The Genocide Games

(Essays and Op-Eds)

Table of Content

In Honor of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance, the Persecution of Falun Gong, Uyghurs and So Many Others, Boycott the Beijing Olympics

The Silent Olympics: Beijing Restricts Free Speech

Is China Trying to Cheat Its Way to Olympic Glory?

Beijing’s Big Plans

Is the UN Helping China Hide Its Crimes?

Olympic Failure and the Cost of Representing China

Disappearance of Uyghur Skier Is a Reminder of Beijing’s Repression of Ethnic Minorities

Olympics Row: Visa vs. China’s e-CNY

How Rural China Forms an Accomplice Network to Control Trafficked Females

Olympic Referees Benefiting China & Beijing’s COVID Rules Draw International Outcry

Don’t Let the Bright Lights of the Olympics Blind You to the People Suffering in Its Shadows

The Reason Why No One Is Watching the Beijing Olympics

The CCP Is the Big Loser in the ‘Genocide Games’

China’s Sports Schools Destroy Lives and Fail to Deliver Gold

In Honor of Peng Shuai’s Disappearance, the Persecution of Falun Gong, Uyghurs and So Many Others, Boycott the Beijing Olympics

This combination of file photos shows tennis player Peng Shuai of China (L) during her women’s singles first round match at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne on Jan. 16, 2017; and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (R) during a visit to Russia at the Saint Petersburg International Investment Forum in Saint Petersburg on June 18, 2015. (Paul Crock and Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP via Getty Images)

Roger L. Simon

December 4, 2021; Updated December 5, 2021

Commentary

As an avid lifetime player and fan, I was probably more aware of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai  than most Americans, even media types.

I was watching on television when she cramped up in the semi-finals of the 2014 U.S. Open—her greatest success thus far—and had to be wheeled off the court, throwing the match to Caroline Wozniacki.

Peng got my sympathy then, but not nearly as much as she’s had recently since she is, as of now, a member of what is known in Spanish, because it happened so often in Argentina during the days of their  military dictatorship, as the “ desaparicida ” (the disappeared).

Ms. Peng has vanished because, as Leta Hong Fischer  explained in the New York Times:

“On Nov. 2, Peng Shuai, a former Wimbledon doubles champion, accused China’s former vice premier , Zhang Gaoli , of sexual assault. ‘Like an egg hitting a rock, or a moth to the flame, courting self-destruction, I’ll tell the truth about you,’ she wrote in a lengthy post on Weibo , China’s popular social media platform. Then she disappeared.”

The truth she was telling (we could say “alleging,” but in communist China, you don’t make casual accusations) was that Zhang sexually assaulted her. This while his wife was present in the house, no less—talk about patriarchal societies!

Zhang and Peng had had an on again, off again relationship, about which the tennis player was guilty and self-critical. She clearly wanted it over and assumed it was. The former vice premier equally clearly (and more violently) disagreed.

This is the first known #MeToo-type accusation toward a high-ranking Chinese official. Zhang was, until quite recently, a member of the Politburo.

Public discussion of her assertions and her whereabouts have been removed from the highly-censored Chinese internet.

Mega-tennis stars Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic have registered their concern and support for Peng, as have many in the sport.

Moreover, unlike most American sports organizations, notably the National Basketball Association, the Woman’s Tennis Association under Steve Simon (no relation) has actually taken action against the totalitarian communists who rule China. The WTA is suspending play  in that country until Peng surfaces in safety.

They might also wait until the CCP stops suppressing and worse Falun Gong  and Uyghurs  and other minorities, meaning millions and millions of people in gigantic China.

Bari Weiss discusses the ramifications of these choices on her Substack : “Women’s Tennis Has Balls. Does Wall Street?”

Weiss’ target is hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, whom she accuses of looking the other way at the numerous well-known atrocities of the People’s Republic, including—but, as we say, “not limited to”—the genocide against the Uyghur Muslims and the mysterious disappearances of doctors and scientists “who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19.”

She writes of Dalio:

“Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“‘I can’t be an expert in those types of things,’ he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. ‘I really have no idea.’ He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called ‘Principles.’”

Disgusting, no?

Well, yes, but sadly quite normal in our society these days when many in the upper reaches would rather go along with China than deal with anything so old-fashioned as morality.

Which leads us to the Olympics. How is it even faintly moral—I know, such an old-fashioned term—to participate in a festival of sport in China when one of the leading sports figures in the country has been disappeared by that government?

It’s obviously not. In a way, with the Beijing winter games coming in February, we are back at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Only this time there’s no American hero like Jesse Owens likely to be confronting the minions of Xi Jinping.

Less likely still is that the United States will actually boycott the games. There’s a question our leaders even have leverage to do so, if they so wished (which they probably don’t).

The reason is right under our noses in a Dec. 2 New York Post editorial: “Sorry, but Hunter Biden’s profiteering matters—even if the rest of the press ignores it.”

“Most of the media”, their board writes, “continue to ignore Hunter Biden like toddlers with their fingers in their ears. His laptop is ‘unconfirmed.’ ‘Unsubstantiated.’ ‘It doesn’t matter.’”

After debunking “unconfirmed” and “unsubstantiated,” which are, indeed, ridiculous at the point—in fact were always ridiculous—the editorial boards adds:

“So that leaves ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Liberal media outlets are uniquely incurious about Hunter selling the influence of his father. In the case of the Chinese deal, outlined by [author Miranda] Devine, they say there’s ‘no indication’ that Joe Biden ever received the ‘10 percent for the big guy’ promised in one email.

“But consider these questions:

- We know from Hunter’s own correspondence  that the chairman of China’s government-connected energy firm CEFC promised him $10 million a year for three years to provide ‘’ What politicians did he introduce executives to? Which of those meetings did Joe Biden help facilitate? What promises were made at those meetings?”

I’ll leave it there. There’s obviously more at the Post link, including emails indicating Hunter actually paid Joe’s bills with credit cards the two shared and that one of those same cards was used to pay a prostitute, presumably in China.

Unlike the discredited Steele dossier, this comes from actual evidence, on a hard drive that belonged to Hunter.

So, will the United States under Joe Biden be boycotting the Beijing Olympics ? You’ve got to be kidding. I wouldn’t be surprised if the family had a piece of it.

Nevertheless, We the People can boycott the Beijing games ourselves. We can decide not to watch yet another slavish display of communist propaganda on our television screens and create our own ratings disaster for NBC. They deserve it and then some.

So find something else to do during the Olympics. Write your congressman—there’s plenty to write about—or brush up on your Shakespeare before he’s banned from the schools.

As for Peng Shuai—pray for her. And while you’re at it, pray for the Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, and just about everybody else in the People’s Republic of China who cares even slightly about human freedom.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on GETTR and Parler @rogerlsimon.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-honor-of-peng-shuais-disappearance-the-persecution-of-falun-gong-uyghurs-and-so-many-others-boycott-the-beijing-olympics_4139045.html

The Silent Olympics: Beijing Restricts Free Speech

A police officer stands guard inside the closed loop bubble for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics near the main media center at the Olympic Park in Beijing, on Jan. 29, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Antonio Graceffo

February 3, 2022

News Analysis

In addition to being subjected to constant surveillance, attendees of the Winter Olympics  have been warned by the Chinese regime not to speak out on any sensitive topics such as human rights issues.

“How did we get to a point where we granted hosting rights to a nation where you can’t use your phone ?” said Owen Slot, chief sports writer at The Times of London, on the issue of the Olympic Games.

The decision to allow Beijing  to host the 2022 Winter Olympics has been extremely controversial, given the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses, including the genocide of Uyghur Muslims , cultural genocide in Tibet, and its militaristic overtures toward Taiwan . An additional cause for concern is the fate of tennis star Peng Shuai, who disappeared shortly after accusing former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault.

Chinese authorities have cautioned athletes against discussing controversial subjects during the Games. Yang Shu, deputy director general of Beijing 2022’s International Relations Department said that violators would face “ certain punishment .” Yang’s statement, however, may not be in line with the rules on political and religious speech in the Olympic Charter .

Before the Summer Games in Tokyo, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eased the Olympic Charter’s  Rule 50, allowing athletes greater freedom to express political views in news conferences. Yang said that athletes could be punished, not only for violating IOC rules, but also if the athletes violated China ’s rules, which are considerably more restrictive. This raises the question of how much right the host country has in controlling statements made by Olympic athletes.

Censorship is only one component of the CCP ’s extreme regimen of social control. The U.S. Department of State  warned that travelers to Beijing may have their hotel rooms and possessions searched without their permission. Reporters covering the Olympics are required to download a health-monitoring app that can gather their personal information and, thus, most will bring throw-away “burner” phones  to prevent their data from being hacked.

Journalists will be subjected to a strict regimen of COVID-19 testing, and if they test positive, they will not be allowed to cover the Games. In light of the numerous restrictions, some news agencies, including ESPN, have decided against sending correspondents to Beijing. NBC will cover the games remotely, from the United States. Former NBC sports host, Bob Costas , called the return of the Games to China “shameless.” USA Today columnist, Christine Brennan, said that the pandemic had played right into the CCP’s hands , giving it a pretext to increase its control over journalists.

With at least 127 journalists  currently detained in China, the country ranks 177th out of 180 in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). In spite of CCP censorship, RSF has issued news reporting guidelines and urged journalists not to use Beijing-friendly terms that do not accurately depict uncomfortable realities. Rather than saying “the fight against terrorism,” RSF suggests saying “the repression in Xinjiang.” Similarly, the Tiananmen “events” should be referred to as “the Tiananmen massacre,” according to RFI.

