My China Boycott

Last year, I stopped buying products made in China -- clothes, furniture, office supplies, everything.

It wasn't about Muslims in concentration camps.  It wasn't about live prisoners' bodies being carved up for organ donations.  It wasn't about intellectual property theft.  It wasn't about illegal shipments of fentanyl to our shores.  It wasn't about trying to quell free speech in Hong Kong or the United States.  It wasn't about the coronavirus, which we only learned about this year.

It was about all of it. 

This is not a personal condemnation of everything Chinese.  I have met many Chinese people, and I like them.  I am happy to have immigrant Chinese friends.

And I do not hold myself out as a foreign policy expert.  I expect our country to continue to work with China on various issues.  It would be folly not to engage with a nation of 1.4 billion people.

But for me, at least for this moment, too much is enough.  

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1.  Here is a roundup of the scope of "re-education camps" now detaining Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang province.

2.  This is the official release of an international investigation into China's use of prisoners' organs for transplants.   More detail can be found here.

3.  This 2019 piece describes increasing numbers of U.S. deaths ascribed to fentanyl.  This one and this one describe how Chinese fentanyl winds up in the U.S.

A third report, published in California last week, said this:

The number of heroin and fentanyl overdose deaths in San Francisco more than doubled in 2019, according to the city’s medical examiner’s office statistics . . . .  Officials said 290 deaths involved fentanyl and heroin last year compared to 134 in 2018. Fentanyl was involved in 234 deaths, up from 90 in 2018.

4.  This December document from a federal court describes the case against a Chinese man charged with shipping 40-foot containers of counterfeit "Nike" and "Louis Vuitton" sneakers to ports in New York and New Jersey over a period of six years.  This 2018 news story describes a different prosecution involving 27,000 pairs of "Nike Air Jordans" shipped to the same two ports.
           But catching two shippers of counterfeit sneakers at two American ports is nothing in the broader scheme.
           This story suggests that e-commerce, including goods sold on Amazon, is a growing channel for Chinese counterfeiters.  
          This post, from a security company, says the scope of counterfeiting runs from fashion to toys to pharmaceuticals and that 88 percent of the fake stuff comes from China.
          As a practical matter, not buying Chinese products is getting more difficult, even on Amazon.  Last year, Chinese products were shipped to Vietnam, relabeled and then sent to the U.S. to avoid tariffs.

5.  China has tried to build its scientific and military credibility on the cheap, with bribes and outright theft.  Last week, a prominent Harvard chemist whose lab did work for US defense agencies was arrested for lying for years about his affiliations with a university in Wuhan, apparently for money.  This 2017 article describes other examples of stolen technology.
       Even the Russians are steamed about Chinese theft of their military research.

6.  Huawei, a theoretically private Chinese company, is a particularly troubling outfit.
        A story last summer described its rewards program for employees who steal other companies' intellectual property, plus its flat-out theft of a Texas company's product design and subsequent marketing of the same product under the Huawei name.
        Also last summer, Huawei was reported to be helping set up citizen-surveillance systems for governments in Uganda and Zambia and possibly other countries on the continent -- rather as the Chinese government keeps track of its own citizens.
       (In fact, China is active in Africa.  A 2018 story reported African Union leaders' charges that monitors and bugs were incorporated into a new $200 million Chinese-built AU headquarters in Ethiopia.)
       At the moment, a senior Huawei official is facing an extradition hearing in Canada.  The US wants to prosecute her for fraud -- effectively using sham corporate identities to violate US-Iran trade sanctions, plus stealing US communications technology.  The Chinese have denied all the charges and retaliated by detaining two Canadian citizens for more than a year.

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There is much more that could be said, but I believe I have made my point.

My primary objection is based on human rights, and my reasoning is this:  If a company in my town discriminated against people of any group, I wouldn't do business there. 

I can't do anything personally about the damage in matters from defense to commerce.  It took centuries for countries and companies to build webs of trust in their dealings with each other.  Now those systems are being undermined by a government whose only ethical construct seems to be that it's perfectly fine to do anything as long as you can get away with it.  I find that troubling, but I'm not in a position to do anything about it.  

