China is terrified of its own people.
THE COUNTRY’S CENSORING, MURDERING REGIME IS TERRIFIED OF ITS OWN PEOPLE
It’s a pretty good sign that a regime is terrified of the people it purports to govern when state censors are obliged to outlaw references to Winnie the Pooh.
Because a lot of people have noticed an unflattering resemblance between the pudgy little bear of bedtime stories and supreme leader Xi Jinping, the Cyberspace Administration of China has been making itself busy this week, blacking out any social media references to “Little Bear Winnie,” the bear’s Chinese name, and replacing them with the warning: “This content is illegal.”
Another fairly reliable indication of just how rattled and gloomy China’s ruling class is, is that it’s even odds that anyone who can afford to has already left the country, or is considering leaving soon, or is already making plans to leave. Three years ago, a Barclays Wealth survey found that one in three “super-rich” Chinese had already bolted the country, and two out of three millionaires had either already left or were planning to get out. In a new survey published this week, Shanghai’s Hurun magazine and Visas Consulting Group found that half of China’s remaining millionaires are thinking about leaving.
Canada is their second-favourite destination of choice, after the United States, and Vancouver is their favourite Canadian city. More than 100,000 Chinese millionaires have moved to Metro Vancouver in recent years. Most of them obtained Canadian citizenship through the scandal-rocked and now shuttered Immigrant Investor Program. It should be without controversy to say that these things are “linked.”
Whether China’s millionaires physically leave China or not, they’re sending their money abroad by the container load. According to the Institute of International Fi- nance, capital outflow from China rose from $118 billion in 2014 to $ 640 billion last year – a sure sign that Xi Jinping’s grandiose, corrupt and increasingly paranoid regime isn’t quite the investment paradise that Canada’s China trade lobbyists would have you believe. As for where all that dirty money is going, it’s mostly just getting parked for safekeeping. The University of Alberta’s China Institute calculates that, last year, $3.4 billion worth of Chinese cash was sunk into Canadian commercial real estate — a hundredfold increase over 2013. Already this year, 65 per cent of the $2 billion in Canadian commercial real estate deals was spent by Chinese investors.
Meanwhile, in his new capacity as Canada’s ambassador, the comically unserious f ormer cabinet minister John McCallum continues to flounce around China apologizing to sundry gatherings of Communist Party consiglieri about how stubbornly touchy Canadians can be about such free- trade inconveniences as democracy and the rule of law. Back in Canada, the sore point about the “exploratory talks” for a Canada- China free trade deal is supposed to be whether trade and human rights should be linked — as though they weren’t already and haven’t always been inextricably and intimately linked, not least by the regime in Beijing.
The incarceration of dozens of journalists and writers — China is the worst offender in the world for jailing writers — along with the imprisonment of thousands of Chinese prisoners of conscience, is directly linked to the purposes of ensuring the Beijing regime’s continuing, unexamined gluttony in its trade rackets, both foreign and domestic. It’s how business is done in China. It’s how Xi Jinping and his cronies get away with murder — and Reporters Without Borders was quite right on Tuesday when it used the word “murder” to describe the death last week of Liu Xiaobo, China’s Nelson Mandela. There is certainly no mystery about the link between the police state apparatus that was busy censoring Winnie the Pooh this week, and covering up the circumstances of Liu’s persecution and death last week.
“We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by lack of care,” Reporters Without Borders Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said Tuesday, at the organization’s new offices in Taiwan — Asia’s most liberal and democratic country, which Beijing is now subverting through rabble- rousing disinformation produced by “content farms” to a degree that would make the Kremlin blush.
No matter how impudently or often he bellyaches about it, Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to Canada, cannot be allowed to get away with the propaganda lie that “Canadian media often mix human rights issue with economic and trade issues.” It is a too rare occasion that the media does mix the two, for one thing. But more pertinently, it is Lu’s own Com- munist Party that insists on the linkage, only in this way: anyone messes with us on human rights, we’ll mess with them on trade.
When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing punished Norway for it. All bilateral talks were suspended. Norway’s share of China’s salmon imports plummeted from 92 per cent to 29 per cent. All trade talks and cultural exchanges were cancelled. Diplomatic relations were kept in the deep freeze until only last year, when Beijing finally decided that Norway had kowtowed enough.
There are also quite obvious, direct and functional links between the way China’s princelings amass and hide their fortunes and the way Canada’s Liberal-heavy China trade lobby serves as a happy accomplice and collaborator in the intimidation, persecution and plunder of the Chinese people.
The moment Liu Xiaobo died ( in the eighth year of an 11- year sentence for appending his name to a modest democratic charter), Canada’s Governor General was swanning around in Beijing with Xi Jinping. His Excellency David Johnston was lavished with much complimentary notice in China’s news media — which had been scrubbed of any reference to Liu Xiaobo’s agonies. Liu’s body was removed from the hospital in Shenyang in the dead of night. The surrounding streets were closed to traffic to ensure no photographs found their way onto social media. Liu was buried at sea, so that there would be no physical monument to his memory.
China’s state censors took the opportunity of Liu’s death to demonstrate their newly developed acumen in the art of hiding the Beijing regime’s political brutality and economic vampirism by preventing Chinese people from even talking to one another about it.
The most widely- used “chat” application in China is WeChat, with 768 mill i on daily users. WeChat has successfully obliterated the name Liu Xiaobo. To get around the blacking- out of keywords and keyword combinations, Chinese social media users are increasingly resorting to images, but a new report from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto reveals that censors now even have the ability to delete images in person- toperson online conversations, the instant the images are being transmitted. They just vanish, before the recipient even sees what was made to disappear.
In this way, it is as though Liu Xiaobo never existed. Or is just some storybook character out of the past, like the dimly- remembered Winnie the Pooh. “Who controls the past controls the future,” was the party slogan in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Who controls the present controls the past.”
These things are linked.
LIU’S BODY WAS REMOVED FROM THE HOSPITAL IN SHENYANG IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.