In addition to some news media giving the Olympics a pass, the Games are also facing a diplomatic boycott  from countries such as Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom .

Protesters hold up placards and banners as they attend a demonstration in Sydney to call on the Australian government to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over China’s human rights record, on June 23, 2021. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

Even before Peng’s disappearance, there were calls for an Olympic boycott over the CCP’s human rights violations , including aggression against Taiwan. These are issues that have existed for decades and they bring into question why the West would even allow communist China to host the Games.

More recently, Peng has served as a catalyst, tipping the scales in favor of Western governments taking action against the CCP. Since her initial disappearance last year, Peng has made a few, dubious appearances on Chinese and Singaporean media. But citizens and lawmakers in the West are skeptical about whether she was speaking freely  or if she was under duress. The World Tennis Association  (WTA) has demanded an investigation.

Furthermore, the WTA called for an end to censorship regarding Peng. The association has since cancelled all tournaments  in Hong Kong and China, and has intimated that it would abandon its lucrative contracts with China if its demands for an inquiry are not met. Unfortunately, not everyone is brave enough to take such a stand. Caving to pressure from the CCP, the Australian Open  required that fans remove their “Where is Peng Shuai” t-shirts.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution  calling for immediate, third-party verification of Peng’s freedom and safety. The bill also condemned the IOC for collaborating with the CCP to cover up Peng’s disappearance.

Rep. Michael Gallagher (R-Wis.) called for Magnitsky sanctions  to be brought against members of the IOC who colluded with the CCP, aiding in the cover up. The Magnitsky Act empowers the U.S. government to sanction human rights offenders by freezing their assets and banning them from entering the United States. If implemented, Magnitsky sanctions could also challenge the tax-exempt status of the IOC in America.

The diplomatic boycotts and potential sanctions seem ineffective. Despite the CCP’s censorship, surveillance, genocide, and mistreatment of a tennis star, the Games are set to begin on Feb. 4, further legitimizing the CCP’s position as a world leader.

Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., has spent more than 20 years in Asia. He is a graduate of the Shanghai University of Sport and holds a China-MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Graceffo works as an economics professor and China economic analyst, writing for various international media. Some of his books on China include “Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Global Economic Expansion” and “A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-silent-olympics-beijing-restricts-free-speech_4254927.html

Is China Trying to Cheat Its Way to Olympic Glory?

The Chinese men’s national hockey team practices ahead of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the National Indoor Stadium, in Beijing, on Jan. 29, 2022. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

John Mac Ghlionn

February 3, 2022

Commentary

The United States’ ice hockey team will face off against China  on Feb. 10. On closer inspection, though, they will be facing off against a team called China  but composed primarily of Westerners.

What’s going on here? How can this be?

Isn’t China supposed to have some of the toughest immigration policies  on the planet? Perhaps, just perhaps, China—more specifically, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—is trying to cheat its way to Olympic  glory.

As the journalist Justin Olsvik recently noted , Jan. 27 was the finalization of the Chinese men’s ice hockey team roster. Of the 24 players confirmed to represent the country, however, only 9 are Chinese. The other 15 happen to be Canadians, Americans, and Russians. Specifically, 11 Canadians, 3 Americans, and 1 Russian. To say that the Chinese “national team relies on foreign athletes to remain even remotely competitive,” as Olsvik did, is an understatement of epic proportions.

In fairness to Olsvik, he followed up the understatement by discussing some rather interesting statistics. In the world of ice hockey, as some readers are no doubt aware, “points” are awarded to players for each goal scored or assist earned. Most readers are familiar with the NHL, or the National Hockey  League. However, there also exists something called the KHL, or the Kontinental Hockey League. This professional ice hockey league, very much international in nature, was founded in 2008. Clubs from Belarus, China, Finland, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Russia and, of course, China compete in this league.

In 2019, the sports journalist Jon Sorensen noted  that KHL officials planned to introduce “smart pucks and chips,” which would be “embedded in each of the players’ jerseys.”

Why?

“The new sensors and “telematics systems” were introduced to “provide advanced data and analytics on each player and for every team, and deliver the data and information in real time to officials, fans, coaches and broadcasters,” wrote Sorensen.

The Chinese, not surprisingly, paid close attention to the stats. And for good reason.

As the aforementioned Olsvik noted, last season, “the 24 members of the Chinese Olympic team accumulated a total of 198 points.” Of those points, “99.5 percent were racked up by foreigners,” with only one Chinese player, Rudi Ying, picking up a single point . The top three players—Spencer Foo, Tyler Wong, and Brandon Yip, all of Canadian descent—accounted “for 44 percent of the team’s points.”

Olsvik then wonders if enlisting  “athletes from other countries” is inherently unethical. Well, is it? That is up to readers to decide.

Now, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with becoming a naturalized citizen of another country. However, when almost two-thirds of a country’s ice hockey team ( and soccer ) is composed of naturalized athletes, serious questions need to be asked. Sure, China is not doing anything illegal—but using foreign talent to help boost the Chinese regime’s image appears to be somewhat unethical. One could (and possibly should) say that China is trying to cheat its way to Olympic success.

Should we be surprised? Not necessarily. All is fair in love and war, we’re told. And for the CCP, the accumulation of medals—more specifically, the accumulation of gold medals—is very much comparable with warfare,  even if Chinese leader Xi Jinping says otherwise . Whatever needs to be done must be done, even if this includes enlisting the services of foreigners and presenting them as “Chinese” athletes.

This is true for the men’s ice hockey team, and it’s equally true for the women’s.

In March 2018, in an interview  with SupChina, Shirley Hon, then a director of international affairs for the Kunlun Red Star Group, a leading Chinese hockey team, was asked about the 2022 Winter Olympics. More specifically, she was asked what the minimum requirements were for both the men’s and the women’s ice hockey teams.

Hon, a woman very much in the know, responded, “The goal for the men’s team is to make it to the final eight teams.” For the women’s team, nothing less than a gold medal would please the elites in Beijing.

Arena workers prepare the venue for hockey games at the National Indoor Stadium leading up to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, in Beijing, on Jan. 29, 2022. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

In an effort to achieve gold, Digit Murphy, an American and then coach of the women’s national team at the time, was, according to SB Nation, given no shortage of resources : “two brand-new pro teams, a pipeline of players and coaches from the West, and a new arena in Shenzhen.”

The pipeline was created to siphon off talent from abroad. One of Murphy’s new recruits was a woman by the name of Kelli Stack, “a surprise cut from the U.S. Olympic team.”

Murphy, according to the SB Nation piece, fully embraced Beijing’s calls to do whatever was necessary to ensure gold in 2022. Her idea was to formalize Beijing’s plans, then take them one “step further.” Murphy worked tirelessly to enlist what she called “ambassadors.” These were “top Western players imported to China not just to play hockey, but to share and promote the game across a cultural divide.”

Today, with the help of Murphy and other Westerners, China’s women’s ice hockey team is gunning for gold. Will it be successful? If the current world rankings  are anything to go by, then probably not. Nevertheless, the willingness of so many foreigners to assist a country responsible for unmentionable crimes against humanity should fill us all with a sense of dismay.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published, among others, by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and The Spectator US. He covers psychology and social relations, and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-china-trying-to-cheat-its-way-to-olympic-glory_4252707.html

Beijing’s Big Plans

People walk past a bank’s electronic board showing the Hong Kong share index at Hong Kong Stock Exchange, in Hong Kong, China, on Dec. 23, 2021. (Vincent Yu/AP Photo)

The financial world needs to adjust its perspective to see what China is planning

James Gorrie

Writer

February 6, 2022

Commentary

As the Beijing Winter Olympics get underway, all the world’s eyes are on China . But are the big financial players aware of what’s really going on that’s right before their eyes?

Probably not.

China Stocks Crash in US Markets

As tighter U.S. regulations came into force last year, weakness and fraud were revealed in many Chinese companies. As a result, we saw the crash of U.S.-listed China stocks in 2021.

Many stocks hit new lows  and lost as much as 80 percent of their value—others even more. In fact, just the threat of more oversight made some Chinese companies decide to delist from U.S. stock exchanges altogether.

Looking for a Rebound?

Now, just a few weeks into the new year, the speculation among financial observers and investment banks is that after the crushing losses, a stock price comeback  in 2022 is a reasonable possibility.

That’s typical. When stock prices fall so quickly, conventional financial thinking has investors assuming that assets have been oversold.

The investment bankers remain dazzled and hypnotized by the prospect of gaining more access to the China market and the profits that it would bring.

But is expecting U.S. market-listed Chinese stock prices to fully recover reasonable?

Not this time, and there are several reasons why.

This Time, It’s Different–Power Trumps Money

For one, unlike financial institutions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ultimately is not about making money. Yes, the Party is full of millionaires and billionaires, but that’s beside the point. The two are linked, but as Alibaba’s former owner Jack Ma  and other tech moguls discovered, power trumps money.

With the first, you can always get the second. But it doesn’t always work so well the other way around.

The CCP’s national objective is to grow China’s power and project it around the world.

Furthermore, even when the CCP causes bubbles that eventually cause tremendous economic and social upheaval , the people who get hurt have no power and the Party has all of it, so there are no consequences for the CCP—so far.

The current real estate development crash tells this story well. The tens of millions of investors who lost their life savings are suffering, but the Party remains in power.

Hong Kong and Beijing: The Alternative to Wall Street

Moreover, the CCP no longer needs or cares if Chinese stocks perform well on Wall Street. With its takeover of Hong Kong, the Party now has the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, or more formally, the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx), for that.