Mostly I do not want to feel complicit anymore.

I don't think I'm the only one.

Updates

9/23/19 -- Verified footage of Chinese soldiers averting terrorism by escorting hundreds of handcuffed Uyghur men, heads shaved and blindfolded, through a train station.

2/10/20 -- Four Chinese military members were arrested and charged with a 2017 cyber-theft that netted the personal information of 147 million Americans.  You may remember it: The Equifax hack.  My credit card was cancelled and a new card sent to another address last month; the bank said the fraudsters used information from that hack.  

2/11/20 -- More than half the products sold on Amazon come from third party sellers, and much of that merchandise is counterfeit.

2/13/20 -- The U.S. Department of Justice added three new charges against four additional Huawei subsidiaries to its RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Operation) prosecution of the Chinese tech giant.

2/13/20 -- A Chinese diplomat floats the idea that the American military brought Covid-19 to Wuhan.

3/15/20 -- The world accepted uncritically the Chinese report of a "donated" double-lung transplant from a brain-dead patient to a Covid-19 patient whose lungs had failed.  The European human rights journal Bitter Winter is skeptical.

3/18/20 -- A Wuhan doctor says Chinese officials silenced her coronavirus warnings in December, costing thousands their lives.

3/28/20 -- Observations on the ground suggest the CCP has drastically understated the number of Covid-19 deaths in Wuhan.

4/5/20 -- An Australian newspaper challenges Beijing's statements about Covid-19.

4/7/20 -- The UK ordered millions of antibody tests from China, but has concluded the tests don't work.

4/1/20 -- Short- and long-term historical perspective from a former US National Security Advisor.

4/15/20 -- While the world is distracted by SARS-Cov-2, China has stepped up its activity against Hong Kong and Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

4/23/20 -- Canada refuses to use a million faulty KN 95 masks purchased from China, following a 60,000-flimsy mask purchase by Toronto.  Similar complaints from Spain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Turkey.

5/7/20 -- The US Food and Drug Administration finds only fourteen of the previously approved Chinese mask contractors' products are reliable enough for importation.

5/11/20 -- A university professor in Arkansas was charged with wire fraud, presumably related to shared research from his US-funded High Density Electronics Center; reports say the professor received more than $5 million for his work in China. 

5/11/20 -- A medical researcher  and former professor in Georgia pled guilty to tax fraud for not declaring $500,00 in income relating to his unrevealed affiliation with two Chinese universities over six years.  The professor received NIH funding in the US for large-animal research. 

5/20/20 -- An Australian university prosecutes a student for speech that is critical of China.  

China.

6/13/20 -- More than 1,300 Chinese medical device companies, in reports to the FDA, report the same false US address, a brick house in Delaware whose tenants and landlord knew nothing about any of the companies.

5/20/20 -- After hand-to-hand battle along the Himalayan border with China leaves 20 Indian soldiers dead, the Times of India finds that 87 percent of Indian citizens want to boycott products made in China.

6/25/20 -- After lifting its one-child restriction on Han Chinese families, China is forcing sterilizations and birth control on its Uyghur population.

6/26/20 -- ASEAN members claim China has ignored a 1982 treaty in actions in the East China Sea,

7/1/20 -- China tightens down on Hong Kong.

7/2/20 --  Foreign Affairs
                Hong Kong has been absorbed into Mainland China.

7/2/20 -- US customs officials in New York/New Jersey seize  13 tons of human hair shipped from China's Xinjiang province, where more than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs are held in concentration camps. 

7/5/20 -- Wall Street Journal
             "HONG KONG—Internationally peer-reviewed journals published more than 100 scientific research papers from China-based authors that appear to have reused identical sets of images, raising questions about the proliferation of problematic science as institutions fast-track research during the coronavirus pandemic.
             "The cache of 121 papers, credited to researchers from hospitals and medical universities across roughly 50 cities in China, all shared at least one image with another—a sign that many were likely produced by the same company or “paper mill,” said Elisabeth Bik, a California-based microbiologist and image-analysis expert who identified the trove."

