But in that future time, we must remember that those businesses today are doing so, following the money. Moral right and how their outfits enabled the Chinese Communist Party to create millions of victims never factored into their execs’ calculations.
Starbucks Exits Russia. Why Not China?
In solidary with the Ukrainian people, and to put a punctuation mark on its opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Starbucks is closing it’s 130 stores in Russia. The global coffee retailer joins a list of nearly 330 companies that have likewise pulled business from Russia, per Investopedia, March 10.
But at last check, none of these enterprises are dropping out of China. Anyone who loves freedom and stands for human rights should wonder why.
Starbucks and those other hundreds of companies yanking business from the Russian Federation is well and good -- Putin bad. Russia’s invasion bad. Check and check -- but why aren’t they exiting the People’s Republic of China? There isn’t a compelling moral case to be made that Xi Jinping’s regime is at least as reprehensible as Putin’s oligarchy?
Shall we say, “Follow the money?” Always follow the money and power.
The PRC is a documented ongoing, flagrant abuser of human rights. Even Biden’s State Department says so.
From “U.S. State Department Report: Human Rights Violations Against Falun Gong and Other Groups in China,” via Falun Dafa, April 2, 2021:
The 79-page section on China mentioned forced organ harvesting: “...activists and some organizations continued to accuse the government of forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience, including religious and spiritual adherents such as Falun Gong practitioners and Muslim detainees [Uyghurs] in Xinjiang.”
You got that right, forced organ harvesting, which the communist Chinese have turned into a lucrative enterprise.
This from NBC News, June 18, 2019:
Some of the more than 1.5 million detainees in Chinese prison camps are being killed for their organs to serve a booming transplant trade that is worth some $1 billion a year, concluded the China Tribunal, an independent body tasked with investigating organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in the authoritarian state.
Ask the Uyghurs and Falun Gong about the truth. Both groups are the primary victims of this evil organ-harvesting scheme. The day will come when witnesses of this gruesome practice give chilling testimony before international human rights tribunals. Just like the illicit fentanyl trade that Xi’s China is neck-deep in, forced organ harvesting generates millions of dollars annually in revenues for the communist regime.
But why should Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz focus on so inconvenient a truth? Going crosswise Xi might imperil Starbucks’ mainland China operations. Can’t do that.
In addition to killing people for their organs, the communist Chinese are oppressors of liberty and democracy. Ask brave Hongkongers about the communists snuffing out freedom and rights there.
From the HK Post, May 23:
After the pro-democracy protests began in 2019, Beijing made the national security law in 2020, which had crushed the dissent on the island territory. Hong Kong’s Churches, which used to be the space for discussing social issues, have now come under pressure.
According to 18 pastors and religious experts, Churches have been pushed into censoring themselves and also avoiding appointing the pastors which deemed to have political views, and at least one major church is restructuring itself in case the government freezes its assets, reported The Washington Post.
Speaking of invasions, or the potential thereof, what about Taiwan?
The Taiwanese are routinely threatened with invasion by President-for-Life Xi Jingping and weekly menaced by the PRC’s navy and air 
force.
From Online Columnist, April 20:
China’s Peoples Liberation Army [PLA] sent warships, bombers and fighter planes into the Taiwan strait after a visit by U.S. Senators to the independent island nation once a refuge for Mainland Chinese nationals led by Chiang Chai Shek fleeing the 1949 Maoist Revolution to the Island of Formosa.
PRC leaders, from Mao to Xi, have an oft-stated goal of conquering Taiwan. It’s simply a matter of when and how it will be attempted. It may happen sooner than later, Xi being an apex predator and addled Joe Biden being -- well, not a warrior, but something akin to prey. Biden is a wartime leader like Captain Kangaroo commanded a battleship in WWII. Xi surely sees his window for conquering Taiwan during hapless Joe Biden’s term. And you think Xi is the least bit intimidated by Kamala Harris?
Don’t the PRC’s widescale human rights abuses and its increasing belligerence toward Taiwan register with Howard Schultz and his crack team of affluent, mostly white progressives, all of whom, from the safety and comfort of their corporate suites in Antifa and BLM-trashed Seattle, love to be “down with causes?”
But here’s the real skinny. Here’s why Starbucks is glad to exit Russia but not remove itself from the PRC.
Starbucks has only 130 stores in Russia, as mentioned. Per statista, the international coffee chain operates a whopping 5,358 stores across mainland China. Starbucks opened its first store there in 1999, meaning its averaged opening 233 every year for the past 23 years. Expansion is ongoing.