As the third-largest  exchange in the world and the government of Hong Kong as the largest stockholder, there is ample opportunity for Beijing to grow the exchange and increase its influence at the expense of Wall Street. Additionally, a new Beijing-based exchange will be established , creating a powerful center of gravity for global investment and finance.

In fact, by lowering secondary listing requirements, the Hong Kong exchange is attracting U.S. companies to list their stocks there. Furthermore, the CCP can dictate performance on the Hong Kong Exchange, as well as in the Shanghai and Shenzhen  exchanges with capital and manipulation  to boost its power and influence .

Normalcy Bias and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom

Meanwhile, global investment banks and Wall Street firms that are heavily invested in China  insist that Chinese companies will regain their value on U.S. exchanges, but it doesn’t really matter.

The BlackRock logo is pictured outside its headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York City on May 25, 2021. The company is the first foreign investment firm to have 100 percent control of an equity fund in China. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

Financial firms either don’t see what’s happening because they don’t want to, or are just going with the flow. They tend to view the changing world as a consequence of globalism . It is, but globalism isn’t the end for China—it is the means by which to put the Middle Kingdom back into its rightful place: global dominance.

The Chinese regime’s big plan is to replace U.S. hegemony  with its own, and it’s happening at an astonishing rate. Diminishing, if not destroying, the world’s confidence in the U.S. stock market and the dollar is a big part of that plan.

Part of the execution of that plan likely involves a crash in the U.S. markets and Beijing shorting them to take billions, if not trillions, of dollars out of the U.S. economy virtually overnight.

The net effect would be a loss of world confidence and prestige for the United States.

How might this crash come about? How could the CCP trigger it?

An invasion  of Taiwan may well do it, but there are other possibilities.

The Opportunity Is Now

The larger point is that the Chinese regime is now positioned to damage the United States in ways that other adversaries cannot, while providing the world an alternative.

As a global economic power, Beijing enjoys the currency clout, established top-tier, China-based stock exchanges and heavy investment in China by U.S. financial interests.

The United States, on the other hand, is increasingly looking like a global economic power in decline.

Besides adding trillions of new debt in response to the pandemic, America’s wobbly commitment  to Taiwan’s defense, the calamitous Afghanistan withdrawal, and the Ukraine crisis all diminish the world’s confidence in the United States and the dollar.

This emerging reality has terrible implications for the United States and for what remains of the free world.

James R. Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijings-big-plans_4258684.html

Is the UN Helping China Hide Its Crimes?

The United Nations logo at the U.N. headquarters in New York City, United States, in October 2016. (Lewis Tse Pui Lung/Adobe Stock)

John Mac Ghlionn

February 8, 2022

Commentary

In 1945, shortly after the Second World War, the United Nations (U.N.) was established. According to its website , the intergovernmental organization was created to develop “friendly relations among nations, and promote “social progress, better living standards and human rights .”

In reality, though, the U.N. appears to be inherently corrupt . In 2005, as The Economist reported at the time , Benon Sevan, the former head of the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq was accused of taking “kickbacks” to help an oil company win numerous contracts. Another senior U.N. official was accused of soliciting bribes. Further investigations proved that Sevan had accepted bribes from the former Iraqi regime. Shortly after the revelations, Sevan resigned from his position. In October 2005, a criminal investigation was launched. Sevan quickly fled the United States, where he resided at the time, and returned to his native Cyprus, where he still resides to this day.

Now, the U.N. appears to be aiding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to cover up its crimes (at least temporarily) in Xinjiang, a region in northern China  where acts of genocide are occurring.

Are the U.N. and the CCP colluding to cover up human rights abuses? This might sound like a ludicrous question to ask—but it’s not.

On Feb. 2, the South China Morning Post published a rather damning piece, in which the U.N. and China stand accused  of constructing a “mutually convenient stalemate.” The accusation came after the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the organization’s top human rights body, confirmed that it “will not publish a report on alleged abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang  before this month’s Winter Olympics.”

Why?

The headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) named Palais Wilson, honoring the former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, in Geneva on Jan. 8, 2018. (Fabrice Coffrin/AFP via Getty Images)

After all, as the Post piece notes, the Xinjiang report has been in the works for close to three years. Additionally, it is “believed to have been ready for publication for much of that time.” Commenting on the inexplicable delay, OHCHR spokeswoman Liz Throssell said: “I am afraid we don’t have an updated timeline yet for the publication of the report. However, I understand that it will not be ready for publication before the start of the Winter Olympics this Friday (Feb 4).”

Is Beijing pressuring the U.N. into silence, preventing the organization from “spoiling” the Winter Olympics with some harsh truths? It appears so.

Last year, Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador, accused China  of “quietly working to corrupt the United Nations from top to bottom.” She called on the Biden administration to “call out China’s attempts to co-opt the United Nations and its agencies” and rallied other countries “to oppose China’s influence.”

Haley had a point.

The U.N. has a number of specialized agencies. Fifteen to be exact. Four of these are run  by Chinese nationals: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDP), and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The U.N. relies heavily on funding  to cover administrative costs and its 30-plus affiliated programs and specialized agencies , as well as peacekeeping operations. A lot of this funding comes from China. In fact, in recent decades, the CCP’s financial support for the U.N. has grown exponentially.

According to researchers at the China Power Project , before the turn of the century, China was reluctant to play an active role in the organization. Today, however, it’s now one of the largest contributors to the U.N.’s regular budget and peacekeeping budget. Interestingly, it now “provides more personnel to peacekeeping operations than any other permanent member of the Security Council.” All of these “contributions,” note the authors, allow the CCP “to exert diplomatic and political influence globally.” In other words, the CCP’s contributions allow it to control the U.N. narrative.

It’s clear to see that China carries a great deal of clout. Should we be surprised? The answer is no. Not at all. The U.N. appears to be a highly compromised organization, masquerading as an impartial one.

If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is, to quote the aforementioned Haley , “a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” Again, Haley is spot on. This cesspool consists of Qatar, a country with a horrid history of human rights abuses; and Kazakhstan, a country where at least 225 people, many of whom  happened to be peaceful protesters, were recently gunned down in broad daylight. It also consists of Russia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, China. All of these countries  score poorly on the human rights and rule of law index.

Which brings us back to the initial question: is the U.N. helping China?

Although we cannot answer this question with a definitive yes, it’s safe to say that the U.N. is far from impartial. It’s also safe to say that communist China, a country where genocide is most definitely occurring, has far too much influence over an organization that was established to prosecute, rather than protect, bad actors.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published, among others, by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and The Spectator US. He covers psychology and social relations, and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-the-un-helping-china-hide-its-crimes_4258286.html

Olympic Failure and the Cost of Representing China

General view inside the stadium of the Olympic Cauldron as a firework display is seen above during the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China, on Feb. 4, 2022. (David Ramos/Getty Images)

John Mac Ghlionn

February 9, 2022; Updated February 10, 2022

Commentary

In the immortal words of Swedish pop group ABBA, “the winner takes it all.” The loser, however, “has to fall.” In China , as we will see, any “loser” unlucky enough to fall is mercilessly ridiculed.

Instead of being offered assistance, support, and a helping hand, they are bullied and chastised, mocked, and maligned. This, I argue, tells us a lot about the country’s psyche, and why communist China has a bad international reputation .

On Feb. 8, fans across China heaped praise on Eileen Gu, the freestyle skater who won her first gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. In fact, the praise was so effusive that Weibo, the country’s leading social media platform, temporarily crashed and 90,000 comments in the space of 30 minutes explains why.

Gu, a teenager who was born in San Francisco, has an American father and a Chinese mother. In 2019, she decided to represent China. Her decision, it seems, has served her well. Within an hour of her victory, the hashtag “Gu Ailing won the gold medal” had received  more than 300 million views. Across China, Gu is a hero.

Eileen Gu, of China, competes during the women’s freestyle skiing big air finals of the 2022 Winter Olympics, in Beijing, on Feb. 8, 2022. (Matt Slocum/AP Photo)

However, Zhu Yi, another American-born athlete who also pledged her allegiance to China, is anything but. Two days before Gu won gold, Zhu, a figure skater, was competing in the team competition. The 19 year old, who was born and raised in the United States, had a horrendous outing, falling twice  and leaving the ice in tears.

One wonders if Zhu, who gave up her American citizenship to compete for China back in 2018, regrets her decision. Shortly after her unfortunate display, social media users on Weibo attacked her, questioning both her selection and her ability as a skater.

According to a Fox News report , “the hashtag #ZhuYiFellOver had over 230 million views by Sunday [Feb. 6] afternoon before being removed from the website. A second tag, #ZhuYiMessedUp, remained on the site with just around 80 million views at the time.”

What explains the hatred, the nastiness, the casual cruelness? It’s possible that heightened levels of nationalism  played a role in the vitriol directed toward Zhu. Moreover, unlike the United States, which prizes individualism over collectivism, China is a place where individualism is punished. If in doubt, just ask Jack Ma, a man who had the temerity to express an honest opinion .

Collectivist cultures emphasize the importance of fitting in, harmony, and interdependence. In such cultures, a person’s identity is closely tied to the idea of pleasing the crowd. The fall of one citizen, be it a literal one, like Zhu’s, or a figurative one, like Ma’s, represents the fall of the country. In collectivist cultures, saving face is key. To bring shame on a family, a community, a country is unforgivable. Failure to recognize this fact will cost you.