7/8/20 -- The Times of London
               Uyghur representatives present evidence of Chinese genocide and crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court.

7/8/20 -- MIT Technology Review
                New laws from Beijing restrict Hong Kongers' internet access and assure greater surveillance, plus punishments for thoughtcrimes.

7/16/20 -- It's not just banks.  Techcrunch reports that VPN operators are planning to relocate servers out of Hong Kong.

7/19/20 -- New York Times
                 China is using Uyghur labor (presumably forced) to produce face masks that are marketed in the United States and other countries.

7/20/20 -- Daily Mail
                 Description of daily life for Uyghurs in Xinjian concentration camps.  (Not advised for the faint of heart.)

7/21/20 -- New York Times
                 U.S. officials have charged two Chinese researchers of working with Chinese security agencies to hack into American efforts to develop a  SARS-Covid-19 vaccine.  This follows by a similar charge two weeks ago about Russian efforts to hack similar research.

7/30/20 -- Uyghurs for Sale
                 This dense but worthwhile report from the Australian Strategic Police Institute, an independent think tank, examines the redistribution of Uyghurs from Xinjiang province to work in factories in other parts of China and, to the extent possible, examines the degree to which forced labor is employed to manufacture products for Western companies. 
                   In one case, "... a factory in eastern China that manufactures shoes for US company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences and police guard boxes."
                   From the report:  "In all, ASPI’s research has identified 82 foreign and Chinese companies directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uyghur workers outside Xinjiang through potentially abusive labour transfer programs as recently as 2019: Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Motors, Google, Goertek, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE. Some brands are linked with multiple factories."

8/9/20 -- Associated Press

                   "Hong Kong authorities broadened their enforcement of a new national security law on Monday, arresting media tycoon Jimmy Lai, searching the headquarters of his Next Digital group and carting away boxes of what they said was evidence. . . . Lai, 71, is an outspoken pro-democracy figure who regularly criticizes China’s authoritarian rule and Hong Kong’s government."

8/10/20 -- New York Times

                   "Why Is China Coming After Americans Like Me in the U.S.?" by Samuel Chu.

8/12/20 -- Wall St. Journal: TikTok Tracked Users' Data with a Tactic Google Banned

                      "The tactic, which experts in mobile-phone security said was concealed through an unusual added layer of encription, wasn't disclosed to TikTok users."

                      Tik Tok employs more than 130 members of the CCP, China's ruling party.  Most of those CCP members work in management or technical positions.

August 17 --  Radio Free Asia: "Xinjiang Hospitals Aborted, Killed Babies Outside Family Planning Limits: Uyghur Obstetrician:"   

                      "Abdulla told RFA that hospital family-planning units carried out the operations, including for women who were 'eight and nine months pregnant,' adding that in some cases, medical staff would 'even kill the babies after they’d been born.'"

August 27 -- BuzzFeed News

                      "China has secretly built scores of massive new prison and internment camps in the past three years, dramatically escalating its campaign against Muslim minorities even as it publicly claimed the detainees had all been set free. "

September 1 -- New spy charges: Faculty and researchers at at UCLA, at Texas A&M, at the University of Virginia and at The Ohio State University, at the Cleveland Clinic and  NASA/University of Arkansas.

8/22/20 -- Reuters 

                         "More than 500,000 Tibetans have been transferred to Chinese training centers since the beginning of 2020, as an existing mass labor initiative expanded in the region. The figure accounts for roughly 15 percent of Tibet's total population." 

                       

8/29/20 -- Washington Post: 

                         "As repression mounts, China under Xi Jinping feels increasingly like North Korea" by  reporter who has visited both.  Also reflections on Xinjiang province then and now.

8/29/20 -- BBC News:  

                         China's most famous expat artist, Ai Weiwei:  "The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it's already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That's why China is very arrogant."

9/6/20 -- Reuters

                         Frozen raspberries from China were routed through New Zealand to Chile, relabeled as organic Chilean products and then sent to Canada over several years, where they may have caused a norovirus outbreak in Quebec.

12/1/20 -- Business Insider

                           Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple reportedly lobbied to weaken a Congressional bill aimed at preventing them from manufacturing products in China using forced Uighur labor.

