.S.
By Seth D. Kaplan
Jan. 24, 2023 6:36 pm ET
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ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN KOZLOWSKI
WeChat is the most popular communications platform in the world for Chinese speakers. It’s also a preferred vehicle for China’s Communist Party to steal data, censor, propagandize and spread disinformation in the U.S., where the app has an average of 19 million daily users. Congress banned the use of TikTok on government devices recently, and the Biden administration is reportedly seeking to go further by, for instance, limiting access to user data to mitigate the app’s dangers. Given the zeal to address threats emanating from a Chinese app, why is WeChat being ignored?
First developed by Tencent in 2011, WeChat is China’s “app for everything.” A billion people use it for texting, calling, video conferencing, playing videogames, shopping, paying bills, sending money, reading news and more. In the U.S., it is the most important source of news for Chinese students, immigrants and first-generation Chinese-Americans. But since it is a China-based technology product, WeChat is also a prominent part of Beijing’s mass-surveillance network. User activity is tracked, analyzed, censored and handed over to the government in line with Communist Party mandates. Algorithms are adjusted to promote the party’s narratives and demote or censor information that runs against them, making the app invaluable to the party’s efforts to spy on and influence Chinese communities world-wide. (Tencent said in 2020 that “user privacy and data security are core values” and that it was taking “seriously” reports that it surveilled foreign users.)
Lydia Liu, an immigrant from China with a doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, knows this all too well. She started a WeChat public account in 2018 with the aim to tell “the truth of real American life to Chinese immigrants in the U.S.A. and world-wide,” as she told me. Ms. Liu worked countless hours over three years to build the account, eventually reaching more than 250,000 followers and millions of monthly views.
But promoting a positive understanding of life in America—and its democracy and freedoms—challenges the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative about the U.S. In 2021 WeChat suspended Ms. Liu’s account, first for two weeks and then for six months. Posts that contradicted China’s stance on trade or Covid were repeatedly banned. Dozens of articles were disqualified before publication, and more than 40 were removed after publication. Comments were similarly censored. Meanwhile, Ms. Liu was repeatedly harassed. Trolls “repeatedly used the F-word, nicknamed me ‘stab people in the back’ and posted my name and Facebook information on many WeChat groups,” she said.
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While users like Ms. Liu report that WeChat censors or demotes content that is positive toward the U.S., negative posts go viral daily. Chinese-speaking Americans see content suggesting that the U.S. treats Chinese people as second-class citizens, that whites always discriminate against Chinese people, the U.S. is a society plagued by gun violence, and that America’s streets were filled with dead bodies during the pandemic. The goal is to suppress Chinese and Chinese-Americans’ passion for politics and make them believe that the American political system is no better than China’s authoritarianism.
The Communist Party also uses the app to stifle the reach of Chinese-American political candidates who take a strong stance against it, such as Allen Shen, a Chinese-born U.S. Army veteran who ran as a Republican for a seat in the Minnesota House. Mr. Shen says he is unable to post on the app because of his political positions. Lily Tang Williams, who was a law professor in China, ran in a GOP primary for Congress in New Hampshire. She says she avoids anything that might be deemed political while on WeChat, out of concern for her relatives in China.
The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda and censorship efforts are supported by a group of state-backed internet commenters known as the 50 Cent Army, so named because that’s how much they were originally paid per post. (The figure is in Chinese yuan; the U.S. equivalent is about 15 cents.) Numbering anywhere from 500,000 to two million within China, with more overseas, this propaganda army creates articles or comments on social media in China and abroad that promote the party-state’s narratives while undermining anything that might challenge them. Many of the 50 Cent foot soldiers working on American social media are based in the U.S. and claim they have acquired U.S. passports or green cards. Sadly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other arms of the federal government lack the understanding and resources to constrain them.
The Trump administration tried to ban WeChat from U.S. app stores in 2020 on national-security grounds, but a federal judge blocked the ban. The Biden administration revoked President Trump’s executive order and kicked WeChat to the Commerce Department in 2021 for a review, as it did with TikTok. Many states—including Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Virginia—have recently banned WeChat and TikTok from state government devices, but there’s been no perceptible momentum to impose strictures on WeChat at the federal level. The Biden administration is likely much more concerned with TikTok because of its popularity with American youth. And what occurs on WeChat—arguably pernicious for American democracy—is hidden in a language few people in Washington, the media and think tanks understand.
WeChat is likely to grow both in importance to its users and in influence over Chinese-language media in general. Its pervasiveness means that all other Chinese-language media must use it to reach readers. The Biden administration and Congress should therefore refocus on mitigating this growing threat.
Tencent has work to do. If it can’t ensure American standards of free expression and privacy on WeChat, and if its algorithms appear to continue promoting anti-American content while censoring posts critical of China, the U.S. should ban the app. If Washington decides to take that step, it must be done in tandem with other democracies to ensure Beijing’s propagandists and censors can’t own the Chinese-speaking world’s public square.
Mr. Kaplan is a professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He lived in China for seven years.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/26/judy-chu-china-committee-ufwd-intel/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=5rU8WX1bOKwe1qXfrDuoS5uRpBbxRMpzILC3kPZt8g1mgsl87S3.0j5tGRodl4D7ap_LbskA
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Fang
she made this list :
Fang Fang was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020.[10]
her name must have been removed
as an aside most of the women on the list are libs/socialists me to or climate activists or other lib activists
as far as I can tell
so Fang Fang , a commie spy fits right in .
Swalwell boasted he got her out of the country - with the implication it was good he protected us from the spy once he found out....
She should have not been allowed to leave the country and should be sitting in a Federal max security prison....
certainly his helping her leave the US was self serving
the lying little prick
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https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/02/02/breaking-pentagon-admits-theres-a-chinese-spy-balloon-hovering-over-the-united-states-n1667467
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For the life of me, I cant understand why Biden did not shoot the balloon down, when it entered US air space. China tested the US and won.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/prepping-war-chinese-spy-balloon-belies-much-larger-economic-warning-signs (https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/prepping-war-chinese-spy-balloon-belies-much-larger-economic-warning-signs)
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For the life of me, I cant understand why Biden did not shoot the balloon down, when it entered US air space. China tested the US and won.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/prepping-war-chinese-spy-balloon-belies-much-larger-economic-warning-signs (https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/prepping-war-chinese-spy-balloon-belies-much-larger-economic-warning-signs)
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/126/609/887/original/4c39ab5f3aab50d1.png
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=840,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/126/609/887/original/4c39ab5f3aab50d1.png)
It couldn’t be China has blackmail material on him and Hunter!
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https://nypost.com/2023/02/05/trump-denies-any-chinese-spy-balloons-under-his-watch/
:cry:
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https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/02/04/rubio-chinese-spy-balloon-not-the-first-weve-seen-these-before-and-they-get-the-same-info-from-other-means/
only thing is we now know about it apparently
CCP has satellites anyway....
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Trump seems to have considerable back up in the NY Post article. Bolton surely would have let fly.
Interesting that they were undetected at the time. WTF?!?
Regarding Rubio-- if what he says is true, then why are they doing the balloons?
And if what he says is true, then why aren't we doing something about it?!?
And if what the NY Post says about them being undetected at the time, then why isn't Rubio making that point. Isn't the net effect of what he is saying here to diminish the American people's demand for action?
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second post
This would seem to argue against the sanguine response:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6319834202112?fbclid=IwAR09myc_66VilZ7O-3W6ZpvDY31JXI5kXf4ufB-b76PBwWAKLUDfmzF2HgM
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-officials-cast-doubt-on-white-house-claim-that-chinese-balloons-hovered-over-u-s-during-last-administration/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30468654
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/06/ccp-judy-chu-united-front-taiwan-forums-for-peaceful-reunification-of-china/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=pLx3DzxZK70L2ODR_yytGoOJugjwS5ZpMumhzfBw.hhmSDsbTk5PNDGsO2w25qvThIEkUDlZ
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https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/norad-pleads-incompetence-over-failure-spot-trump-era-chinese-spy-balloons
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https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/02/07/report-37-of-deals-to-fund-chinas-ai-sector-included-american-investors/
:x
but they are woke and vote Dem
so it is ok
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/7/china-trade-hawks-hit-hard-reality-trying-curb-us-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=nH8RxyjLTIdH00IFCxUCCZlKTJBzGxXuib7zEqpnyjwO5YM4htyMW01Z7L8DnO2z&bt_ts=1675854670483
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/09/dominic-ng-joe-biden-apec-ccp-ufwd-coea-cofa/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=6LU4BipeNLtL3uPB.CqtEZyKoE60VZp_Nuiyz.N5pRxmIoyCxs56IA8VM8Z5xmaAJUzxeLAh
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/20/biden-dominic-ng-apec-lance-gooden-judy-chu-ccp-ufwd/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=tbRiDiJCOvkEi.3crW25SpSA5Rv_S5EnPezjwvd68hFmeWZkDpzrF4mabmWKB7t2ATycWLf7
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https://americanmind.org/salvo/captain-commie/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=248631275&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8t3LQGdo2pT2P-vEKbOwIo1CvrMqe2Rm8SVGxyVPCCcYG8Mf0rn3HuRcq5a9Pab4IbdYt68kdmBfHLyA1PEp-yqN_sdg&utm_content=248631275&utm_source=hs_email
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/17/janet-yellens-policy-would-destroy-small-us-banks-while-bailing-out-chinese-depositors-experts-say/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=tLtjFCEcN6cB3PbMvyW3DsKF5xWnSZ1_NvKhmbFo9R5mDbat1B4VwfF4zSQj3XlzlfBqccJm&fbclid=IwAR0ElnEGkioMoBepLAP3Tw7o-mIdRcPWepKA4R4Er4aRHjlApQsbxUlhcio
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/07/gretchen-whitmer-appointed-board-approves-715-million-contract-tax-incentives-for-chinese-communist-party-affiliated-company/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/tiktok-a-ccp-intelligence-weapon-experts-sound-alarm-on-threat-posed-by-app-ahead-of-ceos-congress-hearing_5141372.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-03-23&src_cmp=uschina-2023-03-23&utm_medium=email&est=oFLaLxC%2F2mPiKf0c5%2BlLpx7KSacWm5TChvnQLs6Mr%2FtTav4LniVxg9dwvAXRhPP286z5
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Not a perfect fit for this thread, but not sure where else to put it:
China: Global Research Institutions Cut Off From China's Top Database
2 MIN READMar 23, 2023 | 17:57 GMT
What Happened: Over the last week, China's largest academic database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), informed a number of global research institutions and universities that it will limit their database access starting April 1 for an unknown duration, Nikkei Asia reported on March 23. The notices said the limitations are part of an effort to make sure "cross-border services are in compliance with the law."
Why It Matters: Reduced outside access to China's academic information will hinder the ability of Western academics to inform a growing body of Western legislation against China by making such laws both more efficacious and more reflective of realities in China. It will also hamper global research collaboration while inhibiting Beijing's industrialization and digitization efforts, which are driven in no small part by cross-border academic partnerships.
Background: CNKI provides nearly exclusive access to 95% of Chinese academic journals going back to 1915, according to Nikkei. The recent notices restricted access to national census data, statistical yearbooks, conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations and masters' theses.
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https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/21/the-best-little-wuhan-in-texas/
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https://apnews.com/article/china-foreign-influence-utah-legislature-mormon-church-921526d0c8eda2732c361488d20dd1b4
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https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/tiktok-bill-read
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/sen-hawleys-efforts-to-fast-track-tiktok-ban-blocked-by-sen-paul_5159258.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-03-30&src_cmp=uschina-2023-03-30&utm_medium=email&est=3oyC4VtiBJM%2FJolen%2FfWZRh31IgD0tcWOOQjQDwVUqgb5RfUkzMu2vfrSRpQxkhJaa9d
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/sen-hawleys-efforts-to-fast-track-tiktok-ban-blocked-by-sen-paul_5159258.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-03-30&src_cmp=uschina-2023-03-30&utm_medium=email&est=3oyC4VtiBJM%2FJolen%2FfWZRh31IgD0tcWOOQjQDwVUqgb5RfUkzMu2vfrSRpQxkhJaa9d
Sen. Paul is correct.
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why can't we just ban the damn thing without it being a trojan horse piece of government legislation for further control?
I don't agree we should do nothing
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Agree with both of you. Seems to me that a ban on foreign ownership of US media is something that could withstand legal scrutiny.
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Emerald Robinson ✝️
Too many conservatives still don't get it.
They've purged the military.
They own the intel agencies.
They control the federal bureaucracy.
They manage all social media.
They've captured the mainstream press.
They're working with China, not against it.
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Emerald Robinson ✝️
Too many conservatives still don't get it.
They've purged the military.
They own the intel agencies.
They control the federal bureaucracy.
They manage all social media.
They've captured the mainstream press.
They're working with China, not against it.
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-weapons-gap-with-the-prc-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=247761&post_id=111748763&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
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"Too many conservatives still don't get it"
lets start with Mitch McConnell
and the rest of them in the DC country club called the US Senate
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"Too many conservatives still don't get it"
lets start with Mitch McConnell
and the rest of them in the DC country club called the US Senate
There is no DC Uniparty!
:roll:
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"…the U.S. depends on China as the single source for about half-dozen chemical ingredients in explosives and propellants, and other countries of concern for another dozen.
Yes, you read that correctly. I am sure Russia is in there too."
:x
issues for today :
LBGTQKARATKR. - mad cow laughing
reparations - black racists smiling
white supremacy - all whites included ; nazis
flood the US with future Democrats ; soros happy
and get orange man - more work for smiling shysters
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https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/04/03/confirmed-that-chinese-spy-balloon-made-fools-of-the-biden-administration-n1683966
don't worry - blinks is on top of the situation
no mention of the hobby balloons ....... yet
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U.S. Research Scientists Are Blind to China’s Threat
Eager for collaboration, the NIH and NIAID won’t acknowledge concerns about national security.
By Paul M. Dabbar
April 3, 2023 2:12 pm ET
U.S. public-health agencies jumped to an unwarranted conclusion in 2020 that Chinese scientists had done nothing deliberate or accidental to cause the Covid pandemic. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continued to defend engagement with China on pathogen research even as other parts of the U.S. government identified serious biosecurity risks from collaboration with Chinese labs.
