What have they done for us lately?:
Federal regulators yesterday fined the Canadian operations of China’s largest state-controlled bank. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China paid $701,250 for breach of the Proceeds Of Crime And Terrorist Financing Act, the largest penalty of its kind issued this year: “We will be firm.”
"Firm" people shut down embassies.
Also:
Forty per cent of Canadians expect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to land on Santa’s “naughty” list this holiday season — and they think he’s more likely to wake up to a lump of coal than Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to a new Ipsos poll.
Ipsos asked Canadians about whether a list of high-profile individuals — from political leaders, to CEOs, to celebrities — belong on Santa’s “nice” list or his “naughty” list.
Canadians who responded to the survey said Trudeau was more likely to end up on the naughty list than the Chinese president, who heads the government that detained two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, for more than 1,000 days.
The Chinese government has also been accused of committing genocide against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region.
“It’s probably just a lack of awareness of who (Xi) is,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, said in an interview with Global News.
The poll found 26 per cent of Canadians would put Xi on the naughty list, while 40 per cent would do the same to Trudeau. Just three per cent said Xi belongs on Santa’s “nice’ list.
It wouldn't surprise me if Canadians didn't know who Xi was but they do know who wore blackface and who did absolutely nothing while both Michaels languished in prison and they know why.
Now, the juvenile tripe aside, who is willing to turf Justin?
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The Chinese Communist Party has been constructing a moral ranking system for years that will monitor the behavior of its enormous population — and rank them all based on their "social credit."
The "social credit system," first announced in 2014, is "an important component part of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system" and aims to reinforce the idea that "keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful," according to a 2015 government document.
The rankings are decided by China's economics planning team, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China, and the Chinese court system, according to the South China Morning Post.
The system can be used for individual people, but also for companies and government organizations. The private sector, including the burgeoning tech world in China, has their own non-governmental scoring systems that they implement, as Wired reported.
Why, it's like the Canadian government spying on people with cell phone carriers' help.
It's never good when these guys are all chummy:
Last week Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly demanded that the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bar Ukraine from its military alliance, move troops, weapons and installations from its eastern flank and issue “security guarantees” about the future of the region.
“The ball is in their court,” Putin said at a news conference last week. “They need to respond to us with something.”
While Western officials responded with indignation, saying Putin would not tell NATO what to do, Chinese President Xi Jinping applauded Putin’s brinkmanship. At a video summit last week with Putin, Xi denounced the U.S. and NATO for “interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia,” according to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua.
The increasingly warm relations between China and Russia are raising eyebrows, as well as the potential stakes, across the Western world, but the tensions with Washington have been building for months.
If only there were a non-senile tough man in the Oval Office to thwart this alliance.
Yes, but Lithuania is still a honey badger:
China threatened to consign the tiny European state of Lithuania to "the garbage bin of history" after it defied Beijing by allowing Taiwan to open a representative office in the capital of Vilnius.
Lithuania, which has a population of 3 million, broke from its European neighbors by formally recognizing Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims belongs to it.
In August, Lithuania said it would allow Taiwan to open an office in its own name, prompting fury from Beijing, which recalled its ambassador to Lithuania in response. It also downgraded diplomatic relations with Lithuania.
The Japanese don't want to be kidnapped:
Japan will not send a delegation of ministers to next year's Beijing Olympics following a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Games to protest human rights conditions in China.
However, the country said it will send officials with direct ties to the competition, including politician Seiko Hashimoto, head of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, as well as the heads of the domestic Olympic and Paralympic committees.
Chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a regular news conference: "We have no plans to send a government delegation."
And - yes, it's always someone else's fault:
Organisers of the Beijing Winter Olympics said on Thursday they expect a "certain number" of COVID-19 cases in China due to foreigners arriving for the Games, and strongly urged participants to get vaccination boosters due to the spread of the Omicron variant.
Also:
Japanese and U.S. armed forces have drawn up a draft plan for a joint operation for a possible Taiwan emergency, Japan's Kyodo news agency said on Thursday, citing unnamed Japanese government sources, amid increased tensions between the island and China.