12/4/20 -- Reuters

                            Virtually unheard of a decade ago, these Chinese players are ... routing cartel drug profits from the United States to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders ....

                            Most contact with the banking system happens in China, a veritable black hole for U.S. and Mexican authorities.

12/4/20 -- Ready to invest in China?

                             I don't do US politics, but I follow numbers and finance.   This Shanghai speech is creepy, and a post from the Assange-supporting journalist puts it into context.

12/22/20 -- Reuters

                             A Hong Kong family leaves the only home they've known for Scotland, which they never have visited, to provide a better future for their children.

Harry Wu, RIP

Hary Wu on a return visit to China

Very few people survive the great outrages of history.  Fewer still stand up and force the world to pay attention.

One of these, Harry Wu, died two weeks ago.

Wu was raised in Shanghai and by age 23 in 1960 considered himself a communist during the period of the country's grotesquely named Great Leap Forward.  As he was completing his college degree in geology, he made two insufficiently servile comments about the elite status of Communist Party members and the USSR's 1956 invasion of Hungary.

For these, he was hustled off to a forced labor camp where he learned that he had received a life sentence. His family did not know what happened to him for years (during which period his father was tortured and a brother was persecuted and tortured until he descended into madness.)  When his stepmother learned his fate, she killed herself.

Wu spent 19 years in 12 camps, being tortured and beaten, working 12-hour shifts in coal mines and fields and augmenting his starvation diet by foraging in rats' nests for concealed seeds.  In 1979, three years after the death of Mao Zedong, Wu was released and returned to the study of geology.

A year later, he was offered a non-paid teaching job in the geology department at the University of California, Berkeley.  He arrived in the U.S. with $40 in his pocket and stayed a week with a sister who had immigrated many years earlier and made clear that he was not welcome in her Bay Area home.

He worked days and slept nights in parks or on commuter trains.  Eventually he got a (probably illegal) job making donuts on the midnight shift, which allowed him to feed himself and sleep in Berkeley libraries during the daytime hours when he was not teaching.

Gradually he shared his labor camp stories with colleagues who encouraged him to speak out in his new country, where a person could say what he wished without being sent to prison.

This became his life's work.  Wu wrote three books about laogai (the name of the Chinese labor camp system, which translates as "reform through work"), the system that enslaved him and millions of other Chinese citizens, many of whom died of starvation and execution and untreated diseases.

One of the books, "Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag," was described this way in a Los Angeles Times book review:

        "Bitter Winds" deserves to be compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag
       Archipelago" as an achingly intimate account of what happened to millions of
       innocent  men and women in the secret penal realm of the People's Republic. And
       there's a strong dose of Kafka and Orwell in Wu's tales of a world so twisted by
       revolutionary ardor that every decent human impulse became a crime.

Starting in 1992, Wu returned to China several times, at great personal risk, to document that the laogai system still was operating.  He demonstrated that the government was harvesting the body organs of dead prisoners for transplants and that officials of the one-child policy were forcing women to abort unapproved pregnancies.

Significantly, he proved that more than a few of the products China was shipping to U.S. under new open-trade policies were manufactured by political prisoners.  This was not what people in the George H.W. Bush administration wanted to hear.

Later, after earning U.S. citizenship in 1994, Wu made another documentation trip in 1995.  This time, he was caught, jailed and sentenced to a 15-year prison term.

I lived in the Bay Area during this period.  People there knew Wu's story, admired his courage and agitated for his release.

Meantime, then-first lady Hillary Clinton was planning to attend a UN women's conference in China, and she seemed to view Wu's situation as an irritating distraction from her travel plans.  Ironically, perhaps, Wu was released after 66 days in prison, almost certainly to placate the Clinton administration.

Once back, Wu founded the Laogai Research Foundation and started a Laogai Museum in Washington, D.C.  He hoped one day to move both to China.

As relations between the U.S. and China became increasingly normalized, Wu's activism came to be regarded as annoying.  The idea here seemed to be this:  Things are better in China now, so why don't you pipe down?