All government research agencies have different cultures. U.S. public-health agencies have historically been rooted in “open science”—the view that scientific collaborations should be encouraged globally, and that geopolitics shouldn’t constrain cooperation between well-meaning researchers. Little thought is typically given to the national-security implications of joint research. Even when confronted with credible information about the risks of their research partnerships, the public-health agencies often ignore them. Some in the open-science agencies refuse even to acknowledge that research can have national-security implications. But the issue can’t be wished away.
Some federal agencies do weigh the national-security implications of scientific research. The Energy Department’s national laboratories conduct both highly classified and open-science work. Constantly managing that balance takes experience. Plasma science can be applied to electricity production via nuclear fusion or it can be used to make thermonuclear weapons. Gene editing can cure debilitating genetic diseases or it can be used to create bioweapons.
Around 2017, the Energy Department’s national laboratories started having significant concerns about biosecurity with regard to China. A Chinese general who was head of the National Defense University in Beijing publicly declared an interest in using gene sequencing and editing to develop pathogenic bioweapons that would target specific ethnic groups, which may be the most evil idea I have ever encountered. Taking note, the Commerce Department ordered export restrictions of potentially dangerous biotechnology to China. But the NIH and NIAID refused to believe that there was any risk involved in collaborating with Chinese labs. Their indiscriminate commitment to open science blinds them to threats, even when a country like China is open about its intentions.
So while the public-health agencies increased funding and cooperation with China after 2017, the Energy Department asked Congress to restart a biosecurity effort at the national laboratories. The funding started flowing in December 2019, right before Covid began spreading across the U.S. As a result, the Energy Department, with its leadership in the human genome project and gene editing, was quickly able to help evaluate the novel coronavirus with computational biology and imaging. This work informed the rapid development of the Covid vaccines.
Compare the capabilities of the Energy Department’s national laboratories with the culture at the NIH. The latter was unwilling to acknowledge that China had admitted its interest in pathogenic bioweapons. After Covid hit, the agency instinctively jumped to defend China, rather than objectively analyzing the circumstances. The Energy Department investigated the facts without bias.
The public-health bureaucracy also needs better awareness of how much easier it is for bad actors to make bioweapons than to produce other weapons of mass destruction. It takes a national effort to make a nuclear weapon. A small group of biologists in a provincial laboratory could develop easily transmissible pathogens that can kill millions.
While it isn’t clear whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology was working directly with China’s military biology programs, both were definitely using the same U.S. gene-editing technology. And all the agencies were frequently briefed in 2020 that China was lying to the public about Covid. This should have spurred NIH scientists to ask whether China was telling the truth about its research.
The Chinese Communist Party has been known to steal intellectual property and lie about it doing so. Beijing doesn’t recognize the concept of independent scientific research conducted for the good of the world. The public-health bureaucracy and research scientists at the NIH and NIAID, enthralled as they are by the open-science concept, can’t be trusted to manage U.S. biosecurity. An issue of such magnitude should be in the hands of a government agency with a much more realistic view of China and the world.
Mr. Dabbar served as undersecretary of energy for science, 2017-21.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/cops-mad-ron-desantis-because-100000169.html
:cry:
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Chinese dissident destroyed by CCP activity and bribes in US
just as he was about to warn the US of CCP activity in'17:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/criminals-on-the-bench-ccp-linked-new-york-judge-ostragers-135-million-fine-to-crush-ccp-opposition/
paid off NY lawyers that have firms in China presumably to help them penetrate US business protect CCP interests in US etc.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/05/american-investors-bankrolling-china-ai-arms-race-report/?utm_medium=email&pnespid=6OV.CSRcP6Ue2KDGuG2zDM3d5hSvRINlP.K5xro0qB5m4s_4AYDa1xH3uOB9JUKujl4OCPeb
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-arrests-2-for-operating-secret-chinese-police-station-in-nyc_5200542.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-04-18&src_cmp=uschina-2023-04-18&utm_medium=email&est=qs7cAloCKIP6%2FijYyxGH64OCzfLsSH%2BNWdfPmqlu6MGIDvhHTczQrnrAxhNyztL6MX40
https://www.theepochtimes.com/doj-charges-40-ccp-officers-for-allegedly-targeting-us-residents-spreading-propaganda_5201037.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-04-18&src_cmp=uschina-2023-04-18&utm_medium=email&est=IgbhV551awcVkeIaKHJgpyhxQbIvJyLEBO5f0oG0xZxDNITdpZx4op6dTsGTvFowNplM
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3871449/chinese-ccp-invading-usa
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mtg-bares-fang-fangs-throws-house-meeting-chaos-over-swalwell-sexual-relationship-chinese
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She can be a really stupid twat sometimes, but I must say I loved that!
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She can be a really stupid twat sometimes, but I must say I loved that!
When a republican fights, it shocks everyone and reminds us just how pathetic most are.
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OL’ PRESIDENT TIKTOK… ALANA GOODMAN: TikTok Lobbyists Visited White House at Least 40 Times in Past Year
Executives at high-powered firms hired by TikTok for lobbying and strategic consulting visited the White House at least 40 times in the past year, according to official White House visitor records.
The Chinese social media platform and its parent company, ByteDance, are mounting a massive public relations blitz as lawmakers are seeking to ban the app due to national security, espionage, and data privacy concerns. ByteDance and TikTok have spent $13 million on federal lobbying since 2019 and hired heavyweight firms such as influential Democratic public relations shop SKDK.
Those hired guns have had the ear of the White House, the records show. Former Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, a TikTok lobbyist at Crossroads Strategies, visited the White House at least three times last year, most recently for an event on Dec. 21. Stephanie Leger Short, another TikTok lobbyist who works with Breaux, attended a June 23 meeting with White House adviser Mitch Landrieu. Breaux also met with White House official John Podesta last November.
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not hard to conclude this is needed ASAP
"Those hired guns have had the ear of the White House, the records show. Former
Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, a TikTok lobbyist at Crossroads Strategies, visited the White House at least three times last year, most recently for an event on Dec. 21. Stephanie Leger Short, another TikTok lobbyist who works with Breaux, attended a June 23 meeting with White House adviser Mitch Landrieu. Breaux also met with White House official John Podesta last November."
why can't we pay ex Chinese CCP to promote our propaganda data gathering machines in China?
wonder how much it costs to BUY an ex US Senator to work for a foreign enemy
Does he get pain in Yen? Or is the money funneled thru cryto?
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19607/communist-china-michigan
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-depth-us-starts-dismantling-the-ccps-overseas-mafia-apparatus_5241219.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-05-09&src_cmp=uschina-2023-05-09&utm_medium=email&est=kkkX%2BH2OqXXa1qi55iz7bfZZWjHI2owiCEa7cu6gU4cec3NmfIcAX0x13waoc3tHsEOP
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/biden-capitulates-to-china/?lctg=547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b9&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202023-05-12&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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".Biden Capitulates to China"
clearly we have China to overtake us
and we now engage from a position of extreme weakness
off the top of my head :
from many ccp spies in US
from economic - US corps sold us out for cheap labor and don't care same as Wall Street
from left policies making us weaker
from military leaders that let us down and are weak and corrupt
from debt ballooning to well over 30 trillion
from Universities bashing teaching their students to bash our own country
from a DNC that divides us and teaches us to hate one another
from protecting China as being source of corona
from weak State Department - name a single achievement of Blinken compared to
his failures - amazing he is not fired
and sent packing as a total failure
John McCain saw what a total loser this guy is .
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-texas-am-received-almost-500-million-in-grants-from-qatar/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=tipsheet&utm_term=members
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https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/hundreds-of-fighting-age-chinese
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Good substance in there.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/rep-mccaul-presses-blinken-for-answers-on-reported-pause-of-china-sanctions_5289382.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-05-25&src_cmp=uschina-2023-05-25&utm_medium=email&est=gunA63g0Ti0AbjaXwDGC3tMgoJU%2Fmzu6NpwPPNx8CVrnyqTSn106V4WpTaSYoL4misti
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https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/05/27/what-are-those-wiley-orientals-up-to/#more-303907
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https://twitter.com/DrLiMengYAN1/status/1664793460912844801
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The word "treason" comes to mind.
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The word "treason" comes to mind.
It is .
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/pentagon-announces-no-more-drag-shows-on-military-bases_5308745.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-06-03&src_cmp=uschina-2023-06-03&utm_medium=email&est=U%2FSFaiYQ4KtN3lUQp4WF2rWRTCZHVnw605lNUl2qa%2B%2FptVg8pivkaibPLGnK%2FgbgEKWc
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"Chinese spies arrested "?
link is to end of drag shows on military bases ....
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Whoops! My bad! :oops:
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/republicans-call-for-action-as-china-turns-us-into-hunting-ground-for-dissidents_5302581.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-06-04&src_cmp=uschina-2023-06-04&utm_medium=email&est=5bxwhx5zNrj6JwEIhW0De%2BZfBHsn6MzQwv1lce0h2Omejckys27wuiW%2F5nKDoPXzxZNp
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-new-us-ambassador-calls-on-compatriots-chinese-students-to-serve-the-motherland_5297202.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-06-04&src_cmp=uschina-2023-06-04&utm_medium=email&est=lwlv00wsKPufCOH4lvSLBdYb3DM%2BXGpcNKmSr37yHSP%2FaIb3CvQkn9HfkI%2BYPOJyefQj
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-sanctions-companies-training-chinese-pilots-helping-china-in-weapons-development_5332378.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-06-15&src_cmp=uschina-2023-06-15&utm_medium=email
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/ccp-leader-praises-bill-gates-at-china-meeting-first-american-friend-ive-met-in-beijing-this-year
:roll:
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/ccp-leader-praises-bill-gates-at-china-meeting-first-american-friend-ive-met-in-beijing-this-year
:roll:
They have to do a lot of planning for the next global pandemic.
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4170297/kafabe
Michael Yon
@MichaelYon
2 hours ago
KAFABE
Am at Newark airport watching the filthy information campaign. Any “tensions” with China are #kayfabe. #OGUS is owned by #CCP/ #WEF. The day will come when CCP/WEF dox the entire US intelligence and law enforcement community, or at least all those they want rid. Imagine every #DEA, #FBI, #CIA, everyone — doxed and targeted by those they refused to resist. Total unrestricted and unrestrained warfare.
JBS "Note Kayfabe explained here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kayfabe" ...
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https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/facts?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-ec1d720b-fcff-40f9-9922-e2c7b2dd4415
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I have updated the name of this thread to include "Invasion".
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4174184/invasion-clearly-sponsored-by-usa-ccp
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/14/republican-mark-green-alejandro-mayorkas/?pnespid=srNlFStOb6wRheXK9ynpHcONsRWqWpQpJ_Stzbp1vEBmGFJx0O.D28UBgN87Co0wFS.5uEpZ
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jun/14/chinese-may-be-inserting-military-operatives-throu/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=EQ%2FeexmGWnLExsz1TV0V37OmBPzxKes7mix2HmxmoUY2PWtF%2Bn88ABIVLN990ZvJ&bt_ts=1686758313923&fbclid=IwAR2TQO-1D80LcgboagDkh50dwzfCKqwrQroSwNv7fTtQCPJW7N_BTrL7KPE
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https://twitter.com/AbsoluteWithE/status/1671608513733312513
10,000 Chinese and counting:
https://thepostmillennial.com/over-10000-single-chinese-men-detained-at-us-border-from-october-to-now
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https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/4185291/biological-warfare-and-ogus-deeply-involved-with-ccp-https-twitter-com-drlimengyan1-status-167
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Is there a way the Chinese could fukk with us here?
https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/27/biden-battery-china-ccp/?pnespid=qLVrUyIWbr1B26PM_iqyApaXsgmrTZx5Kbik2Ot19UxmzL94uFHb0RDFndtIVzTfhWWDdMIH
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19757/china-saboteurs-us
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for fools:
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2023/07/06/china-has-had-intelligence-base-cuba-least-30-years/
What were supposedly hawks like Rumsfeld and Cheney thinking ?
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/ninth-circuit-greenlights-lawsuit-accusing-cisco-of-aiding-beijing-in-persecuting-falun-gong_5383363.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-07-10&src_cmp=uschina-2023-07-10&utm_medium=email
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https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/18/house-of-representatives-to-investigate-uc-berkeleys-ties-to-china/
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=9dbbb592e8cbe1e557916581fc93030f_64be7a63_6d25b5f&selDate=20230724
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mkZ28AiOF8
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I don't understand how someone can buy that much land and no one can know who it is .
An agent buying for someone else
what about deeds and other documents ?
what they are signed with a big X ?
Or LLC etc..........
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Life is tougher when we are stupid.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/exclusive-senators-sound-alarm-over-us-funding-to-chinese-biotech-firm-over-national-security-threats-5422221?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-07-26&src_cmp=uschina-2023-07-26&utm_medium=email
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interesting this is posted from a far left news site:
https://dnyuz.com/2023/07/29/u-s-hunts-chinese-malware-that-could-disrupt-american-military-operations/
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/2-us-navy-sailors-arrested-165633397.html
if found guilty .
in military not civilian court .
:wink:
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Firing squad works for me.
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why waste bullets
I am thinking hanging.
rope is cheaper and just use tree limb
:wink:
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An ugly issue hiding in plain sight here-- the ethnicity of the accused traitors.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73NMN8OEtzc&t=6s
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second
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/us/blackrock-msci-draw-congressional-scrutiny-for-china-investments-5438092?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-08-06&src_cmp=uschina-2023-08-06&utm_medium=email&est=pQjuOK5Astbe7Nj740m8bn9SgVwvYKeHxhRIu%2B30oGI8PMFgDA4ZorbywsCGcqxjlDZI
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More on the Chinese some of whom are certainly members of sleeper cells being trafficked into the US :
https://www.muckraker.com/articles/chinese-invasion-blueprint-exposed/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eyc6GPF24U&t=387s
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https://www.king.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sleeper-cells-likely-within-our-energy-grid-experts-warn-senator-king
I can only imagine there are probably hundreds if not thousands of sleeper cells in most industries in the US
And Biden laughs when asked anything serious
and gives middle finger to anyone would bring it up.
and before anyone stands up and points finger at me and calls me racist , I am sure many Americans are happy to take bribe and sell us out.