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Japan's Cabinet approved a record 5.4 trillion yen ($47 billion) defense budget for fiscal 2022 on Friday that includes funding for research and development of a new fighter jet and other “game-changing” weapons as Japan bolsters its defense capabilities in response to China’s growing military might and its tensions with Taiwan.
The 1.1% budget increase for the year beginning in April is the 10th consecutive defense spending increase and is in line with Japan’s pledge to the United States to strengthen its own defense capabilities to tackle increasingly challenging security issues in the region.
The budget, which still needs to be approved by parliament, includes a record 291 billion yen ($2.55 billion) for defense research and development, up 38% from the current year.
Of that, 100 billion yen ($870 million) is for development of the F-X fighter jet to replace Japan’s aging fleet of F-2 aircraft around 2035. It would be Japan's first domestically developed fighter jet in 40 years.
Japan and Britain recently announced joint development of a future demonstration fighter jet engine and agreed to explore further combat air technologies and subsystems. The project includes Mitsubishi and IHI in Japan and Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems in the U.K.
Don't do it, Solomon Islands! It's a trap!:
China will send police officers to the Solomon Islands to help train its police force, the Pacific island nation said on Thursday, after rioting last month sparked by the country's 2019 switch of diplomatic relations to Beijing from Taiwan.
Greed helped make China what it is:
U.S. chip maker Intel is facing a backlash from China after telling its suppliers not to source products or labour from the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
The Tienanmen Square massacre was never a black enough mark for the West to stop trading with China:
A memorial to the Tiananmen Square massacre which stood at the University of Hong Kong has been taken down by the school amid a Chinese crackdown on political dissent.
The statue depicted a pile of corpses to commemorate the hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators who were gunned down by Chinese authorities in Beijing in 1989.
Beijing has been clamping down on dissent in Hong Kong with many of the city’s opposition politicians – most notably the majority of the ‘NSL 47’ – in prison pending trial or in exile overseas.
Human rights groups and activists have criticised the removal of the Pillar of Shame that has been standing for 24 years.
Also:
Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Wednesday endorsed Hong Kong’s first legislative elections held under new laws ensuring that only “patriots” who have shown loyalty to Beijing could run as candidates.
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China has replaced Chen Quanguo, who as Communist Party chief in the Xinjiang region oversaw a security crackdown targeting ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims in the name of fighting religious extremism.
Chen, in his post since 2016, will move to another role and Ma Xingrui, governor of the coastal economic powerhouse Guangdong province since 2017, has replaced him, the official Xinhua News Agency said on Saturday. It gave no other details.
United Nations researchers and human rights activists estimate more than one million Muslims have been detained in camps in western China's Xinjiang region. China rejects accusations of abuse, describing the camps as vocational centres designed to combat extremism, and in late 2019 said all people in the camps had "graduated".
Chen, 66, is a member of China's politburo and is widely considered to be the senior official responsible for the security crackdown in Xinjiang. He was sanctioned last year by the United States.
President Joe Biden on December 15 "smirked and walked away" when a reporter wanted to know why he has not asked Beijing "to do more to be transparent on the origins" of COVID-19.
China's coronavirus has now killed more than 806,400 Americans, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
China lied about the contagiousness of COVID-19 and then, while locking down China, pressured other countries to take arrivals from its soil without restrictions or quarantines.
The spread of the disease outside the People's Republic, therefore, was the inevitable result of Chinese policies. In other words, China's leaders have now deliberately killed more than 5.3 million people outside their country.
The President did not raise the issue of the disease's origins during his two-hour phone call with Chinese ruler Xi Jinping in February. Nor did he talk about it during their three-and-a-half-hour "virtual meeting" in November. It does not appear Biden discussed the matter during a 90-minute phone call in September with Xi.
"The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them," Biden said in an August 27 statement, as he released a summary of the findings of the U.S. intelligence community on the disease's origins.
The American president evidently understands that China's Communist Party is a bad actor when it comes to the coronavirus. "Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People's Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it," he also stated August 27.
Yet Biden is apparently not interested in getting to the bottom of the matter. When it comes to China, he has become a master of empty words.
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