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Former Japanese Intelligence Officer Estimates China Sent at Least 20,000 Spies to Japan

While the U.S. intelligence community is busy investigating Chinese spy cases in its country, the Japan intelligence faces the similar challenge: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sent too many spies to Japan.

Radio Free Asia reported that Masatoshi Fujitani, a former Investigative officer from Japan’s Public Security Investigation Bureau stated in a TV interview that he estimated that China has sent 20,000 to 25,000 spies to Japan so far.

On a Japanese cable channel ABEMA’s “ABEMA Prime” program, Fujitani said, “Through cooperation with intelligence agencies in various countries, (we) estimated that China has sent around 20,000 to 25,000 spies or agents to Japan. Adding (those from) North Korea and Russia, the number of agents in Japan is huge. However, with only 1,700 staff members, our Public Security Investigation Bureau is unable to keep up with the opponents. We can only respond as much as we can within our limited budget.”

Source: Radio Free Asia, July 8, 2022
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/jp-spy-07082022060550.html

Briefings | | |   @CS Geo-Strategic Trend

Beijing Increases Purchasing of Low-Priced Russian Coal

Though China’s coal demand is decreasing and domestic supply is increasing, since May Russia, has been  offering a big discount on coal. Therefore, Beijing has increased its purchase of Russian coal significantly.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that, in the period of January to May, China’s domestic coal production has increased by 10 percent over the same period last year. It has risen to 1.81 billion tons. At the same time, Russia’s coal delivery to China in May increased by 20 percent, to 5.5 million tons; and from June 1 to June 28, the delivery increased by 55 percent, to 6.2 million tons.

Source: Epoch Times, June 30, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/30/n13770387.htm

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Japanese Eyewitness’s Description of Live Organ Harvesting Situation

Ushio Sugawara (菅原潮) is a former member in the Yamaguchi Group, a large organized-crime syndicate in Japan. He left the group in 2015. The Epoch Times newspaper interviewed him on June 20 of this year at which time he talked about the organ harvesting he witnessed in China.

In 2007, the brother of a Sugawara’s friend needed a liver transplant. Within a month, the Beijing Armed Police General Hospital offered him a matching organ for 30 million Japanese Yen (U.S. $222,000). When the hospital was ready to do the operations, it found that the blood product of albumin they had was a fake product. His friend asked Sugawara to bring albumin from Japan to China.

Sugawara was stopped at the Beijing airport for not having permission to import albumin to China. Though a high-ranked armed police officer came to meet him, the airport police, which was not under the same command as the armed police, stopped him for several hours. Eventually some politicians got involved and released Sugawara and his albumin.

Sugawara visited his friend’s brother before the transplant. The doctor, who had previously studied in Japan, showed him the organ supplier who was in the next door and was still alive. He was a 21-year-old male and he was under anesthesia. The doctor told the friend’s brother that the organ supplier was a bad person and would die anyway. This way, they would “let him make a contribution before his death.” That doctor also said, “He is young and his organs are very healthy.”

Sugawara kept inquiring about the person and was told that he was a Falun Gong practitioner.

The hospital severed the Falun Gong practitioner’s tendons in both hands and feet the day before. The doctors told Sugawara that they did it to prevent him from escaping and also to have a better result when cutting the organ. When people are scared, their bodies curl up and that can affect the quality of their organs.

However, the surgery failed. Both the Falun Gong practitioner and Sugawara’s friend’s bother died.

Sugawara said that doctors in Japan knew about the live organ harvesting but kept sending patients to China, and Japanese media also knew about it but remained silent on it as well.

Source: Epoch Times, June 27, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/25/n13767360.htm

Briefings | | |   @CS Government/Politics

China Russia Interactions

While the Western world has imposed tough sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, China and Russia held a series of activities recently.

  1. On June 10, the Heilhe-Bragoveshchensk road bridge officially opened. Hu Chunhua, China’s Vice Premier, attended and addressed the online opening ceremony.
  2. On June 15, Putin called Xi Jinping on Xi’s birthday.
  3. On June 17, Xi Jinping attended, online, and addressed the plenary session of the 25th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia.
  4. Russia and China sent naval ships which separately sailed around the Japanese archipelago.
  5. On June 17, China’s Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui said that China is ready to provide airplane parts to Russian Airlines. The Western sanctions ban exporting airline parts and leasing or supplying airplanes to Russia.
  6. On June 20, Russia’s St. Petersburg Stock Exchange started trading 12 stocks listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, including Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, Xiaomi, and Jingdong.