IT IS NOT ABOUT RACE ETC. blah blah blah....
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/newsom-funded-chinese-covid-lab-known-bidens-fda?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1733
https://twitter.com/THATJennCheng/status/1687663235049328640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1687663235049328640%7Ctwgr%5E562f3aa0d8edc10329158e402454dbe26bd25150%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fnewsom-funded-chinese-covid-lab-known-bidens-fda%3Futm_source%3Dutm_medium%3Demailutm_campaign%3D1733
Edited to add on 8/18:
Illegal lab: The discovery of an illegal lab in Fresno County, California, made headlines recently after county public health inspectors reported finding a facility in a warehouse containing unauthorized biological agents, bodily fluid samples, infectious diseases including COVID, and some 1,000 mice. The lab in Reedley did not have permission or permits to operate, but Prestige Biotech and Universal Meditch Inc. back in 2018 had the necessary permits from the health department to use live mice for testing. However, over the next several years, it appears that the facility at the warehouse was illegally expanded into a lab that engaged in conducting biological testing. Fresno authorities are also seeking to correct misinformation that has been reported regarding the lab, noting specifically that there is no evidence of the lab being connected to a foreign government. (MARC: I'm reading that last sentence as gaslighting)
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/china/us-to-increase-flights-to-and-from-china-5461218?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-08-13&src_cmp=mb-2023-08-13&utm_medium=email&est=emhtCpkrjdqLyNDqCD64P7CnOM0olKMBJqXif5Z8lSoOVdv1HV9mYUHEK0a0HC4uCv5A
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2023/08/extend-pentagons-ban-chinas-consumer-drones/389363/
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/16/exclusive-illegal-chinese-marijuana-grow-operations-taking-over-blue-state-leaked-memo-says/?pnespid=sOQ4VCEdbrlGxKnMvjOvE4qNoU_kW4ZuIrGz2_Zi9E1mygK3WCoxyP_lWepbN6dJ4gM0HALE
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https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/08/18/column-n2627206
I wonder what China would do.
It couldn't be worse than what they are already doing .
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More communication. The U.S. and Chinese commerce departments agreed to establish a new channel of communication, according to a statement from the Chinese Commerce Ministry. The move follows a meeting between U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing on Monday. The working group will aim to find solutions to commercial disputes and comprise deputy ministerial and bureau-level government officials from both countries as well as business representatives.
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12461985/Goldman-Sachs-bought-firms-Chinese-state-cash-2-5-BILLION-partnership-fund-invested-drones-AI-cloud-computing-supply-chains-despite-rock-bottom-relations-Beijing.html
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second
https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/31/gotion-ccp-michigan-battery-plant/?pnespid=7L9iGXhENPgHxOnJ_WvuDoLTsAnwDZF6cfbhke9oqgFms8v0hC65fw2bIPcSmkJ7H5O5Axk4
Q: If the plant is here, then what is the danger?
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https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/08/geopolitical-tension-china-would-hit-us-critical-technology-sectors-hard-new-study-shows/389931/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/broadway-star-suddenly-quits-us-musical-about-tiananmen-massacre-while-on-tour-in-china-5484723?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-09-02&src_cmp=uschina-2023-09-02&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=HlhdLO1YbQC1KTtlDuQGzLctfmod12OtvUpCv8upIrp3Iwl8VGIatE2sfp%2F9eYcZVYOn
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/3m-fined-6-5-million-for-secretly-funding-chinese-officials-overseas-trips-shopping-sprees-5481366?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-09-03&src_cmp=uschina-2023-09-03&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=uusl1%2F1lNJ8Sd2xzvuVepGVN9tUuZlCJqQpjc00wDxPlMVCzF9v9ufRBjWlcRx9aSxVs
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https://survival-situation.com/news/disturbing-california-biolab-shrouded-in-mystery-as-china-links-emerge/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-energy-committee-republicans-seek-review-of-fords-agreement-with-chinese-battery-maker-5486883?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-09-07&src_cmp=uschina-2023-09-07&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=jHMZHXvXN90qaVP8V2btzKBiUw3SyehOcBPNHnvJ4hwGyVpcMODCLOV27SoYZa4v15BO
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https://themessenger.com/news/china-is-covertly-targeting-and-recruiting-us-military-talent-to-train-its-troops-general-warns
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/12/ccp-gotion-officials-electric-vehicles/?pnespid=puB6DzkdZbNExv7aoSq2D4DdtErxTMAuffClyvR1tw1m786LyutzLhp0wlOUZATZRfkbVu4W
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/13/dem-rep-walks-away-as-shes-peppered-with-questions-about-her-nda-with-ccp-linked-battery-company/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=v7plFD0dLbpDw.DMtGSoAp_NvkqoCIorfPSwm7I38ABm2H91.HbAMv9NGzjxAuqzX7MAjuET
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second
https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/13/china-committee-illegal-biolab-california/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=q6s_UXkcKK4G3vzQ_iq1EZiStUvwDZ5lKuW6kOVosUdmbe9EC8.AFExl4YKcoDAjgeztuSbT
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TikTok Employees Say Executive Moves to U.S. Show China Parent’s Influence
U.S. staff have raised questions internally about recent personnel transfers from ByteDance
By
Georgia Wells
Follow
Updated Sept. 27, 2023 12:00 am ET
TikTok has spent the past three years trying to convince U.S. lawmakers it can operate independently in this country from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. After recent personnel moves, some employees aren’t so sure.
Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the U.S. from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.
The ByteDance executives have taken on roles overseeing swaths of TikTok’s advertising business, human resources, monetization, business marketing and products related to advertising and e-commerce initiatives. Some have brought teams from Beijing.
The moves have concerned some U.S.-based TikTok employees, who have complained internally to high-level TikTok managers, according to current and former employees familiar with the discussions. The TikTok employees say they are worried that the appointments show ByteDance plays a greater role in TikTok’s operations than TikTok has disclosed publicly.
One employee earlier this year reported the leadership transfers to the staff of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, where TikTok has an office, hoping the Republican’s team would investigate, according to people familiar with the complaint.
A spokeswoman for Cruz didn’t respond to requests for comment.
A spokesman for TikTok said the company hasn’t played down its relationship with ByteDance. He said in a large, global organization, it isn’t uncommon for employees to work on different products or in multiple locations over the course of their careers.
TikTok has faced scrutiny from U.S. authorities over fears that the Chinese government could pressure it for data about its users or use the app to spread propaganda, concerns TikTok has repeatedly denied.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Can TikTok separate itself from ByteDance? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
In 2020, the Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok downloads in the U.S. The Biden administration called for TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell their stakes in it. TikTok has fought both administrations’ demands, while working to show it is independent from its Chinese owner. The financier and influential Republican political donor Jeff Yass, who through his Susquehanna International Group owns a big stake in ByteDance, has also worked to fend off a U.S. ban. “The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe,” Yass has told The Wall Street Journal.
TikTok established regional headquarters outside China, including in Culver City, Calif., and forged a partnership with Oracle called Project Texas to store user data in the U.S. and monitor the app’s algorithm. Part of the Project Texas pitch to lawmakers is that the setup lets TikTok operate independently from ByteDance.
TikTok television ads have tried to distinguish it from its Chinese roots by featuring all-American characters. One tells the story of “Patriotic Kenny,” an 80-year-old military veteran who was left stranded when his American-flag decorated mobility scooter broke down. TikTok users rallied and helped raise money for a new one, according to the ad.
TikTok ads have sought to ease concern that the Chinese government could pressure it for data about its users. PHOTO: NATHAN HOWARD/BLOOMBERG NEWS
And in 2021, TikTok gave some new hires instructions that explained how to distance TikTok from ByteDance in the media, according to documents viewed by the Journal.
“Downplay the parent company ByteDance,” one document read. “Downplay the China association,” said another. The documents were reported last year by Gizmodo.
The spokesman for TikTok said the instructions were never a company policy.
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second
This Ford vs. GM Feud Could Shape the Future of EVs in America
Biden administration’s decision on $7,500 tax credit could determine China’s role in U.S. electric-vehicle industry
By
Andrew Duehren
Follow
Sept. 27, 2023 5:30 am ET
GM, which makes GMC Hummer electric vehicles, has pushed to prevent licensing arrangements with Chinese companies. PHOTO: EMILY ELCONIN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
In June, Ford Motor F -1.05%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Jim Farley pitched visiting members of Congress on the company’s plans for a $3.5 billion battery factory. Using Chinese battery technology at the Michigan plant, he argued, was a smart way for the U.S. to catch up with China’s expertise.
Later the same day at the General Motors GM -0.31%decrease; red down pointing triangle headquarters, CEO Mary Barra and her team had a different message for the lawmakers: Ford’s plans could be the harbinger of Chinese domination of U.S. car manufacturing.
At stake in the meetings, described by people familiar with them, was more than just pride between the old crosstown rivals. It was also the price many Americans could pay for their electric vehicles in the next 10 years—and how the automakers would invest billions of dollars to sell EVs in the U.S.
The pair are lobbying over the terms of a $7,500 tax credit for consumers who purchase new electric vehicles. Starting next year, buyers can’t use the credit on cars that contain battery components from any source that the U.S. deems a “foreign entity of concern,” a vague term meant to reduce American reliance on Chinese batteries and materials.
President Biden is expected to decide this fall how strictly to enforce that requirement. If the rules are too tough, few EVs—if any—will qualify for the tax credit, potentially leaving Americans without that incentive to switch from gasoline-powered cars. A loose read on the rules could invite blowback from Republicans and other China critics.
Ford, with its plans to license Chinese technology to make cheaper, iron-based batteries in Michigan, has lobbied for a more flexible interpretation of the “foreign entity” rule. If its planned batteries aren’t eligible for the car-buyer subsidy, Ford executives have indicated they could scale back the investment; on Monday, the company paused construction of the new battery plant.
“It would be absurd to classify Ford or its fully owned subsidiary as a foreign entity, much less one of concern. We’re Ford, and we’re all-in on America,” Chris Smith, Ford’s chief government affairs officer, said.
GM isn’t planning investments with Chinese battery firms—and could see Ford gain a critical technological and cost advantage in the EV race if its deal goes forward. GM executives and lobbyists have called for a strict “foreign entity of concern” rule that would prevent such licensing arrangements.
“This is not about GM vs. Ford,” a GM spokeswoman said. She said GM wants clarity and for the rules to follow the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the new tax-credit requirements.
Striking UAW members are calling for high wages, while Ford, GM and Stellantis say they need to keep labor costs down to invest in EV production. PHOTO: BILL PUGLIANO/GETTY IMAGES
Robbie Orvis, a senior director at Energy Innovation, a think tank on climate issues, said the tax credit—and the “foreign entity of concern” rule—will shape how many electric cars are sold in the U.S. in the next 10 years.
“This is the big missing piece that a lot of us are waiting to see,” he said.
Ford’s big bet
The biggest American automakers see electric vehicles as the future of the industry. Striking United Auto Workers are demanding high wages and benefits, while Ford, GM and Stellantis say they need to keep labor costs down to invest in EV production.
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Higher costs remain a significant barrier to EV sales for many American buyers. The average price of a new electric vehicle was $53,469 in July, higher than the $48,334 average for gasoline-powered cars, according to Kelley Blue Book data. So automakers see the $7,500 EV tax credit as crucial to get more price-conscious consumers to make the switch.
A Treasury spokeswoman said the Biden administration’s incentives would help U.S. automakers be global leaders.
Battery charging. Giant touchscreens. Semi-autonomous driving. EVs have become computers on wheels. WSJ’s Joanna Stern took three of the leading cars on a road trip and then leased the best one. Photo illustration: Annie Zhao/The Wall Street Journal
“The Inflation Reduction Act is increasing our energy security by encouraging investments in America,” she said. “We will continue to assess and respond to any national security concerns associated with both international and domestic supply chains.”
Some automakers are holding off on investing in their EV supply chains until they see what Chinese materials or technology are allowed under the final rules of the tax credit, people familiar with their plans said.
Ford hoped to get ahead by licensing technology from China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., known as CATL, to make lithium-iron-phosphate batteries at an industrial scale in the U.S. for the first time. They are much cheaper than other alternatives, reducing the production cost of the car. Ford has planned to use them in versions of the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning.
Ford structured the deal with CATL, the largest battery maker in the world, as a licensing agreement, rather than a joint venture. The U.S. company will fully control the subsidiary that owns the Michigan-based factory, paying royalties to CATL for the use of their manufacturing technology. CATL declined to comment.
China’s share of the lithium-ion battery supply chain in 2022
RAW-MATERIAL SOURCING
0%
25
50
75
100
Graphite (mined)
China
Rest of world
Nickel (refined)
Lithium
Manganese (mined)
Cobalt
CHEMICAL REFINING AND PRODUCTION
Spherical graphite
Manganese refining
Cobalt refining
Synthetic graphite
Nickel sulphate
Lithium chemical
ANODE AND CATHODE PRODUCTION
Anodes
Cathodes
BATTERY-CELL PRODUCTION
0%
25
50
75
100
Source: Benchmark Mineral Intelligence
The hot seat
But licensing Chinese technology has drawn political blowback, including from Michigan Republicans. Several House committees have opened probes or held hearings on the deal.
“We should be using taxpayers’ dollars to fund American innovation and ingenuity to be leading in these areas, not lagging behind by decades and subsidizing the [Chinese Communist Party],” said Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Mich.).
Ford has defended the plan by pointing to the jobs and advanced technology it will bring to the U.S.
GM executives have told the Biden administration that if consumers can use the tax credit to buy cars that CATL helps Ford make, GM and other automakers would be at a competitive disadvantage, people familiar with the conversations said. They would feel pressure to strike their own deals with Chinese firms, undercutting Washington’s goal of distancing the auto industry from China, the GM executives have warned.
