US 'disturbed' by death of Chinese activist Cao Shunli

Human rights in China?

'The United States has said it is "deeply disturbed" by reports of the death of activist Cao Shunli at a hospital in Beijing.Cao's lawyers said she had died in detention after being denied medical treatment for several months.The human rights activist was arrested at Beijing airport in September, when she attempted to board a flight to Geneva to attend a UN training course.She had previously served at least two terms in prison camps for her activism.'

But still we pretend that China and Russia are civilised members of the world.

More here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-26597271

In 2014 China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia became members of the United Nations Human Rights Council - Does that seem right to you?

The United Nations has forfeited the right to make moral judgements.

An odd double standard

Imagine walking into a German restaurant in London and finding a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall; very, very unlikely.

Imagine walking into a Russian Restaurant in London and finding a portrait of Josef Stalin on the wall; equally unlikely.

However walk into London's Baozi Inn in Newport Street, part of London's Chinatown, and there's a picture of Chairman Mao on the wall.


Hitler's Nazi regime is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of around 12 million people, Stalin's Soviet Russia for the deaths of around 9 million people but Mao's Communist regime in China for the deaths of around 45-50 million people. Why is this mass murderer's image not as repellent as Adolf Hitler's?


Baozi Inn is a great Szechuan restaurant but their choice of interior decor is extremely suspect. Time Out in all it's right-on glory says that at Baozi Inn 'kitsch Communist Revolution decor meets northern Chinese street food tidied up for London'. Well if you consider commemorating probably the biggest mass mrderer in world history is 'kitsch' then I think your moral compass is well out of kilter.

At UN, Pakistan Praises Saudi Arabia for Protecting “Women’s Rights” | FrontPage Magazine

'As the UN Human Rights Council scrutinized Saudi Arabia's domestic rights record this morning… out of 95 countries who took the floor, 82 praised Saudi Arabia.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, said the country is poised to win a seat on the Human Rights Council.

"A country whose legal system routinely lashes women rape victims rather than punish the perpetrators should not have been praised effusively by members of the UN's top human rights body," said Neuer. "Instead the world should have addressed the Saudi regime's use of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments, such as flogging, amputations and eye-gouging."'

More here http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/at-un-pakistan-praises-saudi-arabia-for-protecting-womens-rights

Here's what some United Nations' member states said about Saudi Arabia and human rights:

Afghanistan: “We commend Saudia Arabia as they continue to enhance the protection and promotion of human rights…”
 

Somalia: “Saudi Arabia maintains a high priority for protection and promotion of human rights…”

Libya: “Saudi Arabia continues to strengthen human rights and promote them and this deserves our appreciation…”

Mauritania, VP of the UNHRC (and a country that practices slavery): “We commend Saudi Arabia for always seeking to strengthen human rights…We commend Saudi Arabia in terms of the progress on guaranteeing fundamental rights and freedoms, socioeconomic progress, participation of women at all levels and participation in society.

China: “We appreciate efforts made to protect the rights of children and to have dialogues of religious tolerance…”

Pakistan: Commended “laudable steps taken by Saudi Arabia to promote and protect the rights of children and women…”

So according to China, Saudi Arabia which arrests Christians for praying, practises religious tolerance.

So according to Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and the slavers of Mauritania, the Saudis excel at human rights.

So according to Pakistan, a country where raping women is endemic, Saudi Arabia, which won’t let women drive or leave the house, is also breaking new ground in protecting women’s rights.

Satire is dead, what other conclusion is there.

"Occupied Territories": What About Cyprus, Kashmir, Tibet?

The Gatestone Institute wonder why only the 'occupation of Palestinian lands' is a matter for concern. What about Tibet, occupied by China, Northern Cyprus occupied by Turkey and others?

Is the Palestinian issue only deemed so important because it allows attacks on the world's only Jewish state?

A live bull is hung from a tree until it dies for Chinese 'luck' festival

'Chinese villagers have defended their tradition of hanging a live bull from a tree until it dies as part of a ritual to bring them luck and a bumper harvest.

