Donald Trump is about to visit Beijing. Inspired by Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to sucker the tragic dementia case into launching a pointless war against Iran, Chinese officials will no doubt lure him into an irresistible ‘deal’. In return for withdrawing all US bases from Korea to Guam and declaring Taiwan Chinese territory, China will buy one million metric tons of American soybeans, give Jared Kushner a real-estate project in Urumqi and let Trump stand on a gold-trimmed red carpet to have a selfie with his ‘good friend, Jeejee Bing’.
(Post from Desmond Shum on who has the upper hand in US-PRC relations.)
A WashPo editorial considers Trump’s chances of getting Jimmy Lai released to be fairly limited…
The former publisher of the shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, for years one of Hong Kong’s most widely read publications, was sentenced in February to 20 years in prison for bogus charges of sedition and colluding with foreign forces, meaning the United States.
The 78-year-old is in poor health, so two decades in prison, with no likelihood of parole under China’s draconian national security law, is tantamount to a death sentence. Lai holds a British passport and could live out his days there.
Hong Kong is now as cowed as any mainland Chinese city under Communist rule. Independent media has been silenced. Opposition parties have disbanded. Civil society, once vibrant, has been stifled. Many people have voted with their feet and left.
Xi releasing Lai would be a welcome humanitarian gesture and remove an impediment to more normalized U.S.-China relations. Refusing to do so, which unfortunately seems the likeliest outcome, would reflect the rot inside the Chinese system. It’s telling that Xi is so scared to let a 78-year-old ailing newspaperman go free.
An op-ed in the Times by Chloe Cheung of the CFHK…
Peter Wai was exposed as a spy who had served in the UK’s armed forces, police and Border Force. Longstanding connections between the Chinese authorities and organised crime are now a matter of court record. And evidence revealed Hong Kong’s London “trade office” to be a hub for transnational repression.
The office’s manager, Bill Yuen, acted on Beijing’s orders to covertly gather intelligence on Hong Kong dissidents and British parliamentarians. The former Hong Kong police superintendent funnelled almost £100,000 through the office’s accounts — payments to Wai and others for surveillance and intimidation operations.
…Remarkably, the London trade office enjoys diplomatic immunities granted when the promise of 50 years of post-handover autonomy for Hong Kong was still taken at face value. That era is over.
The national security law transformed Hong Kong into an extension of the CCP’s security apparatus. The Crown Prosecution Service treats China and Hong Kong’s authorities as one and the same.
Continuing to grant diplomatic status to the trade office is to pretend that the repression of Hong Kong never happened. The security minister, Dan Jarvis, often says that the government “will not tolerate” transnational repression. If that is true, then London’s Hong Kong trade office must be closed without delay.
Desmond Shum makes good points but he hasn’t calculated how with the pull of the switch a whole new regime might be elected into office that would dismantle everything the CCP thought they had secured. But then again, a new regime not of the Republican party might try to restore “normalcy” from the tRump years and insist on playing by the rules and honoring unfavorable “deals”, thus scoring own goals like Merrick Garland did while he was running the Justice Department.
Some would argue that better keep HKTO open as they are amateurs and more likely to f..k up than the professionals sleuths operating out of the China Embassy kitted out with the latest in espionage teck,
It’s amusing that Elon Musk and Tim Cook are tagging along with FDT on his trip. Trump is supposedly going to be talking up American technology, not that he can make a coherent sentence about anything. Elmo and Tim aren’t going to be much help, given that their tech wonders have been getting swamped by Chinese knockoffs and genuine breakthroughs. Their priority will be begging for some kind of break.
And FDT will devolve into complaints about windmills and brags about passing cognitive tests given to patients suspected of creeping dementia. For the win, Papa Pooh Bear just has to sit back and let it all unfold.
There are many legitimate criticisms that may be levelled against the initiation and execution of the war against Iran, but describing it as pointless is not one of them.
Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is not pointless.
The CIA and the Mossad started this war. The U.S. and Israeli military have performed brilliantly. Now it’s up to the spooks to clean up the mess they started.
Regime change is the only lasting solution. Get on with it, boys.
“When you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill
@Arthur MacWhatever
Many former Trump simps including Joe Rogan got this one nailed – “Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is not pointless.” Iran’s ayatollah, whatever you think of him, issued a fatwa declaring uranium will not be enriched into weaponry.
Bannon, Rogan et al acknowledge this, the war criminal that is Netanyahu doesn’t I don’t blame this stance when it comes to Iran, but Nets isn’t about saving humanity, it’s his political survival that counts here.
A nation of 95 million people is not a Venezuela or Grenada. Trump has screwed up here and the likes of JD Vance know this. It would be very ambitious to expect the CIA and US military chiefs to rectify this.
This is Xi’s moment, not Trump’s. Oh, but DJT still has one card up his sleeve: Keggsgeth. Way to go!
(And quoting Churchill is a morale-sapping path to defeat, as anyone who has studied his more scummier actions realises).
I can only add to HKJC’s excellent response a reminder that FDT pulled the US out of the treaty that was well on its way to accomplishing the goal of preventing further nuclear proliferation. And Trump did it because Obama made fun of him at the correspondents dinner. (And then Americans voted for this schmuck not once but twice, which is overwhelming proof of the country’s perhaps terminal decline.)