During a trip to Washington in July, Ford’s Farley tried to contain the furor. At what an attendee said was a “tense” meeting in a Capitol Hill office, Farley faced a barrage of questions from Michigan Republicans. The lawmakers wanted to know how many CATL employees would work in the plant and whether Ford employees would learn to understand the CATL technology, people familiar with the meeting said.
Farley’s answers didn’t satisfy many of the Republican attendees. Rep. John James (R., Mich.) has proposed legislation that would prevent Ford’s deal and others like it from meeting the requirements for federal car-buying subsidies.
CATL, which had a booth at an event in Beijing this month, is the largest battery maker in the world. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS
Biden’s conundrum
Ford’s planned Michigan battery factory, which would create jobs in a swing state, is in many ways the type of investment the Biden administration is hoping to facilitate in the U.S. White House officials considered having Biden attend the announcement of the factory in February.
But as White House officials learned more about Ford’s intention to work with CATL, they opted against sending the president to the event, people familiar with the plans said.
Some Biden administration officials worry that allowing intellectual property-sharing, as Ford is planning, would open a backdoor for Chinese firms to dominate the U.S. battery industry, which they see as a potential national-security risk, according to people familiar with their thinking.
White House officials also are wary of upsetting Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who has blasted the Ford deal and the administration’s handling of the tax subsidies he helped write into law. Manchin said in an interview he would support any automakers who sued the administration if the new rules for the EV tax credit allowed deals such as Ford’s.
“There will be lawsuits if there are companies being damaged by how they’re interpreting and they’re making investments here in the country,” he said.
Other administration officials think barring any EV with Chinese ties from qualifying for the tax credit could backfire, causing automakers to quit trying to follow the rules for the credit entirely. These officials also think the U.S. can best catch up by learning from Chinese firms, an argument Ford executives have made in meetings with White House officials.
“All sides want to rid the U.S. of excess reliance on China,” said Jennifer Harris, who worked on clean-energy supply chains at the White House until March. “In some areas, the shortest, surest path may take some Chinese know-how up front, confined and cabined.”
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Is the competition between Ford and GM a net positive or negative on the rollout of EVs in the U.S.? Join the conversation below.
Some Michigan Democrats have pushed for the administration to support Ford’s plans and protect the roughly 2,500 jobs Ford says it will bring to their state. In a letter sent to Biden administration officials Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sept. 8, Ford’s general counsel warned the company could scale back its plans if its batteries don’t qualify under the EV tax credit rules.
“This will mean fewer U.S. jobs,” wrote Steven Croley, Ford’s counsel, according to a copy of the letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The UAW slammed Ford’s decision this week to pause construction of the plant.
The “foreign entity of concern” rule won’t only apply to the factories that manufacture electric vehicles and their batteries, but also, starting in 2025, the companies that mine and process the raw materials that go into them.
GM earlier this year invested $650 million in Lithium Americas, which is aiming to open a mine in Nevada. GM became Lithium America’s largest shareholder, overtaking Ganfeng, a Chinese company that still owns 9.4% of the company. GM said it plans to invest further in Lithium Americas, diluting other holdings.
“At the end of the day, if you’re the U.S., you want all of this moved out of China,” said David Whiston, an auto analyst at Morningstar Research. “But saying and doing it are two different things.”
Write to Andrew Duehren at andrew.duehren@wsj.com
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/chinese-hackers-stole-60000-emails-from-state-department-officials-5500561?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-09-29&src_cmp=uschina-2023-09-29&utm_medium=email&cta_utm_source=China&est=zgpJtCnsLnh%2BJVMuCI%2BWaDCBesX8w8MxALaC4I7X0qkXtQ%2FEk%2FBfAZT8znvqyo1AfPFA
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... story keeps getting weirder.
https://californiaglobe.com/fl/reedley-lab-owner-tied-to-ccp/?fbclid=IwAR1C4pkXT9bVkn-8cdcu3TSKs576v5P_m8H_YVTsF-epUO0gMU0dExzg0AY
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:-o :-o :-o
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US Marines holding the Chinese Flag
https://twitter.com/i/status/1725397468727456115
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Wonder what the protocol was we our Presidents have visited there.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/
Osama bin Laden Is Duping Young People on TikTok from the Grave
Jim Geraghty
November 16, 2023
On the menu today: News that TikTok users are approvingly quoting a 2002 letter from al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and insisting that bin Laden makes a lot of legitimate points, is the sort of thing that makes you wish gullible young people would go back to eating Tide Pods. You might have thought that the minds of America’s young people would not be so malleable that they could perceive one of the most notorious mass murderers of Americans in history as a justifiable critic of American policies, but here we are. For those of us of a certain age, this development is a difficult reminder that the unforgettable events of our younger years, the ones that shaped us and the world we live in, are just dry pages in a history book to the younger generation. That creates a giant vacuum, a big blank space for reinterpretation.
Why Osama bin Laden Is the Latest Hot New TikTok Influencer
As I said earlier this autumn, because TikTok is basically a way for the Chinese government to suck data out of your phone, and it has been characterized as “the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds,” I don’t think anyone should be on it.
TikTok’s algorithm is also a good way for the Chinese government to put whatever message it wants in front of America’s young people. And this week, the hot new message is: “Osama bin Laden had a lot of valid arguments, and was unfairly demonized by the U.S. government.”
Remember, someone who was in kindergarten in 2001 is 27 years old today. Today’s teenagers and early-to-mid-20-somethings have no memory of the 9/11 attacks, and the long, difficult global war against al-Qaeda that followed. They probably do not recognize the names “Mohammad Atta,” “Mullah Omar,” “Ayman al-Zawahari,” “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” “Ahmad Shah Massoud,” “Pervez Musharraf,” “John O’Neill,” “Father Mychal Judge,” “Todd Beamer,” or perhaps even “Colin Powell” or “Donald Rumsfeld.” Names and terms like “USS Cole,” “Northern Alliance,” “Tora Bora,” “the shoe bomber,” and “the 7/7 attacks,” have little or no meaning to them. Telling them that the DHS threat level has been raised from yellow to orange probably doesn’t mean much to them, either. They likely have only the vaguest idea of why opening an envelope and finding white powder would be so ominous. To them, the Transportation Security Administration has always existed.
If you’re roughly 30 or older, I apologize for starting your day with a flood of memories and probably making you feel old. But we should keep in mind that, never mind the attacks themselves, most of today’s teenagers likely have no memory of the U.S. Navy SEAL operation that killed bin Laden. To them, he’s always been dead, always been history — like the Challenger explosion to the Millennials, the JFK assassination to most of Generation X, or the Great Depression to the Baby Boomers.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we wanted more than anything to give our children a world where they would not live in fear of al-Qaeda attacks. We’ve done that, and largely left al-Qaeda on the ash heap of history. And apparently bin Laden and al-Qaeda are so forgotten . . . that someone can come along and paint an absurdly sympathetic portrait of one of the worst mass murderers in modern history, and America’s extremely online young people will nod along in agreement.
Since the beginning of the Hamas crisis, TikTok has been flooded with pro-Palestinian messages and arguments excusing the actions of Hamas and demonizing Israel. Jeff Morris Jr. noticed anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian high-school walkouts occurring and wondered how and why American teenagers had become so enamored with the Palestinian cause, right after Hamas committed a spectacularly bloody massacre. He noticed that once he engaged with one post, “My entire feed became aggressively anti-Israel. It was as if I was placed in an AB test variant and was told to see this war with Israel being the evil side.”
TikTok insists it does not tweak its algorithm to promote certain viewpoints, and that it opposes antisemitism. One reason for suspicion is that in Chinese state-run media, you can find lots of comments comparing Israelis to Nazis and proclaiming that “Hitler truly knew the Jews” . . . leaving us wondering just how accurately the managers of TikTok define antisemitism.
In this environment, a surprisingly high number of TikTok users reading and reacting to a letter from Osama bin Laden concluded that the most notorious terrorist in American history wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
Newsweek:
A decades-old document allegedly written by Osama bin Laden and titled “Letter to America” recently went viral on TikTok, with some young Americans believing that the al-Qaeda founder made valid points about their own country.
The two-page document, which was published by The Guardian, is a letter Bin Laden wrote in 2002 as a polemic against the U.S. and an explanation of the ideology that led him to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. . . .
“It’s wild and everyone should read it,” said one TikTok user, warning that the letter had left her “very disillusioned” and “confused.” Another user talked of having an “existential crisis” after reading the document and having her entire viewpoint on life changed by it. . . .
“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq,” bin Laden wrote. “This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”
Realizing that it was the source for most of these nascent TikTok terrorism historians, The Guardian deleted the 2002 letter, but you can still find it here and here, and various excerpts of it in books here and here; his letters from 1994 to 1998 here; his 1998 interview with John Miller here; and his bookshelf here. (Also enjoy this ABC News headline from 2016: “New Osama Bin Laden Letters Show Paranoid Micromanager in Hiding.”) I actually think taking down the letter from websites is a bad idea because it will set off a million and one conspiracy theories. Osama bin Laden’s letters — making absurdly unconvincing arguments that his acts of terrorism were justified — are a part of history just like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a part of history. That is to say, they’re a terrible part of history, a demonstration of how evil men justify their evil. Taking them off the internet isn’t going to make Islamist extremism or any other variety of evil go away.
Bin Laden always believed that he was so persuasive, and so self-evidently right and justified, that if the American people would just read his writings and listen to his words, we would realize that we’d been the evil villains all along. One letter written in the early Obama years made bin Laden sound like he was running for president on a populist platform against greedy financial elites:
Your current president [Obama] warns you now about the enormity of capital control and it has a cycle whereby it devours humanity when it is devoid of the precepts of God’s law (Shari’a). The tyranny of the control of capital by large companies has harmed your economy, as it did ours, and that was my motivation for this talk. Tens of millions of you are below the poverty line, millions have lost their homes, and millions have lost their jobs to mark the highest average unemployment in 60 years. Your financial system in its totality was about to collapse within 48 hours had not the administration reverted to using taxpayer’s money to rescue the vultures by using the assets of the victims. . . .
Even the devil can quote scripture for his own purposes; the fact that bin Laden criticizes the bailouts doesn’t mean that the al-Qaeda mastermind was the good guy or had valid arguments. The guy planned and cheered the hijacking of passenger airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers and the deliberate murder of 2,977 people. Everything else is window dressing.
Robert Frost once said, “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” What we’re seeing in the recent, “Wow, bin Laden made a lot of good points” phenomenon is Americans who will not take their own side in a war with people who are hell-bent on killing them.
There is something like self-loathing at work in our culture, a mentality that refuses to accept the contentions that we are good and worth protecting. This is a good time for us to continue what started Tuesday: to declare that nothing justifies the deliberate murder of civilians, to insist that we and our allies are good and worthy of defense and preservation, and to call out evil, and make sure that it meets up with the consequences of its actions, good and hard.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/nyu-student-owns-6-million-132504772.html
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https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/02/biden-admin-cbp-chinese-illegal-migrants/
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https://nypost.com/2024/01/08/news/us-navy-sailor-sentenced-to-27-months-in-prison-for-selling-military-secrets-to-china/
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second
https://www.vermilionchina.com/p/the-chinese-soldier-trained-by-americans
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinese-communist-party-billionaire-secretly-purchased-200k-acres-of-us-land-a-decade-ago-sparking-bipartisan-outrage/ar-AA1mVOFF?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=f027d40c8d514c13aa7c3fefc62f4437&ei=21
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flow of American capital to the Chinese militaryindustrial complex.
ILLUSTRATION BY LINAS GARSYS
No better enemy
America continues to empower its adversaries
By Clifford D. May
Seven years ago this month, then-Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that the $150 billion in sanctions relief the Obama administration was providing Iran’s rulers would — to a greater or lesser extent — fund terrorism.
“I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” he said in an interview with CNBC.
He added: “We are confident that this will not result in an increase somehow in the threat to any partner or any friend in the region.”
His confidence, we now know, was misplaced.
The dollars the U.S. put into the pockets of Iran’s rulers has been spent to supply weapons to Hamas, Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Outside the region, Iran’s rulers are providing armed drones to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, which he’s using to slaughter Ukrainians. In Iran, the regime has increased its persecution of dissidents — not least women.
Then-President Barack Obama enriched Iran’s rulers to induce them to agree to his 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which he claimed would stop them from developing nuclear weapons.
At best, the Iran nuclear agreement might have slightly slowed that nation’s progress toward the goal while it worked on missiles capable of delivering nukes anywhere in the world and, as noted above, funded Tehran’s proxies.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement. He brought economic pressure to bear on Tehran for a couple of years. That did not cause Iran’s rulers to abandon their nuclear aspirations, but it did limit the support they could provide their terrorist friends and family.
President Biden resumed sanctions relief. He has added $50 billion — a lowball estimate — to Iran’s coffers so far. His initial aim was to negotiate a deal that was “longer and stronger” than the nuclear agreement under Mr. Obama, but it soon became obvious that he was willing to settle for one that was shorter and weaker.
Iran’s rulers have shown no interest. Instead, they have expressed their hatred toward America many times in many ways.
Iran is not the only adversary of America that Americans have been empowering. In November, Xi Jinping, the mightiest ruler of China since Mao Zedong, visited San Francisco, where he dined with business executives who paid $2,000 a plate for the privilege and gave him a standing ovation. He told them what they wanted to hear: “We are in an era of challenges and changes. It is also an era of hope. The world needs China and the United States to work together for a better future.”
To his comrades at home, Mr. Xi has delivered a different message: China’s “struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.”
Matthew Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser and currently chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has been researching the ways Americans have been helping Mr. Xi in this contest.
“The scale of global power is beginning to tip towards China in part because of the leverage we are giving them,” he said in testimony last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“U.S. companies and investment funds have helped to underwrite and modernize China’s military and intelligence apparatus. Americans usually don’t invest with the intent to hurt the U.S., but that is what is happening here regardless.”
He added: “U.S. companies, financial institutions, and investment funds have — sometimes inadvertently, sometimes carelessly — helped underwrite and expedite the modernization of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s high-tech surveillance police state.”
Insufficiently appreciated, both on Wall Street and in Washington, is that under Chinese law and the “military-civil fusion” policy of the Chinese Communist Party, no Chinese company is private or independent.