Globally, Starbucks has 34,000 locations. Whereas the Russian stores constitute a mere .004% of its worldwide total, the mainland China shops are nearly 16% of its universe. Losing the Russian stores don’t even amount to a rounding error for Starbucks. On the other hand, closing the PRC stores would be a sizeable hit to the company’s multibillions of dollars in revenues.
Don’t expect Schultz to explain the contradiction. Don’t expect anyone in Corporate America to publicly discuss why doing business with Xi’s tyranny is good but Putin’s regime is bad.
And don’t expect corporate media to challenge big businesses raking in profits from their China ventures. None will be expected to go on record as to why it’s okay to engage a Chinese regime that’s as increasingly despicable as the Soviet Union or National Socialist Germany.
As for Democrats and establishment Republicans pressing the case -- nope, mum’s the word. When was the last time Mitch McConnell pushed legislation sanctioning the PRC for its human rights abuses? Ah, yes, McConnell’s wife’s family profits smartly from China trade. Plenty of D.C. players are reaping handsome retainers lobbying for big businesses engaged in China. Can’t turn off the money spigot, not for mere human rights’ abuses, murder, and oppression.
In years to come, as there’s a Holocaust Museum in D.C., so they’ll be a museum dedicated to the millions of victims of communist China’s tyranny, a tyranny started by the bloodthirsty Mao Zedong. Future U.S. business leaders whose enterprises made fortunes off communist China will eagerly stroke generous checks underwriting the museum. They’ll do so to try to expunge the taint clinging to their enterprises. They’ll do so to try to ease their consciences.
But in that future time, we must remember that those businesses today are doing so, following the money. Moral right and how their outfits enabled the Chinese Communist Party to create millions of victims never factored into their execs’ calculations.
We must never forget.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover.
DO A SEARCH FOR THE OLD WHORE FEINSTEIN AND RED CHINA!
Massive Data Hack Reveals Thousands of Photos from China’s Uyghur Concentration Camps
A huge trove of documents and photographs from police in Xinjiang province, obtained by hackers and released in an extensively vetted report on Tuesday, offers further documentation of the Chinese Communist Party’s horrific human rights abuses.
The files include photographic evidence of mass detention and abuse, including of very young children from the oppressed Uyghur Muslim minority.
The trove, collectively referred to as the Xinjiang Police Files, was originally obtained in 2018 by hackers and provided to Dr. Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC).
Zenz, one of the world’s leading investigators of the Uyghur genocide, enlisted an international media consortium to painstakingly validate the pictures and documents over the ensuing years, resulting in the bombshell report release on Tuesday.
Zenz said the “revelations are very disturbing,” as they provide “frank police implementation directives” and proof of the “personal involvement” of top Chinese officials, including dictator Xi Jinping.
Photos taken inside the camps bear little resemblance to the “voluntary vocational training centers” China portrays them as:
“For the first time, the files provide researchers with thousands of images of detained Uyghurs, as well as photos of police guards wielding automatic weapons and handcuffing and shackling detainees during camp security drills,” the VOC noted.
“The Xinjiang Police Files prove that China’s so-called vocational training centers are really prisons. These documents conclusively demonstrate that Beijing has been lying about its gross human rights violations in Xinjiang. The international community must take immediate and concrete action to hold China accountable for these atrocities,” VOC President Andrew Bremberg said on Tuesday.
The Xinjiang Police Files include over 5,000 “mug shots” of Uyghurs, over 2,800 of them confirmed as concentration camp detainees. Some of them were visibly in distress when photographed by their Chinese captors, who often appear in the photos wielding batons to keep the detainees in line.
Fifteen of the detainees photographed by the Xinjiang police have been confirmed as minors, the youngest just 15 years old.
15-year-old Rahile Omer, the youngest confirmed detainee in the Xinjiang Police Files (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
Photos of even younger children appear in the Xinjiang Police Files, but researchers were not able to determine if they were detained in the camps:
On the other hand, many of the detainees were elderly, some in their seventies:
73-year-old Anihan Hamit, oldest confirmed detainee in the Xinjiang Police Files (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
“In terms of visual evidence that evokes sympathy and an emotional response, this collection of documents stands apart from what we’ve seen so far,” professor Tim Grose of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology told Foreign Policy on Wednesday.
“The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of ‘re-education’ camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both,” said the BBC, which has been reviewing the Xinjiang Police Files since the beginning of this year.
“The documents provide some of the strongest evidence to date for a policy targeting almost any expression of Uyghur identity, culture or Islamic faith – and of a chain of command running all the way up to the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping,” the BBC wrote in an extensive pictorial essay.
