We Don't Have to Trade With China

Yet we do:

The Biden administration has sold nearly 6 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to an entity tied to the Chinese Communist Party, records show.

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Tortured, beaten, imprisoned, killed, and ostracized. Falun Gong practitioners have routinely suffered these abuses at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the past 23 years.

Their accounts of persecution include being sentenced to forced labor camps, shocked with electric batons, deprived of sleep, raped, denied employment or expelled from school, among many others—all because of their faith.

Victims range from children starting at the age of one—detained and forced to watch their parents being tortured—to elderly people tortured to death. The CCP’s brutal treatment of Falun Gong adherents has not spared the most vulnerable.

“The CCP’s campaign has made Falun Gong practitioners the most oppressed group in Chinese society,” reads a 2019 report titled “The 20-Year Persecution of Falun Gong in China” by Minghui, a U.S.-based website that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on three core principles: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice gained popularity in China during the 1990s, with estimates putting the number of adherents at 70 million to 100 million.

The communist regime, fearing the number of practitioners posed a threat to its authoritarian control, initiated a sweeping campaign aimed at eradicating the practice starting on July 20, 1999, a program that continues today. 

Since then, millions have been detained in prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

Detained adherents also have been victims of forced organ harvesting, which has resulted in an untold number of practitioners being killed for their organs to supply the organ transplant market in China.

Because that worked so well the last time:

Chinese President Xi Jinping offered Sri Lanka's new president his support on Friday, state broadcaster CCTV reported, as the Indian Ocean island grapples with its worst economic crisis in decades.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, a lawyer who served as Sri Lanka's prime minister a record six times, was sworn in on Thursday in the face of fierce public opposition.

Sri Lanka's crisis sparked months of mass protests and eventually forced then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country.

In his message, Xi said he believes Sri Lanka will be able to move towards economic and social recovery and he is "ready to provide support and assistance to the best of my ability to President Wickremesinghe and the people of Sri Lanka in their efforts", CCTV reported.

Sri Lanka owes at least $5 billion to China although some estimates put it at almost twice that amount. India has also lent it $3.8 billion and Japan is owed at least $3.5 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund, with another $1 billion due to other rich countries.

Don't worry. Rajapaksa is on his way back.

Interesting:

China Evergrande Group’s Chief Executive Officer Xia Haijun was forced to resign as the embattled property developer tries to strike a restructuring deal to resolve $300 billion of liabilities that have roiled the nation’s real estate market.