And even Chinese companies with transparent military ties have “forged partnerships with U.S. universities, effectively transforming these bastions of learning into outposts of the Chinese government’s technological ambitions.”
Mr. Pottinger predicted: “Left unregulated, such partnerships will contribute to the [People’s Liberation Army’s] modernization in ways we won’t fully understand until those capabilities are used against Americans at home and on distant battlefields.”
Americans are assisting China in the war of ideas, too. One obvious example: Investors in ByteDance, parent company of the social media platform TikTok — which propagates Chinese Communist Party messages and memes to tens of millions of Americans — include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Susquehanna International Group.
As Mr. Pottinger told Congress: “Publicly available Chinese government documents also directly link ByteDance to the Chinese government’s surveillance state, including at least five Chinese surveillance companies … implicated by the U.S. government in the CCP’s severe repression of the ethnic Uyghur people.”
The Treasury Department does have a blacklist meant to limit the flow of American capital to the Chinese militaryindustrial complex. As Mr. Pottinger reported, however, “this tool has barely been used since it was created more than three years ago.”
He ended his testimony with five recommendations to stem the flow of U.S. investment and American technological innovations that Beijing will utilize to enhance the military and intelligence capabilities it deploys in its “struggle and contest with Western countries.”
It would be helpful for Congress to adopt them.
More broadly, I’d suggest pondering a quote attributed to Lenin: “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”
Were this communist revolutionary still alive — he died 100 years ago this month — he might add with satisfaction that today’s capitalists are going further than he anticipated: They are investing in and transferring rope-making technology to their adversaries.
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Posting in this thread as well because of Ed's discussion of how the Chinese use the Cartels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwU8KcUm5o&t=2s
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https://www.vermilionchina.com/p/unwitting-americans-support-the-chinese?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=570930&post_id=141040436&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&utm_medium=email
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Made threats, cyberstalked.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/01/26/conviction-for-threatening-supporter-of-democracy-in-china/
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Very glad to see LE arrest, the prosecutor to prosecute and get the conviction! Hope we can find out what the sentence is to be.
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/31/politics/china-hacking-infrascture-fbi-director-christopher-wray/index.html
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I wonder if we are doing the same to us.
Probably with no where near what they have been doing to us
as a side thought:
We need to prepare for likely quantum computers and we need to get to that end first!
who ever gets there first wins the world if it can be applied in useful ways.
It has to be us.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jan/31/list-of-chinese-military-linked-firms-in-us-surges/
:x
The LEFT too worried about McCarthyism, Red Scare ?
We should be worried and taking real action.
This is worse, far worse then the 50s.
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The LEFT too worried about McCarthyism, Red Scare ?
Not where Russia is concerned as they are now evil incarnate and Trump the supposed patsy.
The political expediency embraced by the left--remember Hillary's "reset" button?--is a sight to behold.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/los-angeles-port-head-says-chinese-cranes-pose-security-risk/ar-BB1iJ3Kh?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=92684fee76df475a888a88036a10938e&ei=14
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Will China Drive Its Electric Cars In From Mexico?
A loophole in the USMCA makes it possible to avoid U.S. tariffs by assembling vehicles in North America.
By Connor Pfeiffer
March 5, 2024 5:22 pm ET
WSJ
Outside this city, 150 miles south of the Texas border and in the shadow of the Sierra de Santa Catarina, is a cactus-dotted field. If all goes well, this unassuming site will be home to Tesla’s Giga Mexico, which could become the world’s largest electric-vehicle factory. The project promises thousands of jobs and as much as $15 billion in investment from Tesla and its suppliers. It is also catching the attention of Chinese competitors.
Mexico’s second-largest metropolitan area is seeing a near-shoring boom because of its proximity to the U.S., competitive labor costs and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. The vacancy rate for industrial real estate is just over 1% and total capacity is up 40% since 2020. But easy access to the American market hasn’t brought only U.S. and other Western companies like Tesla and Unilever. It’s also attracting Chinese businesses like Hisense and Yanfeng.
Thanks to the Trump administration, the USMCA carries important protections against China’s unfair economic practices, including an opt-out clause if any party concludes a trade agreement with a “nonmarket economy,” as well as regional content rules requiring that a car and its components come substantially from USMCA member countries. But Beijing’s heavy state investment in its EV industry could enable Chinese companies to exploit gaps in the current rules.
Imported Chinese cars already make up 20% of Mexican auto sales, and Chinese sales are growing rapidly after the Mexican government suspended tariffs on EVs through September. But the real prize for Chinese companies is to the north—last year, almost 12 times as many light vehicles were sold in the U.S. as in the Mexican market.
From Monterrey, Chinese companies can get EVs to the U.S. market at a much lower tariff cost than if they shipped directly from China. American trade law applies only a 2.5% tariff on auto imports from Mexico that don’t comply with the USMCA’s automobile rules of origin because they get a substantive portion of their components from outside states party to the deal. With all the money Beijing pumps into its EV sector, this is still a good deal for Chinese companies. A BYD Seal made in China retails for 12% less than a Tesla Model 3 in Mexico. With that kind of price advantage, a Mexican subsidiary of a Chinese automaker could manufacture an electric vehicle with a battery and other components from China and export it to the U.S. competitively even after paying the tariff. If a Chinese automaker brought enough of its supply chain to Mexico—including battery production—its cars could even meet regional content requirements and avoid American tariffs altogether.
The influx of Chinese investment over the past three years came up in nearly every conversation with American and Mexican business leaders on my recent trip here. Recognizing growing Chinese interest, local authorities have begun to provide investment materials in Mandarin, and consulting firms involved in near-shoring are hiring staff who understand Chinese business. Several major Chinese auto-parts suppliers have already set up shop, and the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times has touted Mexico as a “hot spot” for Chinese EV investment. It is only a matter of time before one of China’s automakers joins Tesla here.
In 2023 Mexico was America’s largest trading partner for the first time in history. Total goods trade with USMCA partners is almost triple the U.S. trade relationship with China. Protecting this free-trade area must be at the top of the economic agenda, especially as adversaries like Beijing seek to reap its benefits.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party expressed concern about this problem last year in a bipartisan letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Her response was that the administration is looking into it as part of a much-delayed review of the Trump China tariffs. Mexican-origin vehicles, however, likely aren’t within the scope of that review.
When I asked a group of Monterrey business leaders and government officials about the possibility of a Chinese EV manufacturer circumventing USMCA content requirements, they all agreed it is a concern and that the U.S. should raise the tariff. For them, the regional content rules give manufacturers an incentive to build their supply chains in North America, so deliberate noncompliance by Chinese companies would also hurt Mexico because the firms would source many of their components from Asia. Ms. Tai should take their advice and address this issue head-on.
Congress can also help by strengthening American trade tools. It could pass legislation to ensure that Chinese firms can’t evade duties by moving operations to other countries. The same could apply for Chinese subsidies of production in third countries, which aren’t currently considered in trade investigations.
As for the possibility of USMCA-compliant Chinese EVs flooding the market, the U.S., Mexico and Canada all have something to lose and should be proactive in developing a joint response. The U.S. should take a tough line to defend American competitiveness—but a unilateral response that violates the USMCA would be a nonstarter. Not only would it damage the most important U.S. trade relationship; it would also undermine efforts to address Mexico’s continuing unilateral violations of the agreement in the energy and agriculture sectors. (Mexico denies breaching the USMCA.)
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken a cavalier approach to economic relations with the U.S. to advance his statist agenda, and President Biden is letting him get away with it. This will make negotiations around Chinese investment difficult, especially with Mexico’s campaign season under way.
In Monterrey, however, I found Mexicans across business, government and civil society who value their country’s relationship with the U.S. Their goodwill toward the partnership between our two nations is a source of strength and opportunity amid growing threats from overseas.
Tesla’s Elon Musk recently said that without trade barriers, China’s state-backed electric vehicles would “demolish” their competitors in the West. If what’s happening in Monterrey is any indication, the battleground is already being set. The U.S. needs to get serious about Chinese EVs sooner rather than later.
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(1) BIPARTISAN BILL TO DISRUPT MEDICINE SUPPLY CHAIN: According to people familiar with the operations of medicine and precursor producer WuXi AppTec, the bipartisan BIOSecure Act will disrupt supply chains for critical medications.
Public disclosures show that WuXi AppTec works with the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies.
Why It Matters: Ongoing shortages of key medicine and medical devices would very likely be worsened by lawmakers targeting Chinese suppliers like WuXi AppTec. U.S. producers are reliant on Chinese and Indian labs for medicines and precursors, and China cutting off exports to the U.S. in response to the BIOSecure Act could end up to 80% of key medicine precursor imports. – R.C.
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China’s harbor cranes have odd electronics attached to them we are told to pay no attention to:
‘Clearly Overlooked This’: Probe Finds Strange Communication Devices On Chinese Cranes In US Ports
Jake Smith on March 7, 2024
A congressional investigation has discovered strange communication equipment on Chinese-built cargo cranes at U.S seaports, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
Rather than building them domestically at potentially higher costs, the U.S. relies heavily on Chinese-built cargo cranes that are relatively cheap to produce and equip at seaports across the country. The congressional probe discovered that several of these cranes, built by Chinese mega-manufacturer ZMPC, contain communications devices that were not requested or don’t appear to support standard operations, heightening existing espionage concerns, according to the WSJ.
U.S. intelligence has warned that Chinese cranes – equipped with an array of sensors and equipment – could be exploited by Beijing, as part of China’s larger effort to disrupt national security through several fronts. Beijing continues to insist the U.S.’ national security concerns about Chinese-built cranes are “entirely paranoia” and constitute “[an abuse of] national power to obstruct normal economic and trade cooperation,” according to the WSJ.
“[Beijing] is looking for every opportunity to collect valuable intelligence and position themselves to exploit vulnerabilities by systematically burrowing into America’s critical infrastructure — including in the maritime sector,” Republican Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the WSJ. “The United States has clearly overlooked this threat for far too long.”
Some of the devices discovered through the probe included over a dozen cellular modems on crane components at one U.S. port and a modem at a server room at another port, according to the WSJ. It isn’t unusual that such equipment would be found in these ports, as it’s often used to monitor and track operations remotely, but several ports with ZMPC cranes didn’t even ask for that capability.
One port told Congress in December they were aware such modems were installed on cranes but did not know why they were there, according to the WSJ.
“We are unsure who installed the modems, as they were on the cranes when we first saw them in China,” the port told the House Homeland Security Committee in a December letter. The port explained in the letter that the modems were believed to be installed in 2017, around the time the cranes were being built in China before delivery to the U.S.; the modems were removed in October 2023.
“We have found, I would say, openings, vulnerabilities, that are there by design,” Rear Adm. John Vann, leader of the Coast Guard cyber command, told Congress during a Homeland Security Committee hearing in late February, noting that there have not yet been any detections of “malware or Trojan horse-type software.”
“Our ports proactively work with the U.S. Coast Guard, other federal law enforcement, and private sector experts to mitigate risks through inspections and defensive measures,” Cary Davis, CEO of the American Association of Port Authorities, said in a statement on Thursday. “This previous incident is actually a positive case study in cyber defense and domain awareness.”
In a separate letter sent last week, the Homeland Security Committee told ZMPC that the unexplained equipment does not “contribute to the operation of the (ship-to-shore) cranes or maritime infrastructure and is not part of any existing contract between ZPMC and the receiving U.S. maritime port,” according to the WSJ. The letter noted that several of ZMPC’s cranes were built at a base on the Changxing island of Shanghai, adjacent to a Chinese naval shipbuilding yard.
The Homeland Security Committee also told ZMPC it was aware that the company made repeated requests for remote access to cranes and infrastructure at U.S. seaports, according to the WSJ.
The Biden administration announced in February it would invest over $20 billion in the production of domestically built cranes in a bid to move away from Chinese-manufactured versions, citing cybersecurity and espionage concerns. More broadly, U.S. intelligence agencies have raised alarm that China-backed cyber operations are targeting key American infrastructure systems, such as water or energy plants.
ZMPC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2024/03/07/clearly-overlooked-this-probe-finds-strange-communication-devices-on-chinese-cranes-in-us-ports/?fbclid=IwAR2p1LLCNInAv3YiWKQtuy9sICg5yDxtKxDJHFk3d9KVYZ06-DZ5k-WXJD0
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13170709/Chinese-spy-cranes-shipping-ports-covert-communication-devices.html
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/things-are-not-looking-good-for-swalwell-as-fang-fang-meets-with-editor-of-chinese-propaganda-paper/ar-BB1jTY9S?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=15a2e7a93e9447d38b61acb8a2461dcb&ei=84
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/china-may-have-found-a-new-way-to-skirt-us-import-tariffs-go-through-mexico-instead/ar-BB1jVRK0?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=99debbca8d2c4c0f80e25021183cd209&ei=44
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEU754nhEgI
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discussing his book 'Blood Money'
very interesting and important
China's ongoing war with the US including their cognitive warfare:
~ 35 minutes long.
https://www.gingrich360.com/2024/03/17/newts-world-episode-674-peter-schweizer-on-blood-money/
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/new-york-times-after-years-of-appeasing-ccp-now-plans-attack-on-shen-yun-5609232?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-03-18&src_cmp=gv-2024-03-18&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYvAqcwcVzc7PzLYPrHFRB710wA0AIj31kx5JTWZu9FddhEg4S8RP
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/hollywood-takeover-5595342
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News: On March 4, YouTube took down the trailer of the new NTD Original Documentary “Hollywood Takeover: China’s Control in the Film Industry” and removed the Hollywood Takeover YouTube account. The account and trailer were only reinstated two days later after a news outlet asked Youtube why and reported about this news.
“Hollywood Takeover: China’s Control in the Film Industry” is an NTD Original Documentary that pulls back the curtain on how Hollywood is helping to further a global adversary’s agenda, the consequences of that on the future, and what brave individuals are doing to change the tide.
“Hollywood Takeover” follows Chris Fenton, a former Hollywood executive, and Tiffany Meier, an investigative news reporter, on their journey to uncover the must-tell story behind Hollywood and China’s lucrative union, which didn’t happen by accident.
