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https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/china-moves-to-control-hong-kong-beijing-geopolitical-hardball-could-reshape-asia/#slide-1

The PRC’s geopolitical hardball could reshape Asia.

Under cover of the global coronavirus crisis, China is moving to rewrite Asia’s geopolitical map. Beijing has announced it will essentially take control of Hong Kong by directly imposing a sweeping national-security law, bypassing the territory’s elected Legislative Council. Despite repeated assurances by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that it would abide by the 1984 agreement with Great Britain to allow Hong Kong to maintain a loose independence under the so-called “one-country, two-systems” framework for 50 years after the 1997 turnover, the past decade has seen a steady erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms, culminating in the massive million-person-plus demonstrations throughout 2019. Now, those last freedoms face extinction.

The new national-security law will criminalize “foreign interference,” secession activities, and subversion of state power. Moreover, the CCP appears ready to alter Hong Kong’s Basic Law, essentially its constitution. Moreover, China’s security services will be able to operate openly in Hong Kong, further reducing Hong Kong’s sovereignty.

Only 23 years have passed since Great Britain handed over the colony to Beijing, and in that time, Hong Kong’s importance as a financial hub has lessened as Shanghai and other mainland financial centers developed. Yet Hong Kong always remained a symbol of relative freedom within China’s Communist system, and as the CCP has steadily clawed back power inside China since the accession to power of General Secretary Xi Jinping, Hong Kong’s status increasingly became irreconcilable with trends on the mainland. The CCP pushed electoral reforms by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council that ensured the election of pro-Beijing candidates, interfered with the courts and press, and steadily increased the mainland’s influence over society.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/china-hong-kong-western-world-needs-to-pay-attention/

China is currently transgressing the terms of its 1997 treaty over Hong Kong, which promised a “one country, two systems” settlement that preserved Hong Kong’s somewhat autonomous democratic institutions. These institutions guarantee rights to Hong Kongers and guard its common-law inheritance.

China’s legislature in Beijing is preparing a new national-security law aimed at Hong Kong to prohibit and punish terrorism, foreign influence, and secession. By that, they mean demonstration, free speech, and a functioning democratic system with rights guaranteed to citizens. Meanwhile, Beijing’s loyalists installed in Hong Kong’s legislative council have been making open attempts at a putsch against the pro-democracy majority.

China’s move against Hong Kong is likely dictated by propitious circumstances. Democracy protesters in Hong Kong may be fatigued. And while the rest of the world deals with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is little appetite to expend the diplomatic energy or engage in the trade actions that could protect Hong Kong.

At the time of the treaty, little Hong Kong accounted for nearly 20 percent of China’s overall economy, and it was a crucial engine of China’s economic growth. Companies that wanted to do business in a liberalizing China headquartered in Hong Kong. Financial markets still prefer it. Why? Because it has inherited a property-rights regime and a judicial system from the Anglo tradition. One could make a case in a Hong Kong court and expect a fair hearing, rather than a political judgment dictated by a party boss.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-terrorists-win-a-convert-11590100143?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

When Italian aid worker Silvia Romano returned home this month, the government hoped for a bright moment amid the devastation of Covid-19. Ms. Romano, 25, had been held captive in East Africa for 18 months by a gang affiliated with the Islamist terrorist group al-Shabaab. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte personally welcomed her back, but her liberation wasn’t an unblemished political victory. In fact, it infuriated many Italians.

Ms. Romano appeared in a chador, a modest garment common in many Islamic countries. During an interrogation, she reportedly told officials that she had converted to Islam freely and now went by Aisha. The former hostage denied rumors that she had been forced to marry one of her abductors. She said they treated her well.

The West has waged war against Islamist extremists for decades. Raising arms against such evil to ensure security and stability for innocents at home and abroad is justifiable and laudable. But there are other reasons for the fight, and Ms. Romano’s story suggests that many Westerners have forgotten them.

The former hostage is innocent of wrongdoing, the victim of a tragedy that cost her dearly. No one yet knows, and it’s possible no one will ever know, whether genuine belief or incessant brainwashing motivated her conversion. Yet I can relate to Ms. Romano. I too come from Milan, an industrial city with a proud history of hardworking people now suffering from spiritual decay. As a freelance journalist in North Africa, I also spent significant time living among Muslims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-moves-on-hong-kong-11590103414?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

China’s forceful takeover of Hong Kong appears to have begun, and threats against Taiwan are rising. That’s the message this week as the National People’s Congress in Beijing moved to pass an onerous new security law for Hong Kong and the Chinese navy plans to practice an amphibious assault on an island controlled by Taiwan.

Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, China promised Hong Kong legal autonomy and the preservation of basic liberties, including freedom of speech, press and assembly. Yet Beijing is now seeking to bypass the Hong Kong Legislative Council and impose the national-security law unilaterally. This rule-by-diktat means the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement that Beijing promised for 50 years after 1997.

Enforcement of the national-security legislation would erase the legal lines between Hong Kong and the mainland. By our deadline China’s Communist Party legislature hadn’t released a draft bill, but rest assured the purpose is to silence and punish dissent to prevent a repeat of last year’s mass protests in Hong Kong. For months Beijing has falsely accused protesters of seeking independence from the mainland and acting on behalf of a foreign “black hand.”

https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/the-asian-century-began-in-may-2020/

Economic historians may date the start of the Asian century to May 2020, when most Asian economies bounced back to full employment while the West languished in coronavirus lockdown. Asia has emerged as an economic zone as closely integrated as the European Union, increasingly insulated from economic shocks from the United States or Europe.

Google’s daily data on workplace mobility uses smartphone location to determine the number of people going to work – by far the most accurate and up-to-date available reading on economic activity. As of May 13, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam were back to normal levels. Japan and Germany had climbed back to 20% below normal. The US, France and the UK remain paralyzed. Google can’t take readings in China, but the available evidence indicates that China is on the same track as Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam.

Asian economic recovery is consistent with success in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have Covid-19 death rates a tenth of Germany’s and a hundredth of the rate in the US, UK, France or Spain. As I reported May 21, the US is struggling to re-open its economy despite a much higher rate of new infections than the Asian countries or Germany. That entails substantial risk. Two Ford Motor plants in the US that had re-opened May 17 shut yesterday after employees tested positive for Covid-19, for example.

Asia’s short-term surge followed its success in disease prevention. But the long-term driver of Asian growth is China’s emergence as a tech superpower. This week’s session of the People’s Congress in Beijing is expected to pass a $1.4 trillion of new government investments in 5G broadband, factory automation, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and related fields. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16050/replace-the-who

The Chinese are particularly incensed by the lead role Australia has taken in orchestrating calls for an independent inquiry, and have responded by banning imports of Australian beef.

Chinese President Xi’s offer, therefore, to support an inquiry by the WHO into the pandemic amounts to little more than yet another attempt by China’s communist rulers to avoid proper scrutiny about Beijing’s culpability for spreading Covid-19 throughout the rest of the globe.

President Trump’s misgivings about Mr Tedros could not be better founded…. With someone like Mr Tedros, with his clear pro-China tendencies, at the helm of the WHO, it is clear that the body is simply not fit for purpose, and that any attempt to reform it is doomed to fail.

A far better solution, one that will help to protect the western democracies from suffering any future catastrophic pandemics similar to the Covid-19 crisis, is to set up a completely new international health body — one that, rather than subjugating itself to Beijing’s pernicious influence, is genuinely interested in protecting the interests of the people it serves.

No one should be taken in by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s offer to cooperate with an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. By stipulating that the investigation needs to be carried out under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), China’s communist leader is simply indulging in yet another attempt to conceal the fact that the global crisis originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

This has been the approach adopted by China’s communist rulers ever since Covid-19 first surfaced in Wuhan late last year. Rather than alerting the rest of the world to the potential impact the virus might have, the ruling Communist Party of China concentrated its energies on covering up the origins of the outbreak, with the result that the rest of the world is struggling to cope with the effects of the pandemic.

China’s deliberate attempts to obfuscate the origins of the pandemic has provoked an outcry, with a number of nations, such as the U.S. and Australia, calling for a truly independent international inquiry to be held into how the pandemic started, as well as China’s lack of transparency in alerting the rest of the world to the potential impact of Covid-19.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16043/iran-anti-israel-agenda

Recently, Iran’s parliament, the Islamic Consultative Assembly, unanimously approved an “urgent bill” directed against Israel. We are therefore to assume, it would seem, that passing a bill against the State of Israel was more “urgent” for the Iranian regime than concentrating on protecting the lives of the Iranian population during this public health crisis.

Although the traditional anti-Israel marches are cancelled this year due to the spread of coronavirus, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani stated that people will be able instead to march by cars, join a motorized phalanx or join an online event organized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Not only have Iran’s ruling clerics failed to rein in their rogue behavior amid the coronavirus; they seem instead to be exploiting the “distraction” to boost their expansion.

Iran has further entrenched itself in Syria and Lebanon, including that included building a new underground weapons-storage facility at Iran’s Imam Ali military base in eastern Syria. They have boosted their support for Shia Iraqi militias and the Houthis in Yemen. They have rolled out a new missile on the way to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons to Israel and any capital in Europe. And they have ratcheted up their anti-Israeli and anti-American agenda.

