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America’s Mayor Celebrates Communism

Mayor Eric Adams, China, communism, New York City

The American political tradition is not communist. It is anti-totalitarian. So we don’t expect our political leaders to cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

One would never want the mayor of Podunk, let alone New York City, to attend a flag-raising ceremony to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

But that’s just what New York City Mayor Eric Adams did on October 1.

Now, Adams didn’t tell the Chinese Communist Party officials and others attending what a fan he is of the Chinese government’s wide-scale and unrelenting repression and murder, but his very presence implied acceptance of the Chinazi regime: Hey, you made it. Seventy-four years! Good for you guys.

A CCP-PRC ceremony conducted to commemorate the CCP founding of the PRC is not about being nice to Chinese people or celebrating a vague diversity. If you go there in an official capacity to glad hand Chinazi officials and wave the U.S. flag along with the Chinese flag, you are sanctioning the Chinazi regime. You’re telling everybody — everybody too busy to read news or history or investigative reports — that these rulers aren’t so bad.

“That flag is a flag of repression,” says Chinese dissident Zhou Fengsuo. “It’s the CCP flag of China. The day when they killed many of my compatriots on Tiananmen Square . . . that’s the flag they raised there to show their victory over peaceful people.”

Adams has provided another propaganda coup for the CCP, which enjoys racking them up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Northern Disclosure

Justin Trudeau, airplane, China, India, Sikh

Oh, Canada. 

My wife and I visited our northern neighbor just a week ago, while its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was stuck in India . . . with plane trouble.

“Trudeau’s presence at the G20 summit . . . came against a backdrop of tensions between his government and host India over Ottawa’s handling of rightwing Sikh separatists,” U.K.’s Guardian reported. “New Delhi accuses Ottawa of turning a blind eye to the activities of radical Sikh nationalists who seek a separate Sikh homeland in northern India.”

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I served as a member of the Punjab Referendum Commission, an international group with some know-how about direct democracy. We’re advising and monitoring the referendums being organized around the world by U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice. Nearly a million Sikhs live in Canada.

Mr. Trudeau should wear the Indian government’s scorn as a badge of honor, of course, for upholding the Sikhs’ basic rights to speak out in his putative free society. 

But that’s not the only billion-being nation-state brouhaha this scion faces; Trudeau’s Liberal Party controls the Parliament but “after months of demands from opposition parties” just finally agreed to an official public inquiry into foreign (read: Chinese) interference in their political affairs. 

“Canadian news reports earlier this year, citing anonymous Canadian intelligence officials and leaked classified documents, alleged that Chinese intelligence officials had funneled donations to its preferred candidates,” explains Axios, “all members of Canada’s Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”

Worse than plane trouble.

I hope Canadians will get to the bottom of it and hold their politicians accountable in ways that we in the U.S. did not 30 years ago when Washington was first awash with Chinese cash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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New Red Map

China, map, borders, aggression

“China warns US Has Crossed Red Line” began Newsweek’s headline to a report that the Chinese state-run Global Times threatens a “brewing and imminent storm of lethal consequences for Taiwan” in retribution for the U.S. recently providing $80 million in military assistance to the island nation. 

China claims Taiwan and its inhabitants, desiring their patriotic company so devoutly as to contemplate leveling much of the country in missile strikes, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Taiwanese to achieve that glorious “national rejuvenation.”

Of course, when the U.S. provides defensive weapons to protect against just such a murderous military invasion, the Butchers of Beijing holler it is “provocative!”

Speaking of . . . the Chinazis were kind enough last week to remind us that Taiwan is hardly the only land they’ve got their eyes on. 

The Communist Party just drew a new map. 

India noticed first that the CCP’s penmanship pinched Indian territory. Japan objected to China’s claim of its Senkaku Islands (under U.S. military protection). 

Countries bordering the South China Sea — Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam — have long complained of China’s ridiculous nine-dash-line, claiming roughly 90 percent of the Sea and building militarized islands in the exclusive economic zones of other countries. 

In recent weeks, Chinese ships have used water cannons to block Filipino vessels attempting to resupply their countrymen on an island that international courts have ruled belongs to the Philippines. Two Vietnamese fishermen were injured last week in yet another water cannon attack by the Chinese Coast Guard around the disputed Paracel Islands.

Last week, Vietnam and the United States reached agreement on a “comprehensive strategic partnership” — something Vietnam has with only four other countries, one being China. Why? The Vietnamese see it, analysts tell The Washington Post, as “necessary given how aggressively China is flexing its military muscle in the region.”

This isn’t U.S. saber-rattling, it’s China rattling its neighbors. 

