Bernie Sanders Gets China Wrong
G7 Defends Hong Kong
And chaos reigns at China’s first Costco
That and more on this week’s China Uncensored.
This is China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
This week’s China news headlines!
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders
was one of the first US Senators
to come out hard against China.
Here he is in 1994,
arguing against granting China
most favored nation trade status.
“Mr. Speaker, when multinational corporations
throw American workers out on the street,
and move to China where workers are paid 15
cents an hour,
where slave labor exists,
where basic democratic rights are ignored,
where workers cannot organize free trade unions—
that scenario may be good for
the profit margins of the large corporations,
but it is a disaster for American workers.
It is absurd to be talking about
most favored trading nation status
for a country which allows for
the ruthless exploitation of its workers.”
Wow, if Twitter had existed in 1994,
Donald Trump would have tweeted pretty much
the same thing.
So what does Sanders think now?
“I think China is a country that is moving
unfortunately
in a more authoritarian way in a number of
directions.”
Well, they’ve been authoritarian since the
beginning,
but carry on.
“But what we have to say about China in
fairness to China
and it’s leadership is if I’m not mistaken
they have made more progress in addressing
extreme poverty
than any country in the history of civilization,
so they’ve done a lot of things for their
people.”
Oh, Bernie.
Yes, they’ve done a lot of things for their
people.
Like the slave labor and ruthless exploitation
of workers
you mentioned back in 1994!
Unfortunately it seems Sanders may have fallen
victim
to a common piece of Communist Party propaganda—
“China has lifted more than 700 million
people out of poverty.”
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party
is like a giant arcade claw machine,
gently lifting millions of Chinese people
out of poverty.
The thing is,
if you’re lifting something out of Chinese
state-run media,
you probably can guess it's not really true.
I gave a full rundown of why that isn’t
true
in the episode China’s Poverty Lie.
But to be brief, the Chinese Communist Party
destroyed the entire Chinese economy in the
1950s,
in their attempt to enforce
collective farming and steel production.
When that failed miserably
and ended in the deaths of millions,
they launched the Cultural Revolution.
That also failed miserably
and ended in the deaths of millions.
Then after Chairman Mao died,
the new leader Deng Xiaoping decided to scale
back
some of those failed collectivization policies.
He gradually allowed people to buy and sell
and do business again.
Given this little bit of market-based economic
wiggle room,
Chinese people lifted *themselves* out of
poverty.
They got an even bigger boost
when jobs started coming in
from all those multinational corporations
Sanders talked about in 1994.
But even despite allowing private enterprise,
900 million people in China
still make less than 10 dollars a day.
But Chinese authorities categorize
most of them now as “low-income”.
So technically, they’re not in poverty.
Oh, and note that every time China releases
their annual white paper on human rights...
it focuses on how many people its lifted out
of poverty—
claiming *that’s* the most important human
right.
Which is to say,
as long as people seem less poor
than they were 40 years ago,
human rights in China are improving!
Look, economically Chinese people
are doing better than they were when Mao died.
And that’s a good thing!
But the propaganda is when the Chinese Communist
Party
takes all the credit for “lifting people
up”
and then also tries to use it to cover up
their human rights crimes.
Like Xinjiang’s re-education camps?
Those people aren’t being tortured.
They’re being lifted out of poverty!
Hopefully Sanders’s economic plan
doesn’t take inspiration from China’s
“poverty elimination.”
The Pentagon is accusing China
of bullying tactics against Vietnam.
Yes, the Pentagon is standing up for Vietnam—
the communist regime they tried so hard
to defeat half a century ago.
But now, of course,
there’s a scarier communist regime.
A Chinese survey vessel
entered Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone
on Saturday.
It claimed to be doing a seismic survey.
You know, for science.
Nothing to do with all the oil there.
The Pentagon statement said,
“China resumed its coercive interference
in Vietnam's longstanding oil and gas activities
in the South China Sea.”
And if anyone knows a thing or two
about coercive interference for oil,
it’s the US military.
What you’re looking at isn’t footage
from some upcoming Sci-fi movie.
This is an autonomous passenger drone
made by the Chinese company Ehang.
And it could be the first company in the world
to start regular flights on pilotless passenger
drones.
But do you really want your pilotless drone
being built and controlled by a Chinese company,
which, by law,
has ties to the Communist Party?
I can just imagine some Falun Gong practitioner
on his way to the grocery store,
suddenly rerouted... to a labor camp.
Where he will get lifted out of poverty.
So you see,
these drones aren’t from a sci-fi movie.
They’re from a real life horror movie.
I’d rather fly on this plane full of durians.
But the Ehang drone nightmare
may not be coming to the US anytime soon.
“The Pentagon recently banned the use of
drones
built by China’s DJI
and may soon ban all Chinese-built drones
and Chinese-manufactured components from military
use.”
And if it ends up being anything like
the Chinese telecom company Huawei,
the military ban could someday
become a consumer ban as well.
The officially atheist Chinese Communist Party
has just ordained its first Catholic Bishop
in China,
under a new deal with the Vatican.
You might be asking yourself, wait what?
Well, the Chinese Communist Party
has always insisted it had the right
to appoint Catholic bishops in China.
Look, it makes no sense,
but that’s just how the Party operates.
But over the past several years,
the Vatican has been working on a pretty great
deal
that will benefit Catholics living in
one of the most oppressive countries for Christians
in the world.