Many of the photo records highlighted by the BBC included detention files that did not even bother to invent a reason why the Uyghur man or woman in question was sent to the camps. Some were imprisoned for nonsensical “crimes” such as visiting other countries, practicing their Islamic faith, or merely being related to other detainees with “strong religious leanings.”
A 58-year-old man named Tursun Kadir was sentenced to 16 years in detention for “growing a beard under the influence of religious extremism.” Photos from the Xinjiang Police Files showed that his Chinese captors shaved off his beard.
Tursun Kadir, sent to the Xinjiang concentration camps for growing a beard, which was removed in detention (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
The BBC noted that the file names given to these photos suggested the Chinese state was feeding them into a “huge facial recognition database.”
In December 2020, independent researchers discovered Chinese telecom giant Huawei was designing a race-based “ethnic identification system” that could pick Uyghur faces out of crowds. At least a dozen Chinese police departments have been caught using A.I. systems designed by other companies that can visually profile Uyghurs based on their ethnic features.
Australia’s ABC News interviewed Uyghur refugees who spent Tuesday night frantically searching the Xinjiang Police Files for photos of their vanished friends and relatives.
“I couldn’t stop my tears. All of them look like my dad or my brothers. Every [pair of] eyes looks like [they are] asking me, ‘Please help me,’” a woman named Rayhangul Abliz told ABC after spending the night vainly searching for photos of her missing family.
Some Uyghurs felt relief that China would no longer be able to whitewash the atrocities of Xinjiang in the face of such overwhelming photographic evidence, while others were horrified by the thought that so many missing Uyghurs were not included in the massive trove of documents and pictures. Five thousand photos cover just a tiny fraction of the estimated 1 to 3 million detainees in the Xinjiang camps.
The release of the Xinjiang Police Files brought condemnations of the Chinese Communist regime from across the civilized world, as chronicled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ):
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock addressed the new findings in a video conference with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi and “called for a transparent investigation” into the allegations, according to a ministry statement.
“This is not something that can be ignored, and it is also not something that can be kept quiet about,” Baerbock told reporters in Berlin.
Speaking at a daily press conference, the U.S. State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, said the new reporting shows China’s ongoing “genocide and crimes against humanity” targeting Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.
The release comes at a tense moment for the international community, as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet is making her long-delayed visit to China. Human rights activists fear the visit will be a farce stage-managed by the Chinese Communist Party, but the bombshell release of so much documentation could make a whitewash harder to pull off.
According to Chinese state media on Tuesday, Bachelet has done nothing so far except praise China for its “important achievements in economic and social development and in promoting the protection of human rights.”
In this photo taken May 24, 2022, and released by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, second from left, holds a virtual meeting with Vice Minister Du Hangwei of the Ministry of Public Security, seen on screen at right, in Guangzhou, southern China’s Guangdong Province. (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights via AP)
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin labored furiously to spin the documentary evidence of Xinjiang atrocities in his Tuesday press conference, dismissing the extensively verified report as “the latest example of the anti-China forces’ smearing of Xinjiang.”
“It is just the same trick they used to play before,” Wang sputtered. “The lies and rumors they spread cannot deceive the world, nor can they hide the fact that Xinjiang enjoys peace and stability, its economy is thriving and its people live and work in peace and contentment.”
Wang said on Wednesday that dictator Xi Jinping spoke with U.N. High Commissioner Bachelet in a virtual meeting, but refused to answer questions about whether the Xinjiang Police Files were discussed.
Genocide: Police Hack Shows Xi Jinping Ordered China to ‘Break the Lineages’ of Uyghurs
A massive trove of Chinese Communist Party internal documents, including photos of thousands of concentration camp victims, from the Uyghur heartland of East Turkistan, published on Tuesday, revealed that officials in charge of the Uyghur genocide regularly cited dictator Xi Jinping as personally ordering genocidal policies.
In one document, a 2018 speech, China’s Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi applauded Party officials and police in East Turkistan for working to “break the lineages, break the roots, break the connections, break the origins” of the region’s people, claiming it necessary to end terrorism.
The “Xinjiang Police Files,” published by researcher Adrian Zenz and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, including speeches by high-ranking Party officials, PowerPoint presentations used to train Chinese police in working in East Turkistan, thousands of photos and profiles of concentration camp victims in East Turkistan, and instructional documents teaching concentration camp guards how to handle prisoners. Zenz verified the documents through coordination with academics and experts on East Turkistan – the region China calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” – in a peer-reviewed journal article published by the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies.