China’s Zhu Yi reacts after competing in the women’s single skating free skating of the figure skating team event during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing, on Feb. 7, 2022. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images)

On a different day, under different circumstances, Zhu could have stormed to victory, and Gu could have fallen. Both of these young women are supreme athletes. Both of them turned their backs on the United States to represent China. But only one of them is being praised.

In China, as we can see, loyalty is not always rewarded. In fact, it rarely is. One must do something truly amazing, like win a gold medal at the Olympics, to receive praise. However, one must only step out of line for a brief second to be punished, swiftly and severely. This is the cost of representing China.

Endemic Indifference

The sheer malice shown toward Zhu appears to be symptomatic of a broader trend. In October 2011, a two-year-old Chinese girl by the name of Wang Yue was run over by two separate vehicles on a road in Foshan, Guangdong Province. As the toddler lay bleeding on the road, crying out for more than seven minutes, at least 18 different drivers maneuvered around her body, opting to ignore rather than to help her. Eventually, a person had the decency to stop and take the little girl to the hospital for treatment. Sadly, a week after the horrendous affair, Wang succumbed to her injuries and died. Again, what could explain such cruelty? How could close to 20 different drivers ignore a little girl, clearly injured, sprawled out in the middle of a road?

At the time, some commentators believed the incident reflected a moral decline  in contemporary Chinese society. But I argue, Wang’s situation was, and still is, indicative of something more concerning. Having lived in the country myself, and having witnessed the casual cruelty shown toward everyday citizens, from young children to those in their twilight years, I say this with a high degree of certainty —which is odd, especially in a collectivist culture. However, the maintenance of group harmony does not always require empathy. Sometimes, threats and coercion, rather than actual support and understanding, are enough.

In a country where a tyrannical regime reigns supreme, human dignity is in short supply . The country is, after all, run by a pack of brutal bullies, and these bullies influence every single aspect of Chinese culture. Now, many of the Chinese people—for example, the bullied—are mirroring the actions of those in Beijing. They have become bullies, devoid of compassion and understanding.

John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. His work has been published, among others, by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and The Spectator US. He covers psychology and social relations, and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/olympic-failure-and-the-cost-of-representing-china_4266257.html

Disappearance of Uyghur Skier Is a Reminder of Beijing’s Repression of Ethnic Minorities

Chinese torchbearer athletes Dinigeer Yilamujian and Zhao Jiawen hold the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the National Stadium in Beijing, China, on Feb. 4, 2022. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Antonio Graceffo

February 10, 2022

News Analysis

The Chinese Communist Party’s ( CCP ) repression of ethnic minorities was the reason for a widespread diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics. Now, a Uyghur skier who lit the Olympic flame has gone missing.

Just days into the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, and controversy already abounds. A Dutch reporter  was mishandled by Chinese authorities while filming. Athletes and coaches have complained about inhuman treatment  during forced quarantine. Top foreign athletes have been disqualified on questionable grounds, including improper attire.  Security experts from around the world have warned about the Chinese regime spying on athletes and visitors, through a mandatory health monitoring app.

Human rights groups were appalled when the CCP selected an ethnic Uyghur, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, to light the Olympic flame, calling it a political stunt to distract attention away from the CCP’s human rights  violations.

After her event on Feb. 5, journalists waited  for Yilamujiang, but she never showed up. Reporters were also unable to reach her through China’s National Olympics  Committee. At a press conference, Beijing Olympics organizers  refused to comment on her disappearance.

The CCP had a Uyghur athlete light the Olympic flame  to show the world that in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, accusations of genocide in Xinjiang were just misinformation. The 20-year-old athlete from Xinjiang’s northern Altay Prefecture placed 43 rd  in her cross-country skiathlon Olympic debut, which raises the question of whether she had even been qualified  to compete in the Games.

The fact that she was chosen to light the cauldron was clearly a political decision. China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun said that out of the 174 members of China’s Olympic team, 20 athletes are ethnic minorities . Yilamujiang is one of six athletes from Xinjiang, but she was the only ethnic Uyghur. Consequently, the CCP hoped that by allowing Yilamujiang to represent China at a crucial moment, it could stave off claims of racism and genocide. Overseas Uyghur human rights  groups called the move “offensive.”

During interviews at the beginning of the Games, Yilamujiang thanked the state for giving her so much, but said nothing of her ethnicity  or how significant it was to be an ethnic minority who was chosen to light the flame. By contrast, her fellow athlete, Adake Ahenaer, a speed skater from Xinjiang, specifically mentioned how important it was for her, as a Kazakh, to represent her ethnic minority group and succeed in the Olympics. Ahenaer even commented on how emotional she got when she saw Yilamujiang on TV representing the minority peoples . But somehow, Yilamujiang never said anything similar and it would seem that she had been coached on what not to say.

Beijing used similar publicity stunts at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics. At the time, to prove the CCP’s racial equality, it had Chinese children, dressed in the ethnic costumes of China’s 56 recognized ethnicities, dance around the national flags. Journalists later discovered, however, that the children portraying China’s minorities were not actually from those ethnic groups . In reality, tensions with ethnic minorities had been increasing, leading up to the Games, with pro-Tibet independence advocates protesting in front of the building of state broadcaster CCTV in Beijing.

In 2008, the CCP chose a Uyghur, Kamalturk Yalqun, to be an Olympic torchbearer, but he did not light the cauldron. He has been living in exile in the United States since 2014. His father disappeared into China’s state security apparatus in 2016. Yalqun was one of many voices calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

While there were no full boycotts, numerous Western governments—such as Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—held diplomatic boycotts, specifically because of human rights violations against Uyghurs.

In response, Beijing warned that boycotting nations will “ pay a price ” for their “mistake.”

Dozens of human rights activists protested in front of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles, calling for boycotts of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, in California, on Feb. 3, 2022. (Alice Sun/The Epoch Times)

Uyghurs who have managed to flee to the West have reported various forms of abuse by the CCP, including forced labor, torture, forced conversion, organ harvesting, forced sterilization , imprisonment, sexual abuse , mass detention, and separation from family members. Uyghur victims describe having been forced to eat pork , sing the praises of CCP leader Xi Jinping, drink alcohol, and burn a Quran. The CCP forbids women in Xinjiang from wearing head scarves, while men are prohibited from sporting beards. The Islamic greeting “ As-salamu alaikum ” is banned, as is fasting during Ramadan. According to a July 2021 report by Time magazine, camp guards told detainees that “all ethnicities will be as one and must share the same language and food.”

The rules are enforced through facial recognition surveillance cameras that blanket much of Xinjiang. Being caught in a violation could result in detention.

The CCP claims that the measures taken against the Uyghurs are necessary to combat the “three evils” of “separatism, terrorism, and extremism.” It also says that the accusations of abuse and genocide of Uyghurs is a web of “lies and absurd allegations.”

In spite of the CCP’s claims that all ethnic minorities are treated equally, its repression of Uyghurs extends beyond China’s borders. As a result of the oppression, many Uyghurs flee  to other countries, where they are often pursued, harassed, and intimidated by agents of the CCP. In some cases, they are pressured into spying  for Beijing. Chinese officials conduct interrogations of Uyghurs at “ black sites ” in other countries, Sky News reported on Feb. 9. If a particular Uyghur is considered a “troublemaker,” then he/she simply disappears.

In December 2021, Congress  passed a law that bans imports from Xinjiang over concerns about slave labor. The CCP responded to the ban, calling it “economic bullying.”

The U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 , which imposes sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur region.

Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., has spent more than 20 years in Asia. He is a graduate of the Shanghai University of Sport and holds a China-MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Graceffo works as an economics professor and China economic analyst, writing for various international media. Some of his books on China include “Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Global Economic Expansion” and “A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/disappearance-of-uyghur-skier-is-a-reminder-of-beijings-repression-of-ethnic-minorities_4269379.html

Olympics Row: Visa vs. China’s e-CNY

A sign for Chinas new digital currency, electronic Chinese yuan (e-CNY) is displayed at a shopping mall in Shanghai, China, on March 8, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

IOC apparently breaks Visa exclusivity agreement to appease Beijing

Anders Corr

February 11, 2022 Updated: February 11, 2022

Commentary

At the Beijing Winter Olympics, China is rolling out its digital currency, the e-CNY, for the first time to foreigners.

Nobody should want to attend the Games given the genocide. But if you were forced to go, then you would have the option of prepaying a credit card with digital Chinese yuan loaded for touchless payments.

Or you could buy the more gimmicky versions, with payment chips embedded in ski gloves or a panda soft toy. You can now buy your hot chocolate without freezing your hand first by removing your glove to dig into pockets for change.

Progress, apparently. It is at times like these that one appreciates the supposed innovations of dictatorship. But for those droids always looking for the next greatest and latest, wrist implantable e-CNY is not yet available.

And forgotten by most are the wearable payment methods that Visa promoted during the 2018 Games. “You dream of amazing. We dream of amazing ways to pay,” according  to Visa ads for the PyeongChang Winter Games in South Korea.

E-CNY is a digital currency, like Bitcoin, which is illegal in China. Beijing does not want the competition, and Bitcoin along with other cryptocurrencies are just too easy to spend on illegal things. Crypto is relatively anonymous for users, which is ideal for criminals. In China, that likely includes you if you want your money out of the country or have any ideas not in concert with Xi Jinping Thought.

E-CNY is unlike other cryptocurrencies because it is tightly controlled, monitored, and transparent to the regime. The state knows exactly what you are spending, and where, at every moment of the day.