The survival of the United States depends on people waking up to the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless literal and cognitive takeover of our country. At this crucial historical moment, the truth may be inconvenient to many, but we all have a choice to make: will we continue to feed the red dragon?
Official website: HollywoodTakeover.com
Please give and share this documentary: HollywoodTakeover.com/share
Join us for the star-studded red carpet premiere event of “Hollywood Takeover”:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/red-carpet-premiere-hollywood-takeover-5603402
Also the panel after the red carpet premiere:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/panel-on-hollywood-takeover-5606124
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very interesting. I have been seeing many commercials for this event on cable the past few weeks
in my area:
https://www.shenyun.com/newark/new-jersey-performing-arts-center
“China Before Communism,”
and yes this phrase is at the end of the commercial I was thinking to be sure viewers know these Chinese performers are not associated with the CCP
NYT <= :x
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including a bill from SA
https://www.semafor.com/article/03/18/2024/senator-ron-wyden-criticizes-mnuchins-tiktok-bid-ties-to-gulf-money
A rare time I might agree with Sen. Wyden.
this makes zero sense.
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discussing his book 'Blood Money'
very interesting and important
China's ongoing war with the US including their cognitive warfare:
~ 35 minutes long.
https://www.gingrich360.com/2024/03/17/newts-world-episode-674-peter-schweizer-on-blood-money/
Thanks for posting this. Excellent research and analysis. Frightening content and conclusions.
Time permitting, would like to discuss this point by point. So many important points made! Hope to come back to it soon.
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/tiktok-ban-update-senate-house-bill-bytedance.html
One could only imagine the amount of the bribes taking place as I post.......
McConnell's wife Chinese business could be shut down overnight if CCP wants to.
No doubt we know what he is thinking......
and it ain't America's interests first.
They already own so many of us.
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(3) USDA: CHINA’S SHIFT AWAY FROM U.S. AG IS RETALIATION: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that China’s shift away from purchasing U.S. soybeans was a “signal” over states’ attempts to ban Chinese ownership of farmland.
Vilsack said the Chinese agricultural minister approached him about an Arkansas law that forced the sale of farmland owned by Syngenta, a Chinese agricultural company.
“China’s purchases are $6 billion less than they were a year ago. Why would that be? Is it just Brazil, or was there a reason why the Chinese Ag. Minister asked me about Syngenta? It was a signal,” Vilsack said.
Why It Matters: China started shifting agricultural purchases to Brazil a couple of years ago, so this is not new. What is new is China bringing up specific cases of forced divestiture, which is likely to continue drawing a Chinese economic response. This could, in turn, push the Biden administration to more actively oppose these types of laws enacted by red states. The Department of Justice, for instance, is embroiled in the courts over a similar Florida law. – M.S.
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https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/fbi-says-china-defining-threat-429943
why didn't they see this going back to the 1990s or at least early 2000s like anyone else who see them copying all our tech military etc.
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https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/ex-tiktok-employee-says-he-was-ordered-to-send-us-data-to-china/
Wait, I thought they denied this.
Tik Tok is banned in India. And in China!
--------------------
A former senior employee at TikTok said he was ordered to send American user data to Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, contradicting TikTok’s public claims of operating independently from China, according to a Fortune report published Monday. Evan Turner, a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September in 2022, told Fortune that every two weeks TikTok had him email spreadsheets containing millions of American users’ data to ByteDance employees in Beijing, including the users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, and demographics. Turner said he "literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China"
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ccp-provides-government-funding-tax-rebates-to-fentanyl-producers-house-report-finds/
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Hat tip BBG
This could go a number of places, but given that the FBI is threatening the people revealing this apparent Chinese penetration into electoral databases and research center I'm dropping it in. Could this, perchance, reflect a quid for Biden's numerous Chinese pro quos?
Note: these X posts are graphics heavy and hence this piece should be viewed in the oringal, which starts here:
https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1666490357469822976
KanekoaTheGreat
@KanekoaTheGreat
KONNECH #1🚨: Evidence shockingly suggests that the FBI is shielding two firms closely tied to the Chinese government, which have financed and developed an American election software company for the past 15 years, all while transferring confidential election data back to China.
2) Konnech has provided election administration and logistics software to many prominent cities and counties in the United States, including:
•Alameda County, California
•Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
•Contra Costa County, California
•Denver, Colorado
•Detroit, Michigan
•Fairfax County, Virginia
•Hillsborough County, Florida
•Maron County, Indiana
•Los Angeles, California
•San Francisco, California
•Santa Clara County, California
•St. Louis County, Missouri
•Travis County, Texas
•Washington, D.C.
3) On August 13, 2022, Catherine Engelbrecht (
@truethevote
) and Gregg Phillips (
@onwardsocial
) convened a group of researchers to discuss how the FBI's headquarters had betrayed them following a 15-month investigation into Konnech's storage of American election data on Chinese servers. The data involved various sensitive information, including:
•Name, DOB, SSN, Address
•Phone, Email, Bank Account
•Voting Machine Passwords
•Thumb Drive Passwords
•Voter Registration Rolls
•Provisional Ballot Serial Numbers
•RFID Tags On Voting Equipment
•Election Building Schematics
•And More...
"You'd be startled to know that this server lives on the main Unicom backbone in China. And it's in a Chinese University in Wuhan, China. I'm not talking about this just being a storage place for data process here.
The app server for this particular application was in China... We're confronted with the fact that everything there was to know about elections in America, and in key counties in key cities, was in this server in Wuhan, China... So what do you do with this information?
Well, we went to the FBI because this was a matter of national security. And, they agreed. So, we started working with the local FBI community. From January of 2021 until April of 2022, the FBI opened up a significant counterintelligence operation on this.
The problem with it was that it wasn't just American information. It was Australian information. It was Canadian information, it was Mexican information. And we ultimately found out that the CCPs own elections are on this same server set in that university...
Everyone involved on the counter intelligence teams at the Bureau agreed on one thing, this software, this penetration, and this opening was a significant national security threat...
So two weeks before the 2000 Mules movie came out, I get a call from an agent and he says this has risen now to the level of a national security threat and headquarters has gotten involved. I don't know who he was referring to, but he said two women saw the case differently, and felt as though we were the criminals.
They had instructed the Detroit FBI office to notify Konnech that we had breached their firewalls, none of which is true... We later found out they were accusing me of stealing three servers from the Chinese Unicom backbone and having illegal possession of American private information.
And they were shopping that around to the other agencies that would be involved NSA, CIA and others. Trying to get somebody to pick up on this so that they could come Roger Stone me...
But the challenge we all have is this software is still in place... When you dig into Konnech's CEO Eugene Yu, in particular the other URLs that he owns, it will take you to the underlying URL that runs the Chinese Communist Party's elections.
It lives on that server, on that same URL address and that URL is owned by Eugene Yu."
https://open.ink/konnech
4) In 2002, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu was an "officer" on the "finance committee" of a Chinese foundation that flew Professor Charles Lieber, the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, to Zhejiang University to give a speech on “Nanotech in Today’s World.”
This discovery was made in a Chinese magazine entitled "Overseas Scholars," written by the China Association for Science and Technology in the United States (CAST-USA) and the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation (AZKEF).
CAST is a transnational organization and constituent member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), whose stated mission is to “maintain close ties with millions of Chinese scientists, engineers and other people working in the fields of science and technology” and to operate as “the bridge linking Chinese science and technology community with the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government,” according to organization’s archived “About Us” webpage.
In 2003, CAST established the Help Our Motherland through Elite Intellectual Resources from Overseas Program (HOME) in concert with the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party to recruit overseas science and technology talent to transfer technology and intellectual property back to China.
The CPPCC’s role in channeling overseas science and technology knowledge toward China’s development has grown since a 2013 directive from General Secretary Xi Jinping to focus on incentivizing overseas Chinese to contribute their technical skills and expertise to China’s national rejuvenation.
By 2020, a United States congressional body warned that the Chinese government has built a “sprawling ecosystem of structures, programs, and incentives to coopt and exploit overseas experts for the science and technology they acquire abroad.”
“Chinese leaders have long viewed advanced science and technology (S&T) as key to China’s comprehensive national power and sought to acquire it through licit and illicit means from developed countries like the United States,” the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) said in the report.
“This ecosystem sponsors promising Chinese students and scholars at the U.S. and other foreign universities, incentivizes their return to China for the long term, and employs transnational organizations to channel S&T know-how from those remaining abroad back to mainland China.”
The U.S. Senate report continues:
“Many programs associated with Beijing’s S&T transfer ecosystem—including scholarships to study abroad, talent recruitment plans, and entrepreneurship parks—contribute to China’s military-civil fusion strategy by collecting specific technologies and know-how that improve the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and advance the goals” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
“This ecosystem sponsors promising Chinese students and scholars to study at foreign universities, incentivizes or requires their return to China in exchange for this support, and recruits researchers via hundreds of talent programs. Moreover, it integrates Chinese students and scholars remaining abroad with organizations that facilitate the transfer of S&T back to the Mainland, where it can be exploited by the PLA, government ministries, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), state-run laboratories, and startups.”
“Even when overseas Chinese students and scholars do stay in the United States after graduation, China’s transnational technology transfer organizations and talent recruitment plans provide a means to contribute to China’s national rejuvenation by transferring technology and know-how without requiring physical return.”
In the magazine, CAST-USA refers to Eugene Yu by his Chinese name YU Jianwei (于建伟), and says that he is an “officer” on the “finance committee” of the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation. The foundation’s mission is “to promote exchange and cooperation between Zhejiang University and universities in the United States” and “invite United States professors or scientists to Zhejiang University.”
In 2020, Prof. Charles Lieber was arrested for concealing his funding from the Wuhan University of Technology and participating in China’s Thousand Talents Program.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Bill Priestap, the former Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, stated that China’s talent recruitment plans are effective “brain gain programs” that “encourage theft of intellectual property from U.S. institutions.”
Priestap continued, “For example, China’s talent recruitment plans, such as the Thousand Talents Program, offer competitive salaries, state-of-the-art research facilities, and honorific titles, luring both Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts alike to bring their knowledge and experience to China, even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating export controls to do so.”
Eugene Yu was an “officer” on the “finance committee” of a Chinese foundation in the United States tasked with flying professors like Charles Lieber to China. This discovery was made in a China Association for Science and Technology in the United States magazine entitled “Overseas Scholars.”
Similarly to how the U.S. congressional report described CAST’s overseas science and technology acquisition efforts, AZKEF keeps a list of talented overseas Chinese students, offers incentives for prominent scientists to fly to China, and focuses on bridging Zhejiang University with universities in the United States.
https://archive.ph/OFVCf
https://web.archive.org/web/20011119103624/http://www.azkef.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20031220030107/http://azkef.org:80/programs.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20030402092120/http://azkef.org:80/lecture2002.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20140206035502/http://english.cast.org.cn/n1181872/n1257426/47099.html
https://uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/Overseas_Chinese_Students_and_Scholars_in_Chinas_Drive_for_Innovation.pdf
5) On November 29, 2005, Eugene Yu, also known as YU Jianwei (于建伟), established a shadow subsidiary named Jinhua Yulian Network Technology Co., Ltd. (金华宇联网络科技有限公司) in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China, two years after founding Konnech in the United States.
6) On January 25, 2006, Jinhua Yulian Network was accepted into the Entrepreneurship Service Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Jinhua Science and Technology Park.
The Chinese government has funded and overseen the development of Konnech's American election software ever since.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090413172501/http://www.jhcy.cn/yqqy.asp?page=3
7) On February 25, 2006, Eugene Yu registered the website domain "http://yu-lian.cn" for Jinhua Yulian Network with the email address eyu@konnech.com.
https://archive.is/YaRv1#
8) On http://yu-lian.cn, Eugene Yu wrote in Chinese that he provides election software "with Chinese characteristics" to various levels of the Chinese government, including the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131207150515/http://yu-lian.cn/Services.html
9) On http://yu-lian.cn, Eugene Yu praised "Comrade Jiang Zemin" and emphasized Konnech's philosophy of prioritizing "political tasks first, and economic benefits second."
He highlighted his success stories of "Election Management, Detroit" and "US Overseas Voters."
The entire website was written in Chinese.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131207151051/http://yu-lian.cn/Case.html
10) In December 2006, Konnech announced on Facebook that they had partnered with Michigan State University and the Confucius Institute to build, http://ChineseBrief.com, an "interactive communication platform and Chinese language learning tool."
https://web.archive.org/web/20120729201212/http://www.confucius.msu.edu/news.htm
11) On July 18, 2007, Eugene Yu posted an ad on the Chinese Academy of Sciences Jinhua Science and Technology Park's website, offering "5 million yuan" for developing "software packages" for Jinhua Yulian Network and http://konnech.com.
In 2007, 5 million yuan was worth around $700,000 and was the prize money offered by the Chinese government to members of the Thousand Talents Program and other elite overseas entrepreneurs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131019061139/http://www.jhcy.cn/jsnt_detail.asp?id=16
12) The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is a national think tank with extensive research facilities and over 50,000 researchers. CAS has been linked to Chinese military, nuclear, and cyber espionage programs.
The U.S. Department of Defense acknowledges the CAS as China's leading academic institution for comprehensive research and development.
CAS and its affiliated companies are involved in developing AI initiatives, hypersonic spaceplanes, robotic submarines, and missile technology for the Chinese military.
The Justice Department has indicted several individuals associated with CAS for their roles in transferring trade secrets and military technology from U.S. companies through Chinese overseas talent programs.
In October 2002, the Jinhua Science and Technology Park became the first collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and a prefecture-level government.
The Chinese government has built more than 150 "Overseas Chinese scholar pioneering parks" in the hearts of 54 "National New and High Technology Development Zones."
