Chinese communist part

China’s naked weaponization of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s "four pests" campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisors reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history.

Hong Kong’s top court decided Monday to uphold Jimmy Lai and six other pro-democracy activists’ convictions for their campaigning during the anti-government protests that rocked the city in 2019. In a unanimous agreement, the court dismissed the bid to overturn the convictions of the seven activists.   Among the justices who voted to uphold the conviction was British justice David Neuberger, who is still serving as non-permanent judge in the former British colony.   Lai, seventy-six, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was found guilty in 2021 of organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly in August 2019 during months-long pro-democracy protests in the China-ruled city. He was sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

As it becomes clearer that China and the US have entered a new Cold War, Beijing’s spy operations have grown more flagrant and provocative. Whether it be flying spy balloons, buying farmland near US military bases or even establishing a secret police station in New York City, China is slowly but surely infiltrating the US. In February 2023, a US fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic. The balloon crossed into US airspace over Alaska in late January before passing through Canada and into Montana. While the balloon was able to transmit information back to Beijing in real time, CNN reports the government doesn’t know exactly what intelligence was gathered.

Fifteen years ago, the federal government poured $535 million into a California-based solar module innovator, Solyndra. That’s a lot of money. In today’s money, it would be enough to cover the payrolls of the Red Sox and Dodgers combined. In 2009? It was enough for Solyndra to go bust in fewer than two years — making the company one of America’s biggest public funding debacles. Solyndra’s failure remains both a political talking point and area of introspection — especially as the US increasingly wakes up to the stakes of today’s industrial competition with China.

A year ago today, President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands with each other on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, in an attempt to reset the world’s most important bilateral relationship. The two men, who knew each other during their previous encounters at the vice presidential level, hoped to exploit their familiarity with one another to bring US-China relations onto a more productive plane. And for a moment, the Bali talkathon seemed to have that effect.

Recently, Gavin Newsom, the greasy-haired governor who may or may not run for president, made a trip to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping. It went swimmingly, according to various reports.  When it comes to US-China relations, “divorce is not an option,” Newsom, who divorced from Kimberly Guilfoyle in 2005, told CNN on November 8. America’s answer to Justin Trudeau argued that the US and China must “reconcile our strategic red lines.” The idea of being cozy with China, a country that actively uses cyber espionage to undermine the US economy, may strike many as odd, even dangerous — but not Governor Newsom. In fact, according to reports, he is so inspired by his trip to China, that he now wants to bring a CCP-like “social credit system” to the Golden State.

A hearing about the Chinese Communist Party’s funding of American K-12 education took a surprising turn when the Democrats’ witness — and several members of the House Education and Workforce Committee — took pains to conflate opposing foreign investments in public schools with Asian-American hatred. Gisela Perez Kusakawa, the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), kicked off her remarks by linking concern over the Chinese Communist Party’s investments in public schools to America’s incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. Warning the Asian-American youth could end up as “collateral damage,” Kusakawa repeatedly conflated opposing the CCP with anti-Asian-American racism.

America is surrendering its native-born panda to the Chinese Communists, and the Chinese Communist Party — and a premier taxpayer-funded museum and a top defense contractor are helping to foot the bill for the goodbye party. Xiao Qi Ji, an American-born panda whose name means “little miracle,” will be shipped back to China later this month — and the Smithsonian’s National Zoo is having an entire panda-fest to celebrate this humiliation. “We are going big because they are going home,” the National Zoo boasted in its announcement of a nine-day celebration filled with screenings of Kung Fu Panda, yoga sessions and panda-themed items. “Tasty celebratory treats will be provided courtesy of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China.