The threat of war between China and the United States is real . . . and clearly, not just over Taiwan. The Chinazis marked red lines all over the map. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Chinese Biolab in California

California, biolab, China

The abandoned biolab found last December in Reedley, California, was uncovered by local law enforcement — not the Department of Homeland Security, the CDC, the FBI, or any of the federales’ faker’s dozen of intel agencies.

But the locals quickly discovered this was not just an unregistered business, or the anodyne testing service the paperwork for the company promised. What they found in the warehouse was a suspicious array of mice, living and dead, and vials of diseases, kept, we are told, in a careless manner.

Almost as ominously, the business — Prestige Biotech, previously known as Universal Meditech Inc. — is Chinese-owned and operated. 

And had received government subsidies. 

Ours! Who knows what came from China?

“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.), who represent congressional districts in California’s Central Valley, wrote a letter to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee seeking a probe into how and why Universal Meditech Inc. was granted two Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans of $74,912 each in April 2020 and February 2021,” explains The Epoch Times.

The company had previously been awarded — but did not qualify for or actually receive — a $360,000 tax credit under California’s CalCompetes GO-Biz program.

Why wasn’t this tale told for half a year? 

“The FBI,” as Mark Tapscott writes, “imposed a blackout on any public statements about the facility.” 

“[T]he FBI and the CDC and everybody else in the alphabet soup of state and federal agencies” told locals not to comment, says Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.

Curiously, the reporting makes no mention of Homeland Security. What is that agency for, again?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Unspoken Contract

tiger chair, communism, torture

“After the Tiananmen massacre,” explained Washington Post editorial board member, Keith Richburg, “China’s rulers adopted an unspoken social compact with the population: The Communist Party offers them boundless economic growth, the opportunity to get rich and some expanded personal freedoms in exchange for its continued right to rule.”

Mr. Richburg doesn’t bother to name any of these “expanded personal freedoms” to which he refers. I’m sure the Chinese people are wondering as well.  

Richburg is certainly not alone in his delusion; one regularly hears this inane idea suggesting some sort of political legitimacy and justification for the CCP’s totalitarian state. In fact, in this same Post feature assessing China’s current economic woes, columnist Catherine Rampell likewise declared, “For generations, the Chinese Communist Party has held on to power partly through an implicit bargain with its citizenry: Sacrifice your freedoms, and, in exchange, we’ll guarantee ever-rising living standards.”

But there simply is no such bargain. No contract. No political compact between the Chinazi rulers and the Chinese people. That’s a figment of fuzzy Western elitist — and Rousseauvian — fantasy. 

The CCP doesn’t hold power via demonstrated public support. Their power flows from the barrel of a gun, as notorious mass-murderer Chairman Mao acknowledged long ago. Not to mention fear of today’s Tiger chair. 

Pretending otherwise only enables the tyranny.

Know your enemy. And if you know the Chinese state, you know it is your enemy and an enemy of the Chinese people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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It’s a Date

Taiwan, China, war, defense, freedom, technology

“Do not mess with Taiwan before 2028,” Vivek Ramaswamy instructed translators to tell Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, “before the end of my first term, okay?”

Responding to a question from Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Ramaswamy — the entrepreneur, author, and GOP presidential candidate — urged a “move from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity.”

The right idea, I guess, just not elaborated in the clear-thinking manner I have been hoping for.

You see, there was a “second part” to Ramaswamy’s foreign policy prescription. “That commitment is only as far as 2028,” he explained, “by which point I will have led the United States of America to achieve semiconductor independence, and we will not take the risk of war that risks Americans lives after that for some nationalistic dispute between China and Taiwan.”

“Some nationalistic dispute”?* Sure, between the democratic miracle of the last century and a genocidal totalitarian regime that claims it . . . along with claiming 90 percent of the South China Sea, the world’s busiest waterway.

A skeptical Hewitt heard Ramaswamy “saying ‘I will go to war, including attacking the Chinese mainland, if you attack before semiconductor independence. And afterwards, you can have Taiwan. So if you just wait until 2029, you may have Taiwan.’”

Let’s make the world safe for semiconductors! 

But . . . not for people? 

Ramaswamy’s transactional approach might make the Taiwanese feel less inclined to assist our efforts toward semiconductor independence. And what a terrible message to send other allies in the region!  

As the democratic countries of Asia and the world are stepping up and coming together to push back against Beijing’s belligerence, the U.S. ought not jeopardize this by suggesting more convenient dates for calendaring in future Chinazi invasions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* From the interview, Ramaswamy appears ignorant of Taiwanese history; namely, the fact that the Nationalist Chinese forces that fled to the island in 1949, as well as their offspring, comprise a distinct minority of the island nation’s population. Meanwhile, the native Taiwanese had been under Japanese colonial rule for the previous fifty years and, prior to that, never completely under Chinese control.

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