These ultra-modern facilities were designed for returning specialists to "incubate" (find commercial or military applications for) technologies acquired overseas as part of China's strategy of "serving in place" that allows Chinese scholars to stay abroad while transferring foreign technology back home.
https://uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Interos_Supply%20Chain%20Vulnerabilities%20from%20China%20in%20U.S.%20Federal%20ICT_final.pdf
https://media.defense.gov/2019/May/02/2002127082/-1/-1/1/2019_CHINA_MILITARY_POWER_REPORT.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20100628161736/http://www.jhkjy.ac.cn/about/index.asp
13) Jinhua Yulian Network's initial address was located at No. 988 Shuanglong South Street, Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China, which is situated 500 meters away from the Jinhua People's Government building (No. 801 Shuanglong South Street) and across the street from the Jinhua Science and Technology Bureau (No. 828 Shuanglong South Street).
14) The Jinhua Science and Technology Park (JHTP) offers Chinese government-funded support to domestic and overseas enterprises, including financial assistance, living facilities, server hosting, internet access, university partnerships, technology transfers, research assistance, and patent support.
In 1988, the State Council launched the Ministry of Science and Technology’s national Torch Program to speed up the nation’s “science and technological industrialization.”
In 2005, the Ministry of Science and Technology awarded JHTP the distinction of a national-level technology business incubator.
In 2006, JHTP was granted 3 million yuan by the Ministry of Science and Technology through China's national Torch Program to establish the Park's Internet Data Center, where Jinhua Yulian Network would develop, test, and maintain Konnech's American election software.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091017113128/http://www.jhcy.cn/yqgk_01.asp?flag=%B7%FE%CE%F1%B9%A6%C4%DC&lmbm=2405&lmmc=%B7%FE%CE%F1%B9%A6%C4%DC&url=yqgk_01.asp
https://web.archive.org/web/20090413171900/http://www.jhcy.cn/cxzt_01.asp
http://jhcy.cn/jhkjy/town_details/28.html
http://jhcy.cn/jhkjy/town_details/50.html
15) A 2008 Chinese document titled "International Elite Entrepreneurship Modern Service Outsourcing" reveals that Eugene Yu worked for the Chinese government as a Project Manager of the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone (GETDZ) from 1983 until 1985.
The document features 46 Chinese high-tech companies operating overseas and describes Konnech as an "Intelligent Web Communications" company with the mission of becoming "one of the top 50 e-commerce service providers for schools and government in the United States within 10 years.”
The document mentions Konnech's Chinese venture fund and describes the company's goal of developing advanced technology in cooperation with Zhejiang University:
“The company will enter a phase of rapid development after the implementation of the venture fund in Wuzhong.”
"In terms of specialized technology, we have been developing and hiring technical personnel with expertise in the field in a rapid manner by utilizing the role of corporate and university professors and graduate classes for project development, with the aim of receiving advanced applied technology."
"... it is an indisputable fact that many cutting-edge products come from American university campuses. We must take the corresponding path and cooperate with American universities and Zhejiang University and other domestic institutions to focus on the development of applied technologies and the application-oriented development of specialized technologies."
The document describes the problems facing the U.S. market, citing “expensive software programming fees and talent shortages” and reduced “funding for IT projects” before concluding, “In this environment, the role of our China branch is fully demonstrated.”
When Eugene Yu’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss his criminal case in California, they included a section entitled FACTUAL BACKGROUND that says he “worked in various locations” after he graduated from Zhejiang University and before he was accepted into Wake Forest University.
However, it failed to mention his prior employment as a Project Manager in the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone, where he worked in the Industrial Project Negotiation Department and "completed the introduction of several major projects":
"Eugene Yu was born and raised in Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China. In 1974, as part of China’s cultural revolution, Mr. Yu was sent to a communal farm where he labored for four years in squalor conditions. In 1977, after Chairman Mao died, Mr. Yu scored high on a nationwide test, qualifying him for admission to study engineering at Zhejiang University.
After graduating from college, he was sent to work in various locations in China. Mr. Yu then met and married his wife Donna Wang. In 1986, Mr. Yu and Dr. Wang were accepted to graduate school programs at Wake Forest University, where Mr. Yu obtained his MBA degree."
Since the launch of the GETDZ in 1984, China has established 219 national-level Economic and Technological Development Zones (ETDZs), which helped launch China’s rise to a global economic superpower.
In order to promote science and technology-intensive industries, ETDZs offer financial incentives and preferential policies that target domestic and overseas enterprises focused on manufacturing, scientific, and technological industries.
Two decades later, Eugene Yu would return to China to launch his company Jinhua Yulian Network Technology Co., Ltd. (金华宇联网络科技有限公司) in the Jinhua Economic and Technological Development Zone (JETDZ).
https://max.book118.com/html/2012/0222/1126480.shtm
https://cbbc.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/China-Britain%20Business%20Council%20-%20In%20the%20Zone%20-%20A%20Comprehensive%20Guide%20to%20China%E2%80%99s%20Economic%20and%20Technological%20Development%20Zones%20-%20October%202020.pdf
https://documentcloud.org/documents/2317
16) On January 4, 2011, Lin Yu, a managing supervisor at Jinhua Yulian Network, established Jinhua Red Date Software Co., Ltd., also known as Jinhua Jujube Software Co., Ltd.
On January 16, 2011, Konnech registered the domain reddatesoft[.]com with the email eyu@konnech.com.
Jinhua Red Date Software and Jinhua Yulian Network shared the same address at No. 1583 Binhong Road, Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province.
Jinhua Yulian Network's website included "Jinhua Red Date Software Co., Ltd." and "reddatesoft[.]com" in its copyright statement.
Peter McCallister, the General Manager of Konnech Australia, later affirmed in an affidavit that Lin Yu is Eugene Yu's older brother and a Chinese national.
(Note: The modified domain URL "reddatesoft[.]com" is used because of safety concerns with the URL raised by Twitter.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220822014930/https://www.11467.com/jinhua/co/273669.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20130718125224/http://yu-lian.cn/
17) On April 13, 2015, Lin Yu established Jinhua Hongzheng Technology Co., Ltd. (金华鸿正科技有限公司) in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China.
Lin Yu (Eugene Yu's brother) owned 99.4% of the company.
Jun Yu (Eugene Yu's nephew) and Guojun Shao, who co-invented a Konnech patent with Eugene Yu, were among the other equity holders.
Jinhua Yulian Network later transferred a voting patent, co-invented with a Zhejiang University professor, to Jinhua Hongzheng Technology. In a future thread, there will be a detailed discussion about Konnech's patents, employees, and the involvement of this professor.
18) Jinhua Hongzheng Technology provides election administration software, including web and mobile applications, to more than 430 National People's Congresses across over 20 provinces.
The company has established partnerships with Huawei, Lenovo, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and the highest levels of the Chinese government.
19) On July 31, 2015, Eugene Yu registered the website domain "hongzhengtech[.]cn" for Jinhua Hongzheng Technology using the email address admin@konnech.com.
As a result, Konnech held significant control over a company that provides election administration software to the highest levels of the Chinese government.
Shortly after Catherine Engelbrecht (
@truethevote
) and Gregg Phillips (
@onwardsocial
) exposed Konnech's connection to China's National People's Congress, the domain registration email address was changed to jiadeng@hongzhengtech.com.
(Note: The modified domain URL "hongzhengtech[.]cn" is used because of safety concerns with the URL raised by Twitter.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220824173140/https://whois-history.whoisxmlapi.com/lookup-report/AVkvG34MR7
20) In a September 1, 2022, live chat, Catherine Engelbrecht (
@truethevote
) and Gregg Phillips (
@onwardsocial
) discussed the FBI's betrayal, Konnech programming software for China's National People's Congress, and the company's storage of U.S. election data on Chinese servers.
In January 2021, Phillips said that the cyber analyst he had been working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” such as http://vote4la.com, http://vote4detroit.com, and http://vote4boston.com, which Konnech’s “PollChief” software application used to gather personally-identifying information about poll workers.
Using Binary Edge, a software product companies use to identify and assess the risk of cyber breaches, “We began to look at where these URLs resolve to.
We found that most of them resolve to one I.P. address and that I.P. address — the URL resolved in China,” Phillips said. “What we also learned in our review, http://apps.konnech.net, resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he continued.
“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”
This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he emphasized. Engelbrecht and Phillips decided that “this was a major national security risk” and immediately took the information to the FBI.
When Engelbrecht and Phillips took this information to the FBI, the FBI “said the information was forwarded to their counter-intelligence operation, and a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021,” Phillips said.
Phillips described how he and Engelbrecht played an active role in the FBI’s operation, “They engaged us in the operation, they were communicating with us on a regular basis. They were communicating with Catherine regarding communications with the target and this went on for approximately 15 months.”
Phillips and Engelbrecht noted that the field office they worked with for those 15 months was “legitimate” and not “political law enforcement.”
“These were legitimate people who believed that this software posed a national security risk to the United States of America and they were working with us closely to try to stop this from being in place during the midterms,” Phillips said.
“The focus point was always we needed to remove this software from the election, but taking a step further, there were a lot of other concerns that the bureau had.”
In April 2022, Engelbrecht received a call from one of the FBI agents, who informed her that the FBI’s “Washington D.C. headquarters” was now involved in the investigation.
Engelbrecht described how everything changed after this call, “There was no more goodwill, there was no more let's work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target,” she said. “That was a very disturbing call.”
The agent informed Engelbrecht that “two women” at the FBI’s headquarters believed that Phillips and Engelbrecht were “in the wrong for doing this” and that the D.C. office was now trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this.”
Engelbrecht added, “which of course we didn't, but that was kind of their Modus Operandi, they were going to try to pin something on us, and today you can pick your headlines about how the FBI has done this time and again.”
Phillips remarked, “The problem is they know about this, and they chose to do nothing. They chose to investigate it, and in the end, they chose to blame us, but this is China. These are Chinese operatives in the United States; these are Chinese citizens who are programming this.”
Engelbrecht explained how the FBI agents initially hoped they could persuade the Washington D.C. office to do the right thing, “Our contacts were saying we are going to try and smooth this out, but as the days clicked on, they re-contacted us and one of them said you may need to be ready to — his term was to use the nuclear option and go to the press,” she said.
With the FBI no longer interested in pursuing Konnech, Englebrecht and Phillips organized an event for Saturday, August 13th in Arizona called “the Pit” where they brought together about two hundred “researchers, independent journalists, and big thinkers” to share their story.
“We asked the people in attendance for help, we didn't know what the FBI's plans were for us, we didn't know if we didn't speak this publicly if we would ever have the chance to, but we felt like our best chance was to share this with people we trusted who had the wherewithal to get the word out,” Englebrecht said.
She continued, “There have been so many great things that have happened since that event, but one of the greatest, was this community that came out shoulder to shoulder saying let’s dig this, let's see how much more information we can find.”
“The quality of research that has been done to supplement what we already had and to corroborate what we already had has been incredible.”
Phillips added, “This is some of the best research I have ever seen. The quality of it, the depth of it, we were with a prosecutor the other day and we had an opportunity to share some of this information with them.”
He continued, “There's likely going to be a grand jury convened here in the next week or so. It's supported by not just the research that my team OPSEC did for Catherine and True the Vote, but by the research of one of the best research teams I've ever seen come together.”
“The data and research all stand on their own.”
https://truethevote.locals.com/post/2664780/the-tiger-project
21) On September 12, 2022, Konnech filed a defamation lawsuit against Catherine Engelbrecht (
@truethevote
) and Gregg Phillips (
@onwardsocial
), accusing them of spreading baseless "conspiracy theories" and engaging in "racism and xenophobia."
Konnech denied any affiliation with the Communist Party of China and stated that they had never stored American election data on servers in China.
The legacy media echoed Konnech's claims against
@TrueTheVote
and
@onwardsocial
without conducting any examination of the company's connections to Jinhua Yulian Network, Jinhua Hongzheng Technology, or China's National People's Congress.
22) In an unusual move, U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Hoyt issued an ex-parte temporary restraining order in favor of Konnech without providing an opportunity for
@TrueTheVote
and
@OnwardSocial
to respond to the complaint.
Furthermore, Judge Hoyt immediately ordered them to disclose the identities of all individuals involved in their investigation of Konnech at the outset of the trial, prior to the discovery phase.
Failure to comply would result in the imprisonment of Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips for contempt of court.
23) On October 4, 2022, Eugene Yu, the CEO of Konnech, was arrested by the Los Angeles District Attorney's office for storing the data of American election workers on servers in China.
Deputy District Attorney Eric Neff described the scale of the data breach as "astounding," suggesting that it could be "the largest data breach in United States history."
Prosecutors alleged that Konnech employees shared the personal information of Los Angeles election workers with third-party software developers in China, who were involved in creating and fixing Konnech's software called PollChief.
Furthermore, software developers in China had "super administration access" to PollChief software and confidential election data from the United States.
https://truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eugene-yu-complaint-101322.pdf
24) On October 5, 2022, during Eugene Yu's bond hearing, his attorney contended that he posed no risk of fleeing as he had been actively cooperating with the FBI for the preceding month, and his arrest had taken the agency by surprise.
However, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office argued that Yu presented a substantial flight risk due to his strong business ties in China.
Additionally, the prosecution raised concerns about the suspicious nature of Yu's arrest, noting that he was taken into custody without his cell phone while on his way to the airport.
25) On October 28, 2022,
@TrueTheVote
and
@OnwardSocial
submitted an affidavit containing approximately 10% of their text messages exchanged with FBI Agents in Detroit and San Antonio, supporting their claim of working with the FBI on a 15-month "counter-intelligence operation" against Eugene Yu, prior to the involvement of FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
The text messages included conversations with the following individuals:
-Special Agent Bruce Fowler, Detroit
-SA Huy Nguyen, San Antonio
-SA Kevin McKenna, San Antonio
-SA Kristina Spindel, San Antonio
In one text message exchange, Fowler provided his FBI email address and mentioned receiving three thumb drives from the San Antonio office. He asked Engelbrecht to guide him on where to find information on those drives.
In another text message exchange, Engelbrecht asked for the name of an agent in Georgia. Nguyen responded that he would provide the name later, but “in the meantime, you can tell them that you filed the complaint with SA Huy Nguyen and SA Kevin McKenna with San Antonio Division.”
In another exchange, Engelbrecht texted Nguyen, stating:
"I wanted to let you know that we took the nuclear option and went public (in a very limited way, but nonetheless we did it). Konnech quickly filed a civil suit against us in Houston federal court and got an ex parte [temporary restraining order].