While many who quietly made a killing on cryptocurrencies over the past years are trying to get their money into low-tax zones  like Germany, Portugal, and Malta, that’s impossible with e-CNY. Chinese leader Xi Jinping knows who you are and where you keep your money. You will never escape Beijing’s tax man.

The regime would eventually like e-CNY to be a global currency, trusted by all because all trust the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But that’s tough given Beijing’s repeated broken promises, including in the e-CNY’s first rollout to international consumers.

A Visa credit card is seen on a computer keyboard in this picture illustration taken on Sept. 6, 2017. (Philippe Wojazer/Illustration/Reuters)

Visa, the credit card company, has long had exclusive rights in the electronic payments category at the Olympics. It is one of only 13 main sponsors of the Games that likely collectively paid over $1 billion for what amounts to advertising rights for the 2022 and 2024 Games.

“For 36 years, Visa has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to be an Olympic sponsor, ensuring its branding is all over stadiums and athletes, and that no one attending or watching the Games even thinks of Mastercard,” according to The Globe and Mail  on Feb. 7.

Mastercard and AMEX, for example, are not allowed for payments at the Games as a result. Neither should e-CNY or China’s state-owned UnionPay mobile app. But in Beijing, the CCP can be very persuasive. After all, it has the guns and a Maoist philosophy that power grows from their barrels. So companies tend to believe, when in Beijing, do as the Beijingers.

According to China’s state-controlled Global Times  on Feb. 9, “The e-CNY is one of three forms of payment available to athletes and visitors at the Olympic Games, along with Visa and cash, and the only one that supports contact-less payment for the need of epidemic prevention and control.”

Way to play the COVID card against Visa. One wonders why Visa’s contactless forms of payment are not around four years after PyeongChang. Why is the e-CNY panda getting all the credit?

The e-CNY is particularly focused on expansion in China. Utilization of e-CNY at the Games “paves the way for a further large-scale national rollout and cross-border application,” according to Global Times. On Feb. 4, more payments at the Olympics’ Bird’s Nest stadium were made through e-CNY, according to The Wall Street Journal , than through Visa’s network. Most of those payments were by Chinese citizens.

When e-CNY started splashing its logo around the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Visa apparently thought the better part of discretion was not to complain publicly, despite that it conflicted with their exclusivity agreement. That also makes sense from a PR perspective: first, because Visa doesn’t much want to associate with the “Genocide Games” and, second, because it doesn’t want the public in China, or more importantly the regime, to be angered by a commercial dispute. Visa wants to grow its business in China, and getting into a fight with e-CNY is the best way to jeopardize that goal.

So yet again, the CCP and its favored businesses get away with murder. At the Olympics, there’s yet more blood on Beijing’s fake snow.

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea” (2018).

https://www.theepochtimes.com/olympics-row-visa-vs-chinas-e-cny_4270270.html

How Rural China Forms an Accomplice Network to Control Trafficked Females

Marip Lu sits in her family’s shelter in a refugee camp in northern Kachin State, Burma on March 21, 2018. Marip Lu, 24, claims she was kidnapped by traffickers and suffered six years of captivity, rape, and abuse deep in China. (Esther Htusan/AP)

(This commentary was included here in light of the rampant crimes of woman trafficking under CCP’s rule being exposed while the  2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games were going on.)

He Qinglian

February 12, 2022

Commentary

Many analyses blame the Chinese human trafficking industry for the misery of a Xuzhou mother of eight. The stereotype of rural Chinese as simple and hard working people ignores the fact that the abducted females sold for marriage are faced with the oppression of the buyers, and even more so the oppression of the villagers, who are a small community of accomplices who keep the woman in bondage. Villagers, don’t believe what they’re doing is a crime.

Females Sold for Marriage Can’t Escape

There are two Chinese films giving a rough idea of how rural communities have evolved and become a serious taboo of the Communist regime.

“Blind Mountain,” was a cinema release in 2007, and state media, CCTV’s propaganda program on law, “A College Girl Abducted for Marriage” aired in 2018.

The CCTV program imitated lines and plots from the Blind Mountain film, and added two fictional characters, relatives of the buyer: a cousin Hai, and another cousin working as a police officer. The sympathetic Hai tried to help the girl escape, but failed; and the police officer did the righteous thing and punished the buyer.

“Blind Mountain “was based on a real person named Zheng Xiuli.

I saw the movie and researched the actual hardships Zheng experienced. After reading many similar cases, I have a certain understanding of how local communities form an accomplice network when a female is bought for marriage.

The enabling is done by local villagers who prevent the wives from running away. The CCTV program deliberately omitted this very important fact, but portrayed the abducted women as isolated cases or a crime committed by a few poor farmers. The program gave an image of a communist rural life filled with fine farmhouses, clean and tidy farmyards, and many nice cars.

“Blind Mountain” has all the elements of an abducted woman’s tragedy, whose situation was better than that of the Xuzhou mother of eight who was mainly raped and abused by the husband, and became a sex slave of many men in the village.

Zheng Xiuli, a young woman from Northeast China, had a life far more devastating than the film showed.

Zheng Xiuli, a college graduate, went south to work in Zhuhai in 1994. The trafficker, posing as a job broker, abducted her to Huaping Village, nearly 200 miles away, and sold her for 3,000 yuan ($431.88) to a 49-year-old villager named Guo.

Zheng tried to escape the night she arrived at Guo’s house, but the entire village was mobilized to catch her, and so she was beaten badly by Guo’s family. That night, with the help of Guo’s brother and sister-in-law, Guo raped Zheng Xiuli.

Zheng tried to escape many times, until she realized that everyone around her was an accomplice in her captivity. In the following two years, Zheng Xiuli gave birth to two children.

Finally, the desperate and badly abused Zheng splashed sulfuric acid on both of Guo’s brother’s children, and injured five other students.

Zheng Xiuli was not waiting to be rescued, but to be arrested by the police.

In the end, she was sentenced to death for the crime of intentional injury, which was deferred.

Some said that screenwriter Li Yang hoped to draw attention to the tragedy of abducted women with the movie.

A woman reunites with her newborn baby who was sold by the doctor who delivered him at a hospital in Fuping County, central China’s Shanxi province on Aug. 5, 2013. Other such cases have been reported across China in recent years. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Why Villagers Become Accomplices

The incidents of Zheng Xiuli and the Xuzhou mother of eight reflect issues that are far beyond the scope of buying and selling women. One wonders why they could not escape.

I recall the reports I read when I was in China that gave details of an abduction. The local police raided a village in the middle of the night. Otherwise, they would be surrounded by villagers and the mission would fail. The police were there to carry out a rescue, not to cause a mass event.

So let’s look at why villagers would unite in fending off a police action.

In remote rural China, it is not easy for men to get married. Generally speaking, women are reluctant to marry men in poor areas, and many farmers will exchange their own daughters for daughters-in-law. Those who have no daughters have to pay thousands of yuan, and even tens of thousands, for a marriage. This amount will drain the family’s entire resources. Thus, the brides the farmers buy are considered property that ought to be secured by the entire family—the buyers.

Today’s Chinese villages have become a community of shared interest, whether they are single-surname villages or mixed-surname villages. Poor villages are filled with bachelors, who resort to traffickers to get a wife. To protect the property they paid for, villagers follow an unwritten rule to form a system of containment. For instance, they will notify the buyer if they learn of the abducted woman’s intention to escape; when police arrive, they  hide the abducted woman; and when necessary, they intervene in police rescue efforts.

Don’t expect the party secretary of the village to stand up for justice. As a villager himself, the local party secretary is bound to guard his villagers’ interests.

There’s also a 2006 film, “The Story of An Abducted Woman,” based on Gao Yanmin, a woman abducted and sold to  a man in Xia’an Village, Hebei Province. The villagers were hostile to reporters who tried to interview Gao Yanmin after her story was made public. They blamed Gao for exposing the villagers’ buying wives and ruining their reputation. The village party secretary asked a reporter who went for an interview: “There are still more than 60 bachelors in the village, how can you help them?”

In the absence of intervention, the sex ratio at birth generally ranges between 103 and 107 male births per 100 female births, according to UNICEF  (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund). The preference for sons in rural China is very serious, which has created an extraordinary gender imbalance. In 2004,  China recorded 121 boys born for every 100 girls; in 2019, it still remained at a ratio of 112 boys for every 100 girls. Chinese men are estimated to outnumber women by about 30 million for 30 years, according to a Party mouthpiece.

Rural China, harboring the majority of single men, has a huge demand for wife buying. This is the social background of China’s serious abduction and trafficking of women. Coupled with the regime’s general disregard for human rights, women’s rights are easily violated, and the buying of abducted women will only continue in rural China. Trafficking in females is exacerbated because the authorities ignore the issue.

Materialized Rural Development Under the Regime’s Ruling

More than 20 years ago, I concluded that Chinese society has morally collapsed in my book “China’s Trap.” Rural China became the epicenter of the phenomenon of moral collapse, filled with small communities of human trafficking criminals. This moral collapse is the result of the CCP’s land reforms after it came to power. Through a series of movements in land reform, the CCP completely destroyed the clan system dominating village autonomy, an ancient system prior to 1949; killed all local intellectuals and noblemen that governed the system; and instated communes run by bandits and gangsters.