The Vatican will now allow the Communist Party
to appoint bishops.
In exchange, the Vatican gets...
to help make the Chinese Communist Party look
good.
This is what Beijing calls “win-win mutual
cooperation.”
If only the leaders of other countries
were so good at making deals.
As it is, during the recent G7 meeting,
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
and the United States all issued a joint statement
telling China to cut out its oppression in
Hong Kong.
The statement said,
“The G-7 reaffirms the existence and the
importance
of the 1984 Sino-British agreement on Hong
Kong
and calls for avoiding violence.”
The Sino-British agreement was a deal
between China and the UK
that the UK would give Hong Kong to China,
under the condition that Hong Kong
could keep its freedoms for 50 years.
China later said that has no meaning.
I guess they had their fingers crossed behind
their back
when they made the deal.
Unfortunately, international law permits that
kind of thing.
Good news for Australian Author Yang Hengjun.
After being detained for 7 months in China
on undisclosed charges,
he’s finally learned *why* he’s being
detained.
Turns out it’s on espionage charges.
Wow, what a master spy!
It took China 7 months
to figure out what they arrested him for.
Amazing.
It has nothing to do with the fact the author
is considered,
a “dedicated democracy activist
who believed that China’s autocratic system
would, with time,
necessarily liberalize.”
Yang has been an Australian citizen since
2002
but still held a Chinese passport.
Which means, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist
Party,
Yang belongs to China.
Speaking of spycraft, according to the New
York Times,
China has been using Linkedin to recruit spies.
Great, like we need *more* recruiters on LinkedIn.
Can’t wait to hear about another new and
exciting opportunity!
But wait, why is China using LinkedIn?
“Instead of dispatching spies to the U.S.
to recruit a single target,
it’s more efficient to sit behind a computer
in China
and send out friend requests to thousands
of targets
using fake profiles.”
You know, now I’m second guessing
if I should have given all that top secret
info
to my new LinkedIn friend American Joe.
He seems like he’s on the level.
Bad news for VPN users in China.
A 26 year old was just sentenced to 7 years
in prison
for sharing VPN software.
He had been sharing it on popular messaging
sites in China.
Police found those messages
and then found him using his phone’s geographical
positioning.
That’s horrible, terrifying, and also...
I want to know what VPN he was using,
because I don’t think it works very well.
This is just the latest in an ongoing crackdown
on VPNs in China.
I mean, what’s the point of having
a draconian Internet censorship firewall
if people can just  jump over the wall?
The Confucius Institute.
A Chinese language program with schools
and classes all over the world.
Well, the education minister in New Brunswick,
Canada
decided to end his school system’s relationship
with the Confucius Institute,
because of its ties to the Chinese government.
Then he received a visit from a top Chinese
diplomat.
“He told me about how the Confucius Institute
had nothing at all to do with Chinese government,
then very strongly expressed concerns
this might adversely impact trade relationships
with China and the Chinese government.”
I don’t know how Canadian officials
saw through the Chinese diplomat's ploy.
It was foolproof!
Hmm, come to think of it,
that’s the same message my LinkedIn friend
American Joe has been telling me.
Costco opened its first store in China on
Tuesday
and it was chaos.
There was a three hour wait just for parking.
When the gates opened people literally crawled
their way in.
It got so bad,
local police had to be called in.
They demanded people be rational.
Rational?
Rational in Costco?!
I don’t think so.
I need a king-sized mattress
and 5 gallons of Kirkland Signature ranch
dressing!
And I need them now!
Ultimately, the store was forced to close
8 hours early.
And as the Wall Street Journal points out,
what trade war?
And finally, according to a group of Chinese
academics,
“the English language—
and somehow by proxy all Western civilisation—
originated from China!”
The evidence?
“Yellow” in English sounds a bit like
(ye, luo),
which is the word for falling leaves, but
backwards,「葉落」
“Shop” sounds vaguely similar to (shangdian)
“Heart” and “head” begin with the
letters “he”
as a nod to  he, meaning “core”,
in 20th-century Pinyin (“hé”)
Yes, China invented gunpowder,
the compass,
and all of Western civilization
but especially Shakespeare.
Everything has been a part of China since
ancient times.
And that’s it for this week’s China news
headlines!
And now it’s time for me to answer a question
from one of you—
a fan who support China Uncensored
with a dollar or more per episode,
by contributing through the crowdfunding website
Patreon.
Maldoone7 asks,
“Chris, do you think Trump's statement
about ordering US business
to search for alternatives to China
shows his political will...
Or was it more talk?
An interesting question.
Trump has actually been talking about
how US businesses ought to leave China,
since before he was president.
In fact, he had a similar line about Japan
back in the 80s.
But even as president,
he’s not able to force US business
to come back to the United States.
But it does seem like he can theoretically
force them not to do business in China.
Trump suggested he could invoke
the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.
He could use that to block financial transactions
between a US company and China.
So basically those companies would need to
go elsewhere.
But will he actually invoke the Emergency
Economic Powers Act?
I don’t know.
But the message he’s sending US companies
is pretty clear.
Thanks for your question.
And if you have a question for me
you want to hear answered on the show,
sign up to join the China Uncensored 50 cent
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And to everyone, thanks for watching!
Once again I’m your host Chris Chappell.
See you next time.