The 'cow-hanging ceremony' has been carried out by the minority Dong people of southern China for almost 500 years and now attracts hundreds of tourists. '

I won't hold my breath waiting for the lefty types who scream about animals rights in UK and west to protest about this cruelty.

Read more here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2364099/Pictured-Horrifying-moment-live-bull-hung-tree-dies-Chinese-luck-festival.html

Porn film shown at China train station in Jilin | Metro News

The best part of this story is that there actually is a Chinese porn film called 'The Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks'. You really couldn't make that up!
More here http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/02/x-rated-film-accidentally-beamed-on-to-big-screen-at-train-station-3865617/

Fighting censorship...

Apparently the Chinese authorities are stopping their population from seeing this lovely comparison of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger with Chinese president Xi Jinping and Barack Obama. How cruel...

Kung hei fat choi

Kung hei fat choi or happy new year to all my Chinese speaking readers.



Yes I know Chinese isn't a langauge but I believe the above is Cantonese and pretty similar to the Mandarin which is Gong Xi Fa Cai.

Worst of the Worst 2012: The World's Most Repressive Societies

According to Freedom House these are the most repressive societies in the world.

Any surprises in that lot?Not really. And of the seven countries with a combined score of 7 we have one communist psycho dictatorship, two Middle Eastern Islamic states, one African/Middle East authoritarian Islamic state, one failed African/Middle East Islamic state and two former Soviet states who now have questionable democratic credentials as well as repressive societies. Note that of the world's superpowers (USA, Russia and China), only China appear in the bottom ranked countries along with the country that China invaded and still occupy today but that the screaming left seemed uninterested in protesting about - Tibet,

Israel and the United Nations Human Rights Council - the BBC's reporting vs the truth

The BBC report this morning that:

'Israel has cut working relations with the UN Human Rights Council, officials say, after it decided to investigate Jewish settlements in the West Bank.'

I think that some background to the United Nations Human Rights Council and Israel is required.

'As of 2010, Israel had been condemned in 32 resolutions by the Council since its creation in 2006. The 32 resolutions comprised 48.1% of all resolutions passed by the Council. By April 2007, the Council had passed nine resolutions condemning Israel, the only country which it had specifically condemned. Toward Sudan, a country with human rights abuses as documented by the Council's working groups, it has expressed "deep concern.".

The council voted on 30 June 2006 to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session. The Council's special rapporteur on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is its only expert mandate with no year of expiry. The resolution, which was sponsored by Organisation of the Islamic Conference, passed by a vote of 29 to 12 with five abstentions. Human Rights Watch urged it to look at international human rights and humanitarian law violations committed by Palestinian armed groups as well. Human Rights Watch called on the Council to avoid the selectivity that discredited its predecessor and urged it to hold special sessions on other urgent situations, such as that in Darfur.

The Special Rapporteur on the question of Palestine to the previous UNCHR, the current UNHRC and the General Assembly was, between 2001 and 2008, John Dugard. Bayefski quotes him as saying that his mandate is to "investigate human rights violations by Israel only, not by Palestinians". Dugard was replaced in 2008 with Richard Falk, who has compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians with the Nazis' treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Like his predecessor, Falk's mandate only covers Israel’s human rights record.'

So the UNHRC is hardly an unbiased organisation is it? And why should any country take lessons on Human Rights from an organisation whose members at the moment include such supporters of human rights as Saudi Arabia who the BBC report elsewhere today thus:

'In Saudi Arabia, there were at least 82 executions compared to at least 27 the previous year, while Iraq executed at least 68 people, compared to at least one in 2010, according to Amnesty.'

Other members of the UNHRC include other beacons for human rights as Libya (elected when under the Gaddaffi regime), Cuba and heaven help us China. China being a country which the same Amnesty International report as quoted by the BBC says:

'it also noted that China executed more people than the rest of the world put together.

...

Amnesty no longer publishes figures for China, where the data is considered a state secret. The rights group believes the figure to be in its thousands.'

Russia and China summed up by the BBC for once but the narrative will not change

'Russia and China veto an Arab and Western-backed UN resolution condemning the violent crackdown in Syria, hours after scores are killed in Homs.'