A man reads the Chinese Communist Party’s Land Reform Law to peasants in 1950. The aim was to incite class hatred against landlords and use the supposedly disenfranchised to carry out a violent revolution. The campaign resulted in the mass killing of landlords, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. (Public Domain)

Rural reform under the CCP has focused on material infrastructure, and has nothing to do with civilization or humanity. In the 2005 meeting of its rubber-stamp legislature, the regime proposed to build a socialist countryside that fosters production, development, management, construction, mechanization, and agricultural standardization. In 2021 when Xi Jinping emphasized building a new socialist countryside “that is more beautiful and has better living conditions,” it was still focusing on material aspects.

After exposure of the Xuzhou mother of eight, the local government responded to the outraged public with a notice saying that this so-called “family” has received aid and medical insurance since May 2014, subsidies in reconstruction of housing from the government in 2021, and many charitable donations from society. However, there’s no mention of the woman constrained by a dog-chain on her neck, who was gang raped by the three men in the buyer’s family.

This is the new socialist countryside the regime has built. Women’s rights have been abused in a morally collapsed Chinese society.

He Qinglian is a prominent Chinese author and economist. Currently based in the United States, she authored “China’s Pitfalls,” which concerns corruption in China’s economic reform of the 1990s, and “The Fog of Censorship: Media Control in China,” which addresses the manipulation and restriction of the press. She regularly writes on contemporary Chinese social and economic issues.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-rural-china-forms-an-accomplice-network-to-control-trafficked-females_4273591.html

Olympic Referees Benefiting China & Beijing’s COVID Rules Draw International Outcry

Lindsey Jacobellis of Team United States (R) and Michela Moioli of Team Italy (L) cross the finish line during the Snowboard Mixed Team Cross Big Final on Day 8 of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at Genting Snow Park, in Zhangjiakou, China, on Feb. 12, 2022. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

Winnie Han

Ellen Wan

February 13, 2022

Analysis

More than a week into the Beijing Winter Olympics, which opened on Feb. 4, a range of controversies from referees’ decisions to China’s harsh COVID controls have drawn complaints from competitors and international observers.

Amid a diplomatic boycott of the Games by Western countries, led by the United States  over Beijing’s human rights abuses, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics hit a record low in ratings , with only 16 million viewers watching the live broadcast on NBC in the United States, down 43 percent from 28.3 million for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

On the night of the opening ceremony, Sjoerd Den Daas, reporter of NOS, the Netherland’s public service broadcaster, was forcibly removed  from his live TV broadcast outside Beijing’s National Indoor Stadium by CCP security personnel, resulting in the interruption of the live broadcast. The whole process was captured on camera.

During the opening ceremony, a woman in a pink hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, marched with the Chinese flag, drawing the ire of South Koreans.

Adding to the public anger in South Korea , South Korean short-track speed skaters Hwang Dae-heon and Lee Joon-soo were disqualified from the men’s 1,000-meter semifinals for violating rules on Feb. 7. In the following final,  Liu Shaolin of Hungary crossed the finish line first, but was disqualified for a yellow card warning, leaving him without a medal.

South Korean media expressed strong dissatisfaction and accused  the Olympic  judges of favoring China. Both the Korean and Hungarian teams appealed to the International Skating Federation (ISU), but both were rejected. Accordingly, the Korean team decided to file a lawsuit with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and lodge a protest against International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach.

Hajime Takamine, a Japanese commentator, told The Epoch Times that judging from the performance of referees, they were biased in favor of the Chinese team, and it’s possible that the CCP gave benefits to the referees who are supposed to be impartial.

“I think the CCP has used the Olympics to show how powerful it is by roping in and deceiving people through various means, because it believes that the outside world can do nothing about it.”

Complaints About Food

There have also been complaints from foreign athletes and coaches that the food on offer at the Beijing Games does not meet athletes’ physical needs.

After being diagnosed positive for COVID-19, Russian athlete Valeria Vasnetsova complained  that the same food was served to her for five days at the isolation hotel in Beijing.

“The catering is extremely questionable because really it’s not catering at all. There are no hot meals,” German skiing coach Christian Schwaiger said.

“There are crisps, some nuts and chocolate, and nothing else. This shows a lack of focus on high-performance sport.”

Fortunately, the American team was prepared, bringing along some camping food such as bagged pasta that can be cooked in hot water.

Harsh COVID Measures

Finnish ice hockey forward Marko Anttila tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in China. However, Anttila’s test had always been negative before the trip, according to Finnish head coach Jukka Jalonen, saying that Anttila had been with his players and coaches and had not been exposed to the outside world.

“We know that he’s fully healthy and ready to go and that’s why we think that China, for some reason, they won’t respect his human rights and that’s not a great situation,” Jalonen said  at a press conference.

The IOC statement acknowledged that it had received some complaints from athletes, particularly about the temperature, type, and portion size of food, and promised to work with organizers to resolve them.

Commenting on the fact that athletes participating in the Beijing Winter Olympics were all given a free cell phone, current affairs commentator Ji Lin told The Epoch Times that the CCP is actually using these phones to monitor athletes, and then using big data to turn the Olympic Village into a small surveillance society inside China, a large surveillance society.

The commentators said that the performance of the CCP in this Winter Olympics will make more countries recognize the regime’s abusive practices.

“I don’t believe athletes from all over the world won’t talk about what they saw and heard during the Olympics. It is likely that in the near future, more countries and louder voices will attack and condemn the CCP for its egregious human rights practices,” Takamine said.

Winnie Han reports on China news for The Epoch Times.

Ellen Wan has worked for the Japanese edition of The Epoch Times since 2007.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/accused-of-winning-medals-by-foul-means-ccp-triggers-international-anger_4275116.html

Don’t Let the Bright Lights of the Olympics Blind You to the People Suffering in Its Shadows

General View inside the stadium of the Olympic Cauldron as a firework display is seen above during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics at the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China, on Feb. 4, 2022. (David Ramos/Getty Images)

Bob Fu

Arielle Del Turco

February 16, 2022

Commentary

While millions of people around the world were watching the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, in the very same city the ceremony was taking place, Xu Yonghai was being put under house arrest at a motel.

Xu is an elder at his house church, Beijing Holy Love Fellowship, and he has had no shortage of run-ins with Chinese authorities. As the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) puts on a propaganda show like no other at the Olympics, the world must remember the innocent Chinese people, like Xu, who suffer under the CCP’s repression.

Notably, Xu won’t be released until Feb. 21, the day after the Olympic closing ceremony. What did this psychiatrist, who was educated at the prestigious Beijing Medical University, do to deserve being robbed of his freedom of movement? Xu is and has long been unpopular  with the CCP due to his social activism. He formerly spent two years in prison  for his leadership role in a Christian house church.

Sadly, this kind of house arrest or detention during politically-sensitive dates has become a normal routine  for some Chinese dissidents. Other occasions on which Chinese authorities make a concerted effort to clear dissidents from sight include the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, China ’s National Day on Oct. 1, and the annual session of People’s Congress.

You don’t have to look too far outside the Olympic spotlight to see why communist China should never have received the honor of hosting the Games.

In Xinjiang, authorities are carrying out a genocide  via the forced sterilization of thousands of Uyghur women and the abortions of their unborn children. More than a million Uyghur people are detained in internment camps, experiencing torture, rape, medical experimentation, and forced labor.

Meanwhile, churches all across China are facing mounting  religious restrictions, Falun Gong detainees are being utilized as a source of forced  organ harvesting for transplants, and the pro-democracy movement in the freedom-loving city of Hong Kong was successfully crushed  by the CCP’s recent national security law.

Protesters attend a demonstration demanding Hong Kong’s leaders to step down and withdraw the extradition bill, in Hong Kong, on June 16, 2019. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

The CCP goes to great lengths to obscure its human rights  violations. And the Olympics is a propaganda opportunity like no other. Bringing the most prestigious sporting event in the world to China’s capital undermines efforts to hold the Chinese regime accountable for its behavior.

There was a movement to boycott the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics, which took place in Nazi Germany (though the worst Nazi crimes were yet to come). Today, we know more about the CCP’s crimes against humanity than we did of the Nazis’ in 1936.

Yet the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has demonstrated marked unconcern about human rights issues in China, saying  it doesn’t get involved in politics. But it’s not a political statement to oppose genocide—it’s a human one. For the IOC, and the democracies that failed to get the IOC to move the Games out of China, the 2022 Olympics are a shame.

Attempts to “sportswash” China’s human rights record started right off the bat when a Chinese athlete of Uyghur descent, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, was chosen  to light the Olympic cauldron. It’s inherently exploitative to use a Uyghur athlete in this way while the CCP is actively carrying out a genocide on the Uyghur people. After lighting the cauldron, Yilamujiang was promptly ushered  out of the spotlight. It’s a painful spat in the face of millions of Uyghur victims languishing in concentration camps and their loved ones  around the world who just want them to be safe.

Under house arrest at a motel, Xu Yonghai won’t be allowed to see his wife for nearly three weeks during the Beijing Olympics. But when will the millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang be free to see their families? Or the imprisoned house church pastors  or human rights lawyers ?

As China projects images of its power through the Olympics, remember that millions of innocent people are suffering in the shadows.

Bob Fu, Ph.D. is the founder and president of ChinaAid and a senior fellow for international religious freedom at Family Research Council.

Arielle Del Turco serves as Assistant Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council where she is responsible for international religious freedom policy and advocacy efforts. She holds a master’s degree in Government with an emphasis in International Relations from Regent University.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dont-let-the-bright-lights-of-the-olympics-blind-you-to-the-people-suffering-in-its-shadows_4280809.html

The Reason Why No One Is Watching the Beijing Olympics

Security guards patrol the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games village in Beijing on Dec. 24, 2021. (Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images)

Lee Smith

February 16, 2022 Updated: February 17, 2022

Commentary

The Beijing Winter Olympics are heading toward the lowest TV viewership in the history of the Games. Right now, it’s about half the audience that watched the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Why so low?