If I had spent 19 years in slave labor camps for no good reason, I don't think I'd be willing to move on so fast myself.

Wu's goal, he said in one speech, was to place the laogai in its historical context -- with Nazi exterminations, Stalinist gulags and the Pol Pot regime's killing of 25 percent of the population of Cambodia.

He did not try to exact vengeance but to set the record straight.  He took an outrageous life experience and forced the larger facts of the matter into the open.  He left this world a better place than he found it.


The Chinese Memory Hole

China has been opening up in recent years, but there are parts of its 20th century history that the ruling Communist Party would like to pretend never happened.

Harry Wu made this difficult for the Chinese leadership, but he was not the only one.

In 1989, Chinese students staged an uprising in Tiananman Square in Beijing.  What they wanted was democracy.  The army was turned on the students, and an unknown number were killed.
         Liu Xiaobo, a university professor, supported the students and for this lost his job.  He wrote books about Chinese human rights violations (published elsewhere of course) and has been in and out of Chinese jails ever since.  In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts and, presumably, to make him prominent enough to avoid the worst depradations of his government.
          Liu is still under house arrest in China.  Chinese schools are still do not teach about the Tiananmen Square uprising.


In 2008 came the release of "Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962," a remarkable compilation of history and personal death records. Its author, journalist Yang Jisheng, spent more than 15 years researching information that might never have come to light otherwise.
          Tombstone is the story of a man-made famine (ascribed to naive-to-totalitarian central planning) in which 36 million Chinese people starved.  Later commenters have suggested the death toll was greater by several million or more.
          Tombstone of course is banned in China, but a version was published in western countries in 2012. Yang remains in China, but two months ago the government denied him the right to visit the U.S. and receive an award for his book.

Last year, I wrote about Ai WeiWei, a prominent Chinese artist who has been beaten, jailed and harrassed.
           Also last year, a dissident journalist trying to leave the country was tracked down in Thailand, returned to China and jailed.
           Last year and the year before, Hong Kong students mounted massive and increasingly violent protests against China's suppression of democratic elections.  The concept, when Britain turned Hong Kong over to China, was "one country, two systems," but Beijing seems not to be totally on board with the two-systems part of the deal.


Note

Brave Chinese individuals continue to resist a top-down government that hides unpleasant truths.  But the truth will come out eventually.

As of this year, more than 300,000 Chinese students are enrolled at American universities, and thousands of others study at schools in other Western countries.

While those students are here, they have access to websites of Chinese commentary that are blocked inside China.  They have access to news reports and histories of post-war China that are not available at home. While they study abroad, they can observe other government systems and consider what changes they might like to see in their own country.

Thinking About China: Growth Stories

Chinese economic growth is slowing.  The only question is by how much.  

Last week, China reported that its third-quarter growth rate was 6.9 percent on an annualized basis.  This was down from 7 percent in the first half of 2015.  You can see the official trend in the chart below.  

Here's my problem with the chart:  I'm not sure I believe it.  

The Chinese growth target for this year was 7.5 percent.  Some China watchers believe the real growth rate at this point is between three and four percent.  

China has absorbed some shocks this year.  It is possible that its government is trying to put things in an optimistic light.

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"If someone told me that the real statistic for Chinese growth was zero percent, I would find that quite believable," a journalist told an American industrial group in a speech last August, two months before the recent GDP report. 

The journalist, China-based Adam Minter, described why official GDP reports might clash with facts on the ground.  According to a report on his talk:

     Minter cited a 2007 diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks in which then-U.S. 

     Ambassador to China Clark T. Randt Jr. summarized a conversation he had with

     Li Keqiang, who at the time was the Party secretary of Liaoning.

     "(Gross domestic product) figures are manmade. . . . They're unreliable" and 

     "for reference only," Li was quoted as saying. 

     Minter said, "(Li) is now the premier of the State Council of China, the top person

     behind China's economic policies. . . . (Li) told Randt he focuses on three

     figures to evaluate the economy:  electricity consumption, rail cargo and the 

     amount of loans disbursed."

Minter said all three of Li's indicators had dropped substantially in the first half of 2015.  

