We Don't Have to Trade With China

And yet ... :

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen told Pope Francis in a letter that war with China is “not an option” and said constructive interaction with Beijing, which claims the island as part of its territory, depends on respecting self-ruled Taiwan's democracy.

Vatican City is the last European government to have diplomatic relations with Taiwan instead of Beijing, although the United States and other Western nations maintain extensive informal ties. Taiwanese leaders are uneasy about Vatican efforts to develop relations with Beijing.

 

Aren't we all? 

**

The biggest problem is that the CCP leadership never prepared an alternative to its zero-COVID policy. Government officials were too busy extolling their COVID-19 success story as proof of the supremacy of China’s political system and the effectiveness of Xi Jinping’s leadership to draft a Plan B. The central government has changed course without any clear exit strategy.

** 

Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the “Hundred Childless Days” campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the “one-child policy.” The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991. As local accounts attest, authorities in the area went to extraordinarily inhumane lengths to be the “best” at reproducing the least.

In what some locals called “the slaughter of the lambs,” women across Guan County were rounded up for forced abortions or induction of labor; one local official claims that these “procedures” were sometimes no more than a kick in the stomach from an out-of-town mercenary. Children who did make it into the world were reportedly strangled, and their bodies tossed into open pits. The families of pregnant women were publicly shamed in reprises of the Cultural Revolution.

Under the one-child policy, local officials in China were responsible for implementing broad guidelines from the central government about family planning quotas, leaving little oversight of how localities reached their target birth rates. In some extreme cases, such as in Guan County, this led to gruesome abuses. While the “one-child policy” was loosened to a two-child policy in 2015, its lingering effects will only be felt more acutely in the coming years. As China’s population ages and may be shrinking, the economic and social repercussions wrought by a generation of curtailed births are only just beginning to sting.

 

As I keep saying, it's a cult.