Organizers and TV executives say it’s because the United States and other nations have declined to send official representatives to China. Their soft or semi-boycott is in protest of the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses, including those targeting the Uyghur minority.

As I explain in the latest episode of “ Over the Target ,” Western officials don’t really care that much about the Uyghurs or any of the other populations that the CCP has designated as enemies of the party—such as the Tibetans, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy dissidents, or the Falun Gong spiritual group. The West won’t even protect its own people from the CCP’s depredations.

It was only two years ago that COVID-19 swept out of China, spreading death, illness, and poverty to the four corners of the Earth. And, instead of holding Beijing accountable, the world has instead sent its young men and women to that same country to participate in a celebration of athletic competition, friendship, and international comity. So, for Beijing, the 2022 Olympics is a propaganda campaign, summoning the world to celebrate a regime of death, disease, and desecration.

See the timeline leading up to the Games through the eyes of top CCP officials:

Two years ago, a deadly pandemic escaped from a lab where the People’s Liberation Army has a bioweapons program. We lied about the nature of the lab and the origins of COVID-19. We lied about when it started and how it started, and we lied about how it’s transmitted. Our lies cost the world so much in death and destruction, that we might as well have released the virus on purpose. Maybe we did. Your leaders will never hold us accountable. They wouldn’t dare. They have come to celebrate us.

Sure, China may have lost millions of people to the pandemic, but we don’t see human life the way Western countries do—tens, maybe hundreds of millions died from starvation in the Cultural Revolution. The Communist Party is accustomed to sacrificing human lives on an industrial scale to advance the interests of the party. For the party is all that matters.

Seen from our perspective, we waged a war on the great Western powers that they didn’t even know we were waging. And we won. Your economies crashed while ours thrived. Maybe most importantly, you showed that your own ideology is worthless—what you call democracy is a lie.

For almost a century in its conflict with the communist powers, America boasted about the power of democracy. And freedom. But over the last two years, the truth was plain for everyone to see—the Americans do not believe their own ideology. They do not love freedom. They hold free people, their own people, in contempt.

Look at how the West truly regards freedom. At the first chance to seize power, all of their politicians and bureaucrats put on gloves of iron. Emergency laws everywhere. Even small-town mayors and other local officials jumped at the opportunity to impose draconian measures on their own neighbors—while they themselves publicly scoffed at the regulations. Governors of the Americans’ biggest states, like California and New Jersey, were photographed enjoying lavish evenings out on the town, without masks, while they forced others to cower in fear with their faces covered.

The Americans love freedom? They put masks on their children. They kept their schools shut. They forced their elderly to die alone. And this is the perfect portrait of American freedom—an old woman gasping for her last breath, suffocating, leaving the earth alone, with her family on the other side of a glass wall.

The West is led by hypocrites. They still lecture us about Tiananmen Square. In 1992, U.S. President Bill Clinton said he would tie trade with Beijing to human rights. And within a few short years, Democrats and Republicans alike dropped all pretense and gave China Most Favored Nation status in trade. They lied through their teeth that trading with us was the best way to moderate us, make us more Western. Liars. They wanted to get rich. They saw a labor pool of hundreds of millions of peasants under the control of an authoritarian political body—us, the CCP—promising no work problems and a steady flow of cheap goods. The Americans led the West in robbing their own people and exporting their jobs to us. We filled their empty lives with fentanyl in exchange.

The ideological war between communism and the West is now conclusively over—we won. Freedom, such as the Western powers describe it, lost. And now they have gathered in Beijing to acknowledge our strength and greatness—two years after we poisoned their people. These Olympic games are historic—it is a ceremony of international surrender. Thank you. Thank you for coming, slaves.

And that’s how Beijing sees our corrupt Western elites. And it’s why Americans and others around the world aren’t watching the Beijing Games. Unlike their leaders, they hold the CCP accountable. They’ve tasted its cruelty and brutality first-hand.

Lee Smith is a veteran journalist whose work appears in Real Clear Investigations, the Federalist, and Tablet.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-reason-why-no-one-is-watching-the-beijing-olympics_4282060.html

The CCP Is the Big Loser in the ‘Genocide Games’

Human rights activists hold banners as they protest against the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games to mark Human Rights Day, in Taipei, Taiwan, on Dec. 10, 2021. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

If these Games have shown the world anything about China, it’s not what Beijing hoped they would

James Gorrie

Writer

February 18, 2022

Commentary

The Olympic Games aren’t over yet, but as far as Beijing’s hope for a boost in international standing , the Games are indeed finished.

Hosting the Winter Olympics is not turning out to be quite the global reputation builder that the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) had hoped or expected it to be. Treating athletes like Uyghurs  seems to be the Beijing way–old habits die hard.

A Public Relations Disaster

Sure, the Games in Beijing are a nod to China ’s massive global influence, but they’ve also become a platform to show the world the nasty face  of the CCP.

From a public relations perspective, the Games have been a disaster. Some of the problems that have arisen could have easily been anticipated but probably not avoided.

In fact, Beijing’s problems began before the Games even started.

For example, Beijing was hit with another outbreak  of the CCP virus  before the Games began. The CCP’s response was to lock down certain areas, as well as entire cities, affected by the outbreak.

A general of the Olympic Village of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games at the National Sliding Center in Yanqing district, Beijing, is seen on Feb. 3, 2022. (Daniel Mihailescu/AFP via Getty Images)

To make matters worse, a second outbreak occurred of a hemorrhagic strain of the virus—or perhaps a different one?—also came about.

Quite frankly, either or both of them should have been cause to cancel the Games.

But for whatever reason, that Games began on schedule. Predictably, since then, athletes have come down with the disease and have missed events.

Think of that situation: you’re an athlete who’s dedicated years of training and sacrifice in order to compete in the Olympics, only to lose your opportunity by catching a disease allegedly created by the same country that’s been allowed to host the Games.

Of course, every host nation faces the risks of making mistakes and looking foolish because unexpected things happen. But athletes catching the CCP virus, being quarantined and missing their events because the Games are being held in China—the source of the pandemic—isn’t one of them.

Did anyone expect that to not happen?

The ‘Genocide Games’

Even the opening ceremonies proved to be a disaster.

In light of Beijing’s unrivaled abuse  of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the CCP must have thought that using a cross-country skier of Uyghur ethnicity, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, to start the Games would help remake China’s global image.

One may wonder just what sort of “remake” the CCP had in mind?

Was the world to suddenly believe that communist China is a country to be admired or even emulated?

Predictably, that idiotic stunt had the opposite effect.

Torchbearers Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang hold the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics at the National Stadium in Beijing on Feb. 4, 2022. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

Yilamujiang’s lighting of the Olympic torch literally put a spotlight on the CCP’s brutal treatment of that minority. It also gave legs to the derogatory term, “ Genocide Games, ” by which the 2022 Beijing Olympics are now commonly referred, which is as right and proper as it could be.

The CCP was rightfully mocked  around the world for that particular brand of stupidity.

One wonders how anyone on the CCP’s Olympic planning committee could have imagined that such an act would have any other effect than the one it had?

Evidently, those are the kinds of decisions that get made when only one voice—the Party’s—matters.

Perhaps not so ironically, after finishing 43rd in her event, like over a million  of her Uyghur countrymen, Yilamujiang simply disappeared  and has not been seen since.

Who’s Watching?

A bright spot—if it could be described as such—is the fact that these Games are suffering from a horrendously low viewership. Most of the world just isn’t watching , with about half as many viewers tuning in as last Winter Olympics.

But for those who are watching, the CCP is showing just how afraid it truly is. That may be the most important outcome of all in these Olympic Games.

Describing the CCP as fearful may not seem rationale, as it is the vast majority of China’s 1.4 billion people that fear the Party.

But it’s actually the case.

The CCP is afraid  of everyone and everything.

For what other reason than fear would the Party find it necessary to censor torchbearer Yilamujiang, Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai , and gold medalist free-skier Eileen Gu ?

The CCP censors these young female athletes  for one simple reason: they fear what these young women say.

The Party leadership is showing the world that they’re not strong enough to handle the opinions of few female athletes.

That’s the biggest victory of these Games so far.

A Fragile, Inadequate Leader

On a more personal level, imagine how fragile a national leader—an absolute dictator, no less—must feel that he cannot withstand even the slightest bit of criticism from a handful of young women?

The CCP really can’t help looking foolish and brutish because that’s the nature of the Party—absolutist rule that has been the cruelest in modern history.

How fitting for a worldwide event that the CCP looks to as a means of supporting its legitimacy, demonstrates its illegitimacy on every level.

Is the reality a cluster of pathetic, fearful tyrants ruling and ruining China lost on the rest of the CCP members?

One can’t imagine how it could be so.

James R. Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-ccp-is-the-big-loser-in-the-genocide-games_4281520.html

China’s Sports Schools Destroy Lives and Fail to Deliver Gold

A member of the Chongqing Sports Technique School Diving Team practices during a training session in Chongqing, China, on Oct. 25, 2007. Olympic diving champion Tian Liang once trained here. (China Photos/Getty Images)

Antonio Graceffo

February 19, 2022

News Analysis

Beijing regards sports  as an avenue to assert dominance over the world, a goal it is determined to achieve through central planning, state funding, and a willingness to sacrifice its own citizens.