Iran has been the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the Middle East. Iran’s regime has been accused of both covering up the scope of the virus in the country and spreading the disease across the Middle East. While many of the 186 countries that China has afflicted with the virus are focused on addressing the immediate problem, the ruling mullahs of Iran instead appear mostly busy furthering their anti-Israel agenda.

Recently, Iran’s parliament, the Islamic Consultative Assembly, unanimously approved an “urgent bill” directed against Israel. We are therefore to assume, it would seem, that passing a bill against the State of Israel was more “urgent” for the Iranian regime than concentrating on protecting the lives of the Iranian population during this public health crisis.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/20/how-to-hold-china-accountable-build-our-own-stuff/

It’s starting to happen.”

That’s what Brad Parscale said around 8 p.m. to the family and inner circle on the 14th floor of Trump Tower on November 8, 2016, as we were watching election returns trickle in from North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Parscale’s words came back to me with the news this week the Trump Administration awarded a $354 million contract to a private company to manufacture generic medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients in Richmond, Virginia.

It’s starting to happen—global supply chains are coming back to America.

The company, Phlow Corporation, will be making drugs used to treat COVID-19. They will be stored in a strategic stockpile of pharmaceutical ingredients to be used in the event of drug shortages or an emergency.

Those drugs, like so many others, are now made overseas, mostly in China and India. China is the world’s main supplier of the active ingredients used in many common drugs from vitamin C to aspirin.

China produces 90 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for essential medicines used in serious coronavirus infections, according to Rosemary Gibson, author of China Rx. Sedatives, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and medicines to raise blood pressure are among the medications.

The administration killed two birds with one stone by awarding the contract to this upstart company.

The first is ending America’s dangerous dependency on Communist China for essential medicines. The second is breaking up the pharmaceutical oligarchy whose single-minded pursuit of profits led us to our foreign drug dependency in the first place.

The trade association of generic drugmakers attacked White House trade and manufacturing czar Peter Navarro when he first advanced a plan for bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States.

They clutched their precious global supply chains like pearls, falsely claiming that rearranging those chains would spike drug prices, forcing Americans to eat cat food in order to afford their meds.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/20/a-new-cold-war-has-begun-calling-china-to-account-for-covid-19-plague-is-just-a-start/

China’s communist regime has shown a shocking proclivity for lying and deceptive behavior in handling the Wuhan virus pandemic. Now, Australia, already backed by 113 countries, wants a full accounting of China’s unacceptable behavior. China’s answer? Punish Australia.

It’s arguable whether China ever intended to live by the same rules as the rest of the world when it first gained membership in the World Trade Organization in 2001, backed strongly by the U.S. That move, more than anything, cemented China’s accession to world power status, with its economy soaring from just $80 billion in GDP in 1980 to $12 trillion in 2019.

But, as we’re always reminded, with great power comes great responsibility.

And China, under the increasingly totalitarian control of President-without-end Xi Jinping, has flunked that test, as we now plainly see during the COVID-19 disaster. In addition to putting Uighurs in concentration camps and disappearing dissidents, China’s communist regime has all but crushed Hong Kong’s brave freedom movement by arresting its boldest leaders.

That’s just how the Chinese communists deal with things. Smile outwardly, plot inwardly.

When Australia took the lead this week in calling for an independent investigation into the origins and spread of the coronavirus, China didn’t argue or remonstrate or debate. It slapped 80% tariffs on Australia’s exports of barley, a key crop.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-quietly-lowers-the-temperature-with-u-s/ar-BB14kvKf

BAGHDAD — After years of increasing tensions that nearly led to war, Iran has moderated its approach to the West, shifting from a policy of provocation to one of limited cooperation. The change reflects an effort to avoid direct confrontation with the United States that the Iranians say could benefit President Trump in the November election.

After months of attacks on American forces in Iraq, Iran has called off its proxy militias, one of several de-escalation steps.

Nowhere is the shift more evident than in Iraq, where Iran has backed a pro-American prime minister and ordered its proxy militias to cease their rocket attacks on American forces.

The Americans, while publicly dismissive of any change in Iranian posture, have quietly reciprocated in modest and indirect ways.

Taken together, the openings represent an incipient détente that, even if it does not last or lead to the end of hostilities between Iran and the United States, has already lowered the temperature of the relationship, reducing the risk of open conflict.

“A war is less likely to happen, but there is still the risk of a confrontation,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “But it’s less likely because the intent of the primary actors has shifted. Both Iran and the U.S. definitely do not want a war six months before the U.S. elections.”

Iran’s shift, which has not been announced or explained publicly, appears to be tactical, analysts said, noting that the country still vehemently opposes the Trump administration’s demand that it renegotiate its nuclear agreement with the West and that it has not backed off its goal of ousting the United States military from the Middle East. Publicly, both countries remain engaged in verbal warfare.