During the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in San Francisco, California, many U.S. executives spent $40,000 to dine with Chinese President Xi at a business dinner. At the same time, Chinese diplomats paid patriotic flag-wavers (about $200 per person) to greet Xi as his convoy arrived in San Francisco; nearly 1,000 flag-wavers, mostly overseas Chinese residents, were said to have participated in the welcome. For the sake of money, both the rich and the poor surrendered to the Chinese Communist Party ruler.
It is sad that people with the privilege of freedom chose to support the Chinese Communist regime. It is sadder that the regime uses the giant panda, a species that needs saving from extinction, for its propaganda purpose. During Xi’s visit in San Francisco, the dictator signaled that China would send new pandas to the United States, calling them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.” The media in the free world, such as AP, could not help their excitement about Xi’s announcement, saying “Take heart, it looks like China could send new pandas to the US.”
Xi is a dictator; it is officially acknowledged.
The APEC meeting closed in an awkward manner. After talking and dining with the CCP leader Xi, the U.S. President, Biden, said that he still believes Xi is a dictator. “Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told a reporter of CNN. Regardless of how different China’s political system is from that of the U.S., Xi has been formally acknowledged as a dictator by the President of a country that stands for freedom.
Don’t turn a blind eye to tyranny!
Some people living in a free, democratic society are turning a blind eye to tyranny. It is dangerous, for Communists, globally, have never stopped pursuing their tyrannical agendas. James Madison defined tyranny as “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective.”
To fight against tyranny and defend liberty, millions of Hong Kongers protested on the streets in 2019 after the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping — a tyrant and a dictator — issued his harshest warning to the city, saying it urgently needed to “end violence and restore order”. To escape tyranny and restore their own nations, Uyghurs and Tibetans are experiencing the worst persecution in China.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
In the 21st century, we saw the blood of the Hong Kong people who struggled to preserve the freedom they inherited from the Western civilization; they were protesting against tyranny. Samuel Chu said on Twitter (now X), “4 years ago today, I was in Hong Kong for what turned out to be the last time. I remember the smells, the sounds, the chanting, the crowds. What I didn’t know then was that I would not be able to return there again without being arrested and jailed.”
The world also witnessed Uyghur genocide. Millions of Uyghurs have been detained in concentration camps, being forced to denounce their religion. Their children are banned from speaking their native language; their families are punished for preserving their traditions and culture.
A year ago, a fire in a high-rise residential building in a Uyghur city (i.e., Urumqi) killed at least 10 people and injured nine, sparking local protests that quickly spread across China’s cities, where people had been locked down like imprisoned for three years under the CCP’s draconian zero-COVID policy. The protesters, holding blank sheets of white paper — an internationally recognized metaphor for censorship — took to the streets of Shanghai in a Saturday night vigil for the fire victims. The white paper protests quickly spread to Beijing, Chengdu and elsewhere — even to Wuhan, where COVID was first identified in humans in December 2019.
As police moved to crush the protests and censors scrubbed China’s tightly controlled internet of references to the unrest, the CCP regime abruptly rescinded all COVID restrictions. The result of the white paper protests in China has become a milestone marking a point that Thomas Jefferson once made when he said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
(Photo from https://nypost.com/2023/11/14/news/us-biz-groups-selling-40k-tickets-to-dine-with-chinas-xi-jinping/)