This photo, taken on May 31, 2019, shows the outer wall of a complex which includes what is believed to be a concentration camp where mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Zenz wrote in the article that he “unexpectedly” received the thousands of files from an unnamed “third party.” The individual, requesting anonymity for his or her safety, reportedly acquired the documents “through hacking into computer systems operated by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) of the counties of Konasheher (shufu xian 疏附县), located in Kashgar Prefecture, and Tekes (tekesi xian 特克斯县) in Ili Prefecture” in East Turkistan.
The Chinese Communist Party is currently engaging in a genocide against the Uyghur people – and other Turkic groups, such as Kyrgyz and Kazakh people – in East Turkistan, as established by a wide range of experts and multiple governments, including the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The evidence leading to the conclusion that China is intentionally attempting to destroy these ethnic groups includes the use of over 1,000 concentration camps to indoctrinate, torture, enslave, and rape victims; the mass sterilization of non-Han ethnic women; and a concerted effort to eradicate Islam in the country by destroying mosques or forcing them to preach only communist indoctrination and promote Xi Jinping’s personality cult.
Of tantamount importance regarding the enforcement of international law, where genocide is considered a peremptory norm that any court can prosecute, is understanding who has ordered the genocidal policies currently being implemented so as to know who should face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or another similar venue. The senior officials whose remarks appear in the Xinjiang Police Files repeatedly, and clearly, credit Xi Jinping personally for mandating a campaign to erase the indigenous people of East Turkistan.
In a transcript of remarks by Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, for example, Chen consistently calls genocidal strategies like trapping Uyghurs in concentration camps “the Party Central Committee’s strategy for governing Xinjiang with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core.” Zenz refers to the document containing these remarks, made in June 2018 following a visit by Public Security Minister Zhao to the region, in his academic article as “perhaps the most important document of the Xinjiang Police Files because it very directly implicates the central government – and Xi Jinping himself – in the campaign of mass internment.”
The strategy Chen detailed, which he directly credits “the General Secretary” (Xi Jinping) with implementing, is a five-year plan that began in 2017 and is expected to end this year that includes the creation of “vocational training centers” – China’s euphemism for the concentration camps – in addition to the infiltration of all mosques with communist propaganda, “the seizing of wild imams,” and a policy of ethnic erosion both Chen and Zhao in his remarks referred to as “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins.”
Chen applauded his team in his remarks for having successfully implemented Xi’s ideas.
“The sources of extremism have been controlled well, the seizing of wild imams has been done well, the investigating of two-faced persons has been done well,” he praised. “the ‘Digging, Reducing, and Shoveling,’ the ‘Four Breaks’ (breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins) have been done well.”
Chen also praised the promotion of “ethnic unity and the idea that all ethnicities are one family has been done well [through] cadres living [with ethnic minorities],” an apparent reference to both mass surveillance of civilians through the East Turkistan police state and potentially to the “Becoming Family” program. The program forces Uyghur families to accent an ethnic Han Communist Party member living in their homes and spying on them. The new “family member” often replaces the male head of household, forced into a concentration camp, and sleeps in the same bed with the matriarch. Uyghurs have reported widespread rape and sexual abuse through the program.
“Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core,” Chen later repeats, “our Party Committee cannot stop the anti-separatist struggle for even a single minute, even if basic stability will be achieved in five years [2017 to 2021], we will continue to strike hard on it in the next five years [by implication 2022 to 2026].”
In Public Security Minister Zhao’s remarks, some days before Chen’s speech, the top national-level official similarly repeats the mantra of “breaking lineages, breaking roots, breaking connections, breaking origins” and repeatedly credits Xi with the campaign to erase the cultural heritage of Xinjiang.
“This investigation study visit to Xinjiang was approved by General Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang; fully reflecting the great importance, concern and support of the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core for the work in Xinjiang,” Zhao insists at the top of his remarks. “The purpose of the investigation study visit is to implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s strategy for governing Xinjiang.”
This photo, taken on May 31, 2019, shows a Uighur woman (C) going through an entrance to a bazaar in Hotan, in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
“General Secretary Xi has presided over several meetings to study and deploy Xinjiang work, delivered a series of important speeches, issued a series of important instructions,” Zhao narrated, “clarifying the Party Central Committee’s strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era and the general goals of Xinjiang work.”
Zhao went on to explain that Xi was micromanaging even how many staffers should work in each concentration camp and ordered the government to continue “enlarging the capacity” of concentration camps.
Zhao particularly applauded Party officials in the region for their work in “transformation through education,” a reference to the “vocational training” concentration camps. He claimed that as many as 2 million people in the region “have been influenced by pro-Xinjiang independence and “Double-Pan” [pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist] thinking,” effectively calling millions of people terrorists.
American government estimates suggest that as many as 3 million people were forced into concentration camps in East Turkistan at the peak of the campaign.
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