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If you read the Time Magainze piece this morning you will need to read The Thirty Tyrants next. What is going on isn't complicated but it isn't reported so you aren't to blame if you aren't up to speed. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants
2/ Nearly every major US industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.
3/ The film industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and appease Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous market without observing CCP redlines.
4/ In the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any version anywhere in the world.
5/ Apple, Nike, & Coke lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Mike Pompeo announced the US determined that China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.
6/ That announcement makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.
7/ The historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle.
8/ Senate GOP leader McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to one of the wealthiest senators.
9/ The CIA openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine US institutions. The CIA bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence & interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies.
10/ It’s no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.
11/ Loathing Trump provided their political excuse, but the US security and defense establishment had their own interest in turning a blind eye to China. 20 years of squandering men, money, and prestige on military engagements that began in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”...
12/ ... have proved to be of little strategic value to the US. However, deploying Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly benefited Beijing.
13/ Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil.
14/ “There’s a belief that we are not in the same type of conflict with them as we were with the USSR,” says the former Obama official. “But we are.” The problem is that virtually all of the US establishment—which is centered in the Democratic Party—is firmly on the other side.
15/ As late as the summer of 2019, Trump looked like he was headed for a second term in the White House. Not only was the economy soaring and unemployment at record lows, he was rallying on the very field on which he’d chosen to confront his opponents.
16/ Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. In July, top American tech firms like Dell and HP announced they were going to shift a large portion of their production outside of China.
17/ It was at exactly this same moment, in late June and early July of 2019 that the residents of Wuhan began to fill the streets, angry that officials responsible for the health and prosperity of the city’s 11 million people had betrayed them.
18/ They were sick, & feared getting sicker. The elderly gasped for breath. Marchers held up banners saying, “we don't want to be poisoned, we just need a breath of fresh air.” Parents worried for their children.
19/ What sent the residents of Wuhan to the streets at the time wasn’t COVID-19—which wouldn’t begin its spread until the winter. In the early summer of 2019, what threatened public health in Wuhan was the plague of air pollution.
20/ When a real virus hit in the fall of 2019, Chinese authorities followed the same protocol, quarantining not just prospective troublemakers but everyone in Wuhan in the hope of avoiding an even larger public outcry than the one they’d quelled just months before.
21/ There is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had never been previously employed as a public health measure. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.
22/ After Biden’s election, China’s foreign minister called for a reset of U.S.-China relations but Chinese activists says Biden policy toward China is already set.
23/ “I’m very skeptical of a Biden administration because I am worried he will allow China to go back to normal, which is a 21st-century genocide of the Uyghurs,” one human rights activist told The New York Times after the election.
24/ In November a video circulated on social media purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese think tank close to the Beijing government. “Trump waged a trade war against us,” he told a Chinese audience.
25/ “Why couldn’t we handle him? Between 92-16, we always resolved issues with the U.S.? Because we had people up there. In US’s core circle of power, we have some old friends. The crowd laughed. During the last 3-4 decades, we took advantage of America’s core circle."
26/ What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.