Part of the TRO required that we name who we’d gotten the election worker data from, same person who’d provided it to you. We gave the court the name under seal. Our attorney also notified the Houston FBI office, where the case was filed.
I’m very concerned about everyone’s safety at this point. Please do whatever possible to help ensure that name never comes out. I can provide you with whatever you may need."
Nguyen did not respond to Engelbrecht’s text. According to further texts provided by Engelbrecht, she reached out to “KayKay,” saying she hoped to talk, in person, if possible.
“KayKay” replied that she was on a temporary assignment out of state until January and asked if Engelbrecht still had Nguyen’s number. Engelbrecht then explained that she had “called and written him but no response.”
The text then explained: “We have been drug into a vicious lawsuit filed against us by Konnech.” “Our attorneys have contacted the FBI and been told that the Bureau has no interest in engaging with the court in order to maintain confidentiality.”
Engelbrecht added that she, Phillips, and “the researcher who originally provided us the data” are being “doxed,” and that it’s “a very serious situation and we’ve been left to hang.”
Engelbrecht then noted, “Yu has already been indicted by a Grand Jury and arrested,” but they “continue to hear chatter that the FBI is working with Konnech, against us, and still trying to accuse us of crimes we did not commit.”
The True the Vote founder then noted that “what Bobby said on the phone that day in April 22 (when you were reading the yearly CI disclaimer to me) has gone into full overdrive.” She added: “I also now believe Gregg and I have been set up. It’s appalling, heartbreaking, and wrong.”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/18/in-this-untold-story-of-poll-worker-data-chinese-servers-and-scandal-only-the-fbi-knows-the-truth/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txsd.1888133/gov.uscourts.txsd.1888133.46.2.pdf
26) On October 31, 2022, Catherine Engelbrecht (
@truethevote
) and Gregg Phillips (
@onwardsocial
) were imprisoned for contempt of court as they refused to disclose the identity of a researcher who provided information to the LADA that resulted in the indictment of Eugene Yu:
Despite Eugene Yu's arrest by the Los Angeles District Attorney based on the allegations he had previously denied in his defamation lawsuit, Judge Kenneth Hoyt refused to admit any evidence from the criminal proceedings against Konnech in his courtroom.
Furthermore, Judge Hoyt declined to respond to a phone call from the Los Angeles District Attorney's office and asserted that the criminal case against Eugene Yu was unrelated to the civil case involving Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips.
27) On November 5, 2022, Tucker Carlson discussed Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips being arrested for refusing to reveal the identity of a researcher who provided information to the LADA that resulted in criminal charges against Eugene Yu, the CEO of Konnech:
"George Gascon actually indicted Eugene Yu for exfiltrating the personal records of American poll workers, including their social security numbers and home addresses, out of the country to servers in China. These researchers developed that information.
Catherine attempted to give it to law enforcement at the FBI and elsewhere and was sued by Konnech for doing that. When Konnech sued them, they got a restraining order, ordering Catherine to turn over the names of these researchers.
Catherine and Gregg, who are very courageous people, simply refused to do it, and as a result, while Yu is home on bail, Catherine and Gregg are in jail tonight...
The civil libertarians and the mainstream press are basically a flock of sheep that are each bleeding the exact same tune, and all they want to do is deny any conversation about the possibility of fraud in elections."
28) On November 7, 2022,
@TrueTheVote
and
@OnwardSocial
were released from prison following a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which overturned Judge Kenneth Hoyt's order to unjustly detain them for contempt of court in a civil defamation case.
Two week later, the appeals court vacated the contempt order and wrote, "the record does not reveal what sort of emergency justified the district court's demand for that information before the parties could file Rule 12 motions before the defendants could file an answer, before the parties could file their initial disclosures, or before discovery could begin let alone conclude in the ordinary course."
"Much less did the district court explain what sort of emergency could warrant jailing the petitioner-defendants for not making such immediate disclosures. Rather, the district court made clear that it was imposing its disclosure requirements because it—the district court—wanted to add defendants to the lawsuit. Resp. 13; App. 188. That is not how the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure work."
Furthermore, the appeals court criticized Judge Kenneth Hoyt for "using a temporary restraining order, a preliminary injunction, and a civil-contempt order to litigate the case on Konnech's behalf."
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txsd.1888133/gov.uscourts.txsd.1888133.62.0.pdf
@gatewaypundit
about their arrest and subsequent solitary confinement and provided information about the Konnech data breach that occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Allegheny County.
The breach involved the unauthorized exposure of sensitive information belonging to election workers, election judges, the complete Pennsylvania voting registration file, voting machine serial numbers, passwords, and "everything that one would need to cheat."
"This isn't software, guys. This is malware. This is spyware. They are sucking data from the United States, storing it in China, and then using it to create a Chinese-style social credit system where we're all scored.
United States citizens are scored to manipulate votes, manipulate thought, manipulate pretty much everything you can imagine in our lives. And these people are the tip of the spear for that. They're not the only ones but they're there."
30) On November 9, 2022, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office dropped charges against Konnech and its CEO, Eugene Yu.
District Attorney George Gascon cited concerns over “potential bias” and the “pace of the investigation” as his reasons for the decision.
"We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence," Gascon said in a statement.
"We currently have an immense volume of digital data that will define this case, but the processing of that data will take months. We would not be able to fairly and accurately process and present all of that evidence within the statutory timeframes."
"As a result, we have decided to ask the court to dismiss the current case and alert the public in order to ensure transparency."
A few weeks later, Gascon placed Deputy District Attorney Eric Neff, who alleged in court that this was potentially "the largest data breach in United States history," on administrative leave.
31) On December 22, 2022, Grant Bradley, a former employee of Konnech, filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the company that stated he personally “witnessed customer’s data (specifically poll watcher information) being made accessible to foreign nationals from China.”
Additionally, Bradley stated that Konnech used “developers, designers, and coders” who “are all Chinese nationals based out of Wuhan, China.”
https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/20/whistleblower-yes-election-data-company-gave-u-s-poll-workers-personal-info-to-china/
https://scribd.com/document/620894361/22-12-22-Verified-Complaint-1#
32) On February 24, 2023, cybersecurity expert Harry Haury, who forensically imaged Konnech's devices for the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, signed an affidavit stating that he witnessed Konnech storing the personal data of U.S. election workers on servers in China.
Furthermore, the affidavit stated that Konnech's software was developed, tested, and maintained in China, and metadata indicated that Eugene Yu was involved in developing election software for the Chinese government.
Haury, who is the CEO of Cain & Associates, stated that his company assisted the Los Angeles District Attorney's office by following FBI and Justice Department protocols to forensically image servers, computers, cell phones, and other electronic storage devices belonging to Konnech and Eugene Yu.
Haury, who has over 28 years of experience working as a cybersecurity expert for prominent organizations such as the Department of Defense, NSA, CIA, U.S. Treasury, NorthCOM, Sandia National Laboratories, more than a dozen top American banks, and the U.S. Justice Department stated that Konnech's data security system, "amounted to by far the worst example of complete disregard or negligence regarding the protection of PII and sensitive data I have ever seen. We discovered a data breach of U.S. data, which is classified as a total loss of control.”
Substantial evidence was reportedly discovered on Konnech's seized devices, including:
• confirmed multiple instances of Konnech hosting, on servers based in China, U.S. citizens’ personally identifiable information (PII);
• found evidence in private company messages that software code was being developed, tested, and maintained in China;
• confirmed that Konnech was providing administrative credentials to Chinese developers;
• PollChief software suffered from a security vulnerability that allowed any PollChief or Konnech worker to gain "super user" status, giving him or her broad access to information on all U.S. poll workers in the system;
• has evidence that Konnech employees have shared election-related data through, from, and on Chinese servers and applications;
• has evidence in metadata pulled from relevant files indicating Eugene Yu was involved in developing Chinese government (i.e., Wucheng District People’s Congress) election software; and
• has evidence showing Konnech is associated with several companies based in mainland China that appear to be associated with if not subsidized by the Chinese government.
Haury stated, "We concluded that this incident is a very high risk indicator of an intrusion by a foreign intelligence into the U.S. strategic infrastructure, and as obliged by law, we informed the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and other pertinent law enforcement agencies of this contact."
https://truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2023.02.24-Konnech-Dkt.-87-Motion-to-Inspect-Property.pdf
33) On March 24, 2023, Peter McCallister, the former General Manager of Konnech Australia, signed an affidavit stating that he believed Konnech's software development was done in China by Jinhua Hongzheng Technology, a company owned by "Mr. Yu's older brother" and "Jun Yu, Mr. Yu's nephew, was the person responsible for depositing the data onto the server in China."
Additionally, McCallister stated that after Eugene Yu's arrest, Konnech employees in China attempted to hack Konnech's CTO, Luis Nabergoi, and deleted "all conversations referencing or involving Eugene's nephew, Jun Yu."
Lastly, McCallister believed that Jinhua Hongzheng Technology was "the main provider of election software products to the Communist Party of China" and that Eugene Yu had asked him to sell the same "meeting administration and voting software" to the Australian government.
34) On April 5, 2023, Grant Bradley, the former Konnech employee, signed another affidavit stating "Konnech provided programmers in China private data of U.S.-based election workers, to include social security numbers and other identifying information."
"Konnech appeared to employ at least 80 and perhaps around 100 Chinese nationals to work on its elections software for American clients."
"I witnessed customers' data (specifically poll-watcher information) being made accessible to foreign nationals in China."
"Konnech's election logistics software was (and may still be) substantially developed by developers, designers, and coders who (to the best of my knowledge, information and belief), are all Chinese nationals based out of Wuhan, China."
"The standard process Konnech used to onboard China-based programmers was to create customer environments for the programmers by uploading files containing all of the American customers' poll workers' information, polling locations, and other data to DingTalk or Jira, where the leaders from the Chinese team would have access to Jira, and the entire Chinese team would have access to DingTalk."
"During my employment, on or after October 4, 2022 I was instructed by my superiors to say outwardly to customers that poll worker data was not stored overseas, was not available to foreign nationals, and that we had no idea why Eugene Yu had been arrested... My superiors who instructed me in these regards, and I, knew these statements were false."
https://truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023.04.07-Konnech-Dkt.-94-1-Exhibit-H-Affidavit-of-Grant-Bradley.pdf
https://truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2023.03.24-Konnech-Dkt.-91-Reply-ISO-Motion-to-Inspect.pdf
35) On April 14, 2023, cybersecurity expert Nate Cain (
@cain_nate
), who forensically imaged Konnech's devices for the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, stated that Konnech stored the personal data of U.S. election workers and judges on servers in China.
Furthermore, Cain stated that a "Chinese company that has ties to the CCP" did Konnech's "software development and maintenance," and a Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) analyst reviewed their report, verified that it was accurate, and forwarded it to the FBI.
However, Cain mentioned that he had provided evidence of a major Konnech data breach to the police superintendent of a prominent U.S. county, who subsequently took the information to the FBI, and the FBI had declined to provide assistance, informing the superintendent that they were not interested in pursuing the matter.
Additionally, Cain stated that Los Angeles County had refused to inform several other counties that their data had also been breached.
Cain, who has over 25 years of experience working as a cybersecurity expert for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, DISA, and the FBI, received his cybersecurity training from the NSA as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command (MARFORCYBER).
"We found that there was voter poll worker data, as well as election judge data, and election inventory system data found on Chinese servers."
"We weren't expecting to see what we saw, which was that there was a Chinese company that was essentially doing the software development and all of the software maintenance for this company.
And what we discovered was that we got behind the Chinese firewall, and we found documents that showed that this Chinese company actually had ties to the CCP.
And then at that point, I had no choice but to take that information, package it up and provide it to the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) because as a cleared contractor, I have a sworn obligation to provide them that information that this could be a potential Chinese espionage or intelligence operation working against the United States and our critical infrastructure.
So, I provided that information to them, and now, we're in a difficult situation because I don't think that George Gascon was very happy about that."
36) On April 20, 2023, Konnech and Eugene Yu retracted their defamation case against Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, a day after
@truethevote
and
@onwardsocial
unveiled a website (http://openink.com/konnech) containing much of the information discussed in this Twitter thread.
37) In conclusion, Eugene Yu develops election administration software for the Chinese government in partnership with Huawei, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile, and Lenovo.
Two of his former employees have signed affidavits stating that he stored confidential U.S. election data on servers in China, where his software was developed, tested, and maintained.
Two cybersecurity experts, who forensically imaged Konnech's devices for the LADA, have stated that he stored confidential U.S. election data on servers in China, where he developed election administration software for the Chinese government.
This information is publicly available on the internet.
So, why is the FBI still allowing Konnech's election administration software to be used across the country?
38) On April 14, 2016, Jinhua Hongzheng Technology announced on Weibo that it provides election administration software to China's National People's Congress, Detroit, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, and Washington, D.C.
Its predecessor is Jinhua Yulian Network and "Konnech."
https://archive.ph/8xIqe
39) So, why is the FBI shielding two firms closely tied to the Chinese government, which have financed and developed an American election software company for the past 15 years, all while transferring election data back to China?
40) And lastly, why is the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C., targeting Catherine (
@truethevote
) and Gregg (
@onwardsocial
) for exposing this while seemingly protecting Jianwei Yu (于建伟)?
41) If you would like Congress to hold the FBI accountable for betraying Catherine, Gregg, and their commitment to preserving the integrity of our election system, please visit
@TrueTheVote
's website, http://stopccpelectionfraud.com, and follow these three simple steps:
1. Sign the petition
2. Contact your representatives
3. Review these articles
42) In all of my interactions with Catherine and Gregg, despite facing lawsuits, wrongful arrests, and solitary confinement, their main concern has always been the removal of this national security threat from our election system.
If you would like to support their election integrity efforts, you can donate at:
https://truethevote.org/donate/
43) Finally, if you'd like to support my journalism, please consider becoming a member of my Twitter subscriber community.
By joining, you'll gain exclusive access to my reporting, including:
• Exclusive Konnech threads
• Content creation tips
• OSINT research tools
• Monthly Q&A sessions
Thank you for your time!