Men, women and children being killed in cold-blood by President Assad's troops and goons and Russia and China oppose a UN resolution. Assad's troops are using mortars and  tanks against civilians and Russia and China oppose a UN resolution. Russia has supported and armed the Assad regime for years; not that you would know that from the BBC for whom only the US and UK are guilty of supplying arms to vile regimes.

Meanwhile the usual suspects who scream and shout when Israel go after terrorists in Gaza are noticeably silent about an Arab President killing hundreds of his own countrymen. Are the usual suspects really concerned with human rights in the Middle East or only when it provides them with an excuse to scream abuse at the only Jewish state?

Now why would the Chinese want to ensure the survival of the EU?

The Telegraph report that:

'The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, has thrown the eurozone a vital lifeline and pledged to buy billions of euros of European debt to keep the single currency project alive. '

So why are the Chinese so keen to ensure the survival of The Euro and thus the European Union? Why are they announcing support for The Euro at almost the same moment that they announce that they will stop buying US debt? Do the Chinese see the EU project as the sort of nascent superpower that they would prefer to do business with than with the USA? A non-democratic (maybe even anti-democratic) superstate, run by a small elite and administered by apparatchiks whose first loyalty is to the EU not their own country; hard to see why the EU appeals to the Chinese isn't it?

Celebrating a mass-murderer

In the last few days I have seen two rather odd examples of the way that a dictator considered a Communist can still be revered in a way that Hitler could (quite rightly) not. Westminster University is holding an exhibition called 'Poster Power: Images from Mao's China, Then and Now' at its 309 Regents Street building. Here's the blurb:

'Posters from Mao’s China exercise an enduring appeal to audiences across the globe, more than sixty years after the events that produced them. They are revisited in modern and contemporary Chinese art and commercial design, and curated in exhibitions in China, the US and Europe.

So why does imagery produced to support a revolutionary ideology half a century ago continue to resonate with current Chinese and Western audiences? What is the China we see between posters of the Mao years and their contemporary consumerist reinventions? How do we explain the diverse responses such imagery evokes? And what does the appeal of the posters of Mao’s China tell us about the country’s ‘red legacy’?

Poster Power explores some of these questions through setting up a visual dialogue between posters produced between the 1950s and the 1970s and their echoes in recent years. With posters from the University of Westminster’s Chinese Poster Collection, Chinese video art, documentary film, photographs, and contemporary items such as playing cards and nightclub advertising, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the posters’ ambiguities of appeal to their audiences. As visual reminders of both autocratic rule and exuberant youthful idealism, they evoke diverse responses, challenging the idea that Cultural Revolution poster propaganda transmitted a single, transparent meaning. These posters’ capacity to inspire ambiguous responses opens up new narratives of what remains a complex period of China’s recent past, and sheds light on its changing significance in contemporary China.'

Why not a word, nor even an allusion to the around 50 million people killed by the Chinese regime since 1949? why not a mention of the many millions tortured by the Chinese regime and forced to give up their "intellectual" jobs to work on the land as "workers", would that not have resonance for current students? Why not a mention of those killed around Tienanmen Square? Why not a mention of the invasion of Tibet and the destruction of so much Buddhist life? Why not a mention of the human rights abuses that occurred around the Beijing Olympics?

The other example was in an antique shop the other week where there was a small number of photos of Chairman Mao in a case and nobody seemed to think this was odd.

Can you imagine the furore if an antique shop had a collection of Adolph Hitler images on display? Can you imagine the protests if a British University held an exhibition of posters from Nazi Germany and did not put them into context?

Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany killed around seven million people and the regime is rightly abhorred. Mao's communist regime in China killed many many more (as did Stalin's communist regime in the Soviet Union) and yet there is hardly a word of protest in remembrance now. Schools teach the evils of Nazism & the BBC raise the subject regularly, and quite rightly so, but the equally (or more) evils of Mao and Stalin's communist regimes are mentioned far less; why is that the case? Maybe it is something to do with the backgrounds of a large proportion of the BBC, Labour Party leadership and educational elite in this country; once a Marxist, always a Marxist?