"Things are very, very, very bad in China," Minter told the group.

(Minter is the author of "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade," which outlines how first-world recyclables are turned into valuable products in Asia.  He also contributes to major American publications and publishes a personal blog, ShanghaiScrap.)

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Jefferies and Fitch Ratings said a slowdown in Chinese manufacturing was affecting inbound and outbound shipping volume and reducing cargo fees substantially.  (Each group took the reported 6.9 percent GDP growth number at face value and noted that China also had reported a six-month low rate of 5.7 annualized growth in industrial output.)

A Wall St. Journal article reported last month that U.S. exports to China are down, partly because China's three-percent devaluation of its currency has made dollar-denominated American products more expensive.  "September was the eighth straight month in which empty containers leaving (the Port of) Long Beach outnumbered those loaded with exports,"  the article said.

There are worries that if China's economy slows, an even worse worldwide slowdown will follow.  For the U.S., whose sales to China are less than eight percent of exports, this would be a smaller problem than, say, for Brazil, which already has budget problems and which counts China as its major export client, buying iron ore, soybeans and chicken. 

In other cases -- steel sales to the U.S., steel and solar panel sales to European countries, tire sales in India -- other countries' manufacturers and unions are complaining that China is dumping industrial products at below-market costs.  They believe China would rather operate its businesses at a loss to keep workers employed and citizens happy.  There are worries that China will drop the value of the yuan further to make its products more competitive on world markets.

-----

Several of my friends do business in China.  Recent developments, among others, are interesting to them, but they seem to take matters in stride.

"It's always a wild time China," said one.  "Right now things are just wilder than usual."

Cracking the Whip in Hong Kong

People in Hong Kong are restive these days, and with good reason.  The Chinese government has decided that only Beijing-selected candidates will be allowed to run for Hong Kong's chief executive job in its 2017 election.

Since the announcement, there have been demonstrations in the streets.   Great big, peaceful demonstrations.  No broken windows, no looting, no violence.  (Some Americans protest groups could learn from this example.)

Hong Kong's current chief executive sent the police to break up the demonstrations with tear gas and pepper spray.  Now the demonstrators want him to resign.  Who can blame them?

The Chinese government has blocked access to Instagram photos of the demonstrations in both China and Hong Kong.  I do not believe in the suppression of information, and so I am posting a couple Instagram pictures below, just to get them out there.

Hong Kong was ceded to China by the British in 1997, with the understanding that it would be governed separately.   It was agreed, among other particulars, that Hong Kong's citizens would have the right to demonstrate.

"One country, two systems" was the mantra at the time, but strains between two such different systems were almost certainly inevitable.

In fact, China has opened up a bit over the years, but it continues to have problems with the free speech thing.

An editorial in yesterday's Global Times, which seems to be a house organ of the Chinese Communist Party, said the following:

     "The radical activists are doomed.  Opposition groups know well it's impossible to alter
     the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress . . . ."

(Blatantly false terms like "radical activists" and "National People's Congress" always make me think of George Orwell and Newspeak.)

Anyway, the Global Times editorial acknowledged China's 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and said things are completely different now.

     "Recent years have witnessed many severe mass incidents, but none had the ability to disturb
     the thinking of society.   China has tackled these incidents smoothly."

Tear gas, pepper spray.  "The thinking of society."  "Tackled. . .  smoothly."  Hmm.

The situation now seems to be a stalemate.  The demonstrators aren't going home.  The Chinese continue to insist that they will choose Hong Kong's political candidates.  The worry is that China will send in the People's Liberation Army (more Newspeak), as was done in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago.

In reading about the Hong Kong demonstrations, I came upon an interesting group called New Tang Dynasty (NTD) that operates out of New York, covers much of the world and has an audience of more than 100 million.  It broadcasts cultural shows and children's programming as well as news reports. I hope the NTD will not object to my sharing one of its recent posts, which includes public reaction to the suppression of information about events in Hong Kong.




Note:  The Chinese government has made clear for decades that it wishes to absorb prosperous, democratic, peaceful Taiwan into China.  The people of Taiwan must look across the Formosa Strait and shudder at the thought.