“Be Positive, Work Hard, Climb the High Mountain, Win Glory for the Country,” reads a sign  at the Shanghai Sports School. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), sports are not about self-improvement or healthy competition. Sports are one more arena where the Party can claim the nation’s global supremacy. To this end, the athletes are disposable tools of the state.

In the entire history of China ’s participation in the Summer Olympics (through 2020), it has won a total of 634 medals , including 262 gold, 199 silver, and 173 bronze; whereas the United States has won a total of 2,635 medals, including 1,061 gold, 836 silver, and 738 bronze. In 15 of the 28  Summer Games the United States competed in, it has won the most medals of any nation. The only time China has won the overall medal count was in 2008, when it hosted the Games.

All countries feel pride when their athletes win medals, but the CCP takes this to an extreme, making winning the Olympics a government priority. Accordingly, it mobilizes the resources of the entire nation, including industrial policy . China has a state strategy tied to sports funding and training, which focuses on a few disciplines in which its athletes have produced the most medals: gymnastics, diving, shooting, table tennis, and badminton .

As an example of the lengths the CCP will go to, China is the only country in the world with a state-funded ping-pong college, the China Table Tennis College .

China’s Den Yaping in action against South Korean Kim Hyon Hui during the women’s team event at the World Table Tennis Championships in Manchester on 29 April, 1997. (Bob Collier/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2002, the General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) put forth the Olympic Glory-winning Program Guidelines 2001-2010, which called for China to score in the top three medal-winning countries in the 2008 Olympics. This program included Project 119,  which aimed at improving China’s performance in sports it has historically done poorly in, such as swimming and rowing.

In 2021, China’s sports administration received $1 billion in funding from the CCP. To put this number in perspective, Australia, which generally does well in the Summer Olympics, awarded $124 million of government monies to the Australian Sports Commission. The U.S. government, by contrast, allocated zero dollars to Olympic training, as American athletes are supported by private funding  and sponsorships, not by the government.

The difference in how the United States and China approach the Olympics is an allegory for how they approach everything, from education and the economy to industrialization and urbanization. In the United States, the government provides a framework of rules and laws, which ensure property rights, freedom, and safety, while allowing citizens a wide latitude of independence. The economy, industrialization, urbanization, and sports organizations develop naturally. Athletic federations are private and self-regulated in America, whereas in China, these institutions are state-run, state-controlled, and state-funded.

Not only does the U.S. government have no specific Olympic strategy, but about 42 percent of the U.S. population are obese . U.S. federal law does not require physical education  in schools. And yet, the United States has won more Olympic medals than any nation in history.

The U.S. sports education system is very different from China’s. The United States makes sports available to all children, on a voluntary basis. And those who have special talent, and want to follow an Olympic dream, are free to do so. By contrast, China pushes a small number of elite athletes, grinding them down, until only a few survive the gruelling training.

The Chinese Sports School System

The message, “Learn From Our Comrades and Create a New and Glorious Olympics ,” was posted on the self-criticism board at Weifang City Sports School.

In China, high schools and universities generally do not have sports teams  or offer training. Based on the Soviet model, top athletes are created in designated sports schools and universities. Scouts travel around the country, looking for children who appear to have aptitude in sports .

Selected children are subjected to various physical tests, including measuring their feet, arms, and legs, as well as DNA testing , to determine which sport they would perform best at. If the parents agree, children as young as four years old are recruited into boarding schools, where they train on a rigorous schedule. Those who excel are moved to the professional/national teams, where they receive a government salary , a goal which fewer than 3 percent will achieve. The long-term objective of these athletes is to obtain one of the limited spots on the Chinese Olympic team.

China’s Fan Yilin competes in the qualifying for the women’s Beam event of the Artistic Gymnastics at the Olympic Arena during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 7, 2016. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

Li Xiaoshuang Gymnastics School  is a well-known, state-run sports academy in Wuhan, where the staff work for China’s General Administration of Sports . The school has been featured in numerous documentaries and reports in the West, which focused on the isolation, extreme training, and abuse of Chinese children growing up in the sports system. But this is only one of thousands of sports schools in China.

A primary weakness in the Chinese system is that children have to leave normal education in order to participate in sports and have a chance at the Olympics. Sports schools claim to have academic lessons,  but the academic level is extremely low.

As China becomes richer, parents are demanding higher quality education for their children. Consequently, fewer parents are willing to subject their children to the rigors of a sports  school, particularly at the expense of academics.

In 1990, there were 3,687 sports schools  in China. By 2016, this number had dropped to 2,183. The latest figures for the number of children in sports schools are unavailable, but in 2005, there were 400,000 .

Each year, about 100,000 students graduate from sports schools and only 2,700 are accepted into the professional/national teams, according to 2014 data. Less than 5,000 athletes per year are accepted into sports universities. For the rest of China’s sports school graduates, their athletic careers will be over. Unqualified to attend an academic university, they will have to find a way to earn a living.

The US Has a Larger Pool of Athletes

America’s Olympic and professional athletes come from the system of scholastic and collegiate sports teams, where they attend regular classes, the same as non-athletes, and then train for sports before and after lectures.

According to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), a private organization that oversees high school sports, nearly  8 million  high school students, roughly 15 percent, participate in scholastic sports teams. The NFHS administers 16 sports for boys and girls in 18,500 high schools .

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which is responsible for university sports teams, reports that more than 460,000 students  compete in collegiate athletics. The NCAA sanctions 20 sports at universities.

Texas Tech Red Raiders guard Terrence Shannon Jr. (1) brings the ball up court against Baylor Bears guard Matthew Mayer (24) in the second half at United Supermarkets Arena, Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, Texas, on Feb 16, 2022. (Michael C. Johnson/USA Today Sports)

The number of U.S. high school and college students training and competing in sports is dramatically higher than the number playing on scholastic and collegiate teams. Olympic sports such as figure skating, boxing, karate, taekwondo, and horseback riding are not offered as school sports, so parents arrange for private training in outside sports leagues. Athletes not counted in the scholastic and collegiate totals also include the more than 3 million American  children playing Little League baseball and softball, as well as the 700,000 who play in the 35 sports offered by the American Athletic Union ( AAU ).

All combined, the United States has well over 12 million high school and college-age athletes from which to draw the Olympic team. For example, USA Swimming, a private organization, administers 3,000 swim teams . In total, the United States has over 327,000 amateur  competitive swimmers. These athletes undergo years of selections to eventually compete for one of less than 60 positions on the U.S. Olympic swim team.

Life After the Medals

The vast majority of Chinese athletes have no job skills, and many have only a fifth-grade reading  level. The lucky ones may get jobs as coaches. Most will be laborers, sellers, or security guards.

Former Olympic diving coach Yu Fen said that “athletes are unprepared to leave the sports system that has raised them ,” according to a New York Times report.

Yang Wenjun, a Chinese gold medalist in flatwater canoeing, grew up in a sports school. He told the Times how he regretted missing out on a proper education: “As a child, I didn’t learn anything but sport, and now what do I do? I can’t do anything  else.”

Gold medalist Hongchan Quan of Team China poses on the podium during the medal ceremony for the Women’s 10m platform final on day thirteen of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games at Tokyo Aquatics Centre in Tokyo, Japan, on Aug. 5, 2021. (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

According to China Sports Daily, 80 percent of China’s 300,000 retired athletes  are plagued by unemployment, disability, or poverty.

Unlike China, U.S. collegiate athletes attend universities and major in any subject they wish, with business, finance, and economics  among the most common majors . Additionally, student athletes in the United States have essentially the same graduation rate as non-athletes, which is about 69 percent .

China has fewer than 10 sports universities with limited spaces: Beijing Sports Academy has about 14,000 students , Wuhan Sports University has 10,000, Xi’an Physical Education University has 9,000 , Shanghai University of Sport has 7,000 , Nanjing Sport Institute has 7,000 , Tianjin University of Sport has 6,000 , Guangzhou Sports University has less than 6,000 , and Capital Institute of Physical Education has 5,000.

These figures are for the total number of students, including non-athletes, academic students, graduate students, and adult learners. This means that intake of athletes in any given year is a small fraction of this number, an estimate of less than 5,000.

Even the small percentage of athletes who make it to the sports university will only have a sports-related major, with limited marketability.

Roughly 6,000 Chinese athletes retire from competition each year, with China’s Physical Education and Sport Committee estimating that there are a total of 300,000 retired athletes .

In the 2008 Olympics, the only time that China won the overall medal count, the Chinese Olympic team consisted of 639 athletes. Earning less than a gold is considered unpatriotic  by Chinese netizens , and athletes who win bronze are generally cut out of government accolades . This means that in the preceding four years, leading up to the Olympics, 23,930 athletes wound up with nothing. All of the athletes forwent their education, suffering through a lifetime of training, so that the CCP could win 48 gold medals  and 22 silver.

Many Chinese students at sports schools do not even complete their education  because of injuries—they are the worst off. They lack job training and education, and may also be carrying the additional burden of a physical disability.

Discarded athletes—damaged and impoverished and relegated to occupying the lowest rungs of society—are the true collateral damage of the CCP’s central planning system, which uses up and spits out Chinese citizens. And with all of this, America is still leading China in Olympic gold.

Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., has spent more than 20 years in Asia. He is a graduate of the Shanghai University of Sport and holds a China-MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Graceffo works as an economics professor and China economic analyst, writing for various international media. Some of his books on China include “Beyond the Belt and Road: China’s Global Economic Expansion” and “A Short Course on the Chinese Economy.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-sports-schools-destroy-lives-and-fail-to-deliver-gold_4284347.html