George Galloway and Tiananmen Square massacre deaths denial

The excellent Harry's Place has a piece on George Galloway that is not related to Israel and the Palestinians, subjects that I have covered with regard to George Galloway previously, but relate to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Do read the Harry's Place piece but first watch this piece of video...


George Galloway said

"It is a remarkable thing that something we’ve been told for 20 years was a massacre, that not a single photograph of a single dead person has been adduced"

What do you say now George, now that you have seen some pictures (and video) of dead Chinese protesters from Tiananmen Square and its surroundings?

Is this global financial meltdown scenario video about to become real?

Watch the video...
The beginning of the video makes a degree of sense but it does get apocalyptic very quickly and the World government section stretches my concept of possibility somewhat. However Damon Vickers ahs a book sto sell - 'The Day After The Dollar Crashes'.

With the start of the video in mind read this from Zero Hedge:

'China has decided to serve the world another surprise. Following last week's announcement by PBoC Governor Zhou (Where's Waldo) Xiaochuan that the country's excessive stockpile of USD reserves has to be urgently diversified, today we get a sense of just how big the upcoming Chinese defection from the "buy US debt" Nash equilibrium will be. Not surprisingly, China appears to be getting ready to cut its USD reserves by roughly the amount of dollars that was recently printed by the Fed, or $2 trilion or so. And to think that this comes just as news that the Japanese pension fund will soon be dumping who knows what. '

So how do you feel about trading prospects on Tuesday morning?

'the moral compass of the State-Controlled Media'

'The moral code, the moral compass of the State-Controlled Media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They're too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over "civility." Our media is so fraudulent. No talk about the political prisoners. No talk about the gulags.

A question about human rights, the ChiCom leader is allowed to slither out of the answer by saying, "I did not hear the question. I thought President Obama was going to answer that." There's no talk about how they harvest organs from prisoners in China -- and there's Obama, telling the head of this depraved society that we're all pleased with his country's progress. Meanwhile, the very same media is attacking innocent American citizens who have nothing to do with a horrible crime. The moral compass of our media is just stunning -- and, by the way, the media laughed when Hu Jintao side-stepped the question about human rights. Jimmy Carter has won a Nobel Peace Prize as well, and Jimmy Carter also attended Hu's dinner.

So you had two American Nobel Peace Prize Winners effectively honoring the head of a country who's holding 2010's Peace Prize Winner in prison -- and we had to listen to our fearless leader talk about aaaaall the great progress the ChiComs are making and how pleased we are with all that progress.'

Not a word on the BBC about the discgusting lack of moral courage expressed by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama and his predecessor Jimmy Carter; but who would expect any?

The quotation is from Rush Limbaugh.

Here comes trouble

Portugal's finance minister is in Beijing to try to persuade Chinese authorities to buy Portuguese government bonds.

The real global disaster that awaits us in 2012?

Scary - yes, possible - yes, likely - ?
How would the UK be affected?
How to prepare? Buy gold, silver, a generator and long life food - or just ignore it like most politicians.

Yes I know this video is from the National Inflation Association but how sure are you really that it won't come true?

Thanks to Theo Spark for the spot.

Sunday evening catchup (part 1)

1. Paul Kedrosky reports

'Recent media reports citing information from China's electricity authority claimed that 64.5 million urban electricity meters registered zero electricity consumption over the past six months, equating to enough empty flats to house 200 million people.'

2. This is Money reports

'The European Parliament has launched a controversial new power grab, demanding the right to make tax raids on Britain. 

MEPs said they would approve a 2.9% rise in the Brussels budget – demanded by David Cameron rather than the 6% originally proposed – but only if they get powers to raise taxes.'

3. Archbishop Cranmer reports and analyses the EU's latest power grab as EU President Herman Van Rompuy informs us that

"The time of the homogenous nation-state is over…
The national and the European interest can no longer be separated; they coincide…
We have together to fight the danger of a new Euro-scepticism.
This is no longer the monopoly of a few countries.
In every Member State, there are people who believe their country can survive alone in the globalised world.
It is more than an illusion: it is a lie!"

More catchups later...