Sources:
1. China’s Government Website, June 10, 2022
http://www.gov.cn/guowuyuan/2022-06/10/content_5695126.htm
2. China’s Foreign Ministry Website, June 17, 2022
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202206/t20220617_10705728.html
3. Net Ease, June 23, 2022
https://www.163.com/dy/article/HAGVK42D0542ONXL.html
4. Epoch Times, June 21, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/21/n13764456.htm
5. Net Ease, June 17, 2022
https://www.163.com/dy/article/HA3938FF05198CJN.html

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Pandemic: Chinese Doctors Found Zero Severe Illness Cases for Young People Catching Omicron

On June 18, China CDC Weekly published a research paper by Zhang Wenhong, the leading medical expert from the Shanghai COVID control and prevention group. This research looked at 33,816 omicron infected patients who, between March 22 and May 3, started with light COVID symptoms. A total of 22 patients, all in the high-risk group, had developed a serious illness. That represents 0.065 percent of the total population, or 0.238 percent of the high-risk population. No person, or zero percent, in the low-risk group had a serious illness. The high-risk group is defined as people who were over 60 or had underlying diseases such as a cardiovascular disease (including hypertension), chronic lung disease, diabetes, chronic liver disease, kidney disease, a tumor, or immune deficiency.

With the data showing a low health impact from the Omicron virus, people might question the validity of the governments’ “Zero-COVID” and lockdown policy.

Source: Sina, June 19, 2022
https://finance.sina.com.cn/wm/2022-06-19/doc-imizirau9431070.shtml

Hot Topics | | |   Social Stability

Pandemic: WHO Director-General Privately Said COVID Virus Was Leaked from China’s Lab

The British media The Daily Mail reported that Director-general Tedros Adhanom of the World Health Organization (WHO) had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation for the origin of the COVID virus was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, from which the infections first spread during late 2019. Officially, Dr. Tedros said that, “We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population.”

Some of the Western intelligence services questioned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been doing research with the virus and leaked it.

Source: Daily Mail, June 18, 2022
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10930501/WHO-chief-believes-Covid-DID-leak-Wuhan-lab-catastrophic-accident-2019.html

Hot Topics | | |   Government/Politics Social Stability

Government: Authorities Used the Health Code against People Defending Their Rights

Chinascope pointed out in its analysis, “China’s Zero-COVID Strategy: Part II,” that the communist regime in China has abused the Health Code App, a tool it developed to track people’s COVID-related health condition, so it could control people’s movement. The authorities can use its backdoor access to the app to freeze political dissidents or anyone they don’t like, anywhere and anytime.

A recent incident shows exactly how this abuse has been used.

A few days ago, a few local private banks in Henan Province were reported for massively stealing their customers’ money. They offered high interest rates to attract over 400,000 customers who are now facing the potential loss of a total of 40 billion yuan (US $6 billion). The government that was supposed to oversee the banks claimed that it was not responsible for the loss.

Some people then went to Henan to try to get their money back. To their surprise, they found that their Health Code apps had all been turned Red (in the COVID procedure, it means the phone holder is either a COVID patient or has close exposure to a COVID patient and needs to be quarantined). Henan officials visited those who arrived there and offered them two options: either stay in Henan for quarantine (their code will remain Red and they cannot go out to talk to anyone about their bank account problem) or return home.

Those bank customers who did not go to Henan also found their code had turned Red, which then completely prevented them from travelling, or even going out of their homes.

China.com, the website managed by the State Council’s China Internet Information Center, alleged that it was Henan Province that manipulated the health code of those bank customers even though they were not in Henan.

Related postings on Chinascope:

Sources:
1. BBC, June 14, 2022
https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/61794310
2. China.com (owned by China Internet Information Center of the State Council), June 15, 2022
http://finance.china.com.cn/news/20220615/5827254.shtml

Hot Topics | | |   Government/Politics Social Stability

The CCP’s Solution to College Graduates’ Unemployment: Send Them to a Remote Farmland

Chinese college graduates have faced a severe job shortage for years. The National Bureau of Statistics reported in May that the nationwide unemployment rate in April was 6.1 percent. It was 18.2 percent for people whose ages were between 16 and 24. Things will be even worse when 10.76 million students graduate from college in the upcoming two months.

The Chinese Communist Party’s solution is to send the college graduates to farmlands. Recently, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly issued a notice to guide college graduates to work or establish their own business in remote towns or rural communities and ask villages to “actively absorb college graduates to serve as village workers.”

The government will provide incentives to small businesses that employ college graduates in villages, home services, and elderly care. However, Chinese college graduates prefer to work for high-paying companies in large cities, and there is a wide income gap between rural and urban areas.

People compare this government initiative to the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (上山下乡)” movement that Mao Zedong initiated for the city teenagers during the Cultural Revolution. During that campaign, Mao sent several millions of teenagers from the cities to live in remote farmland for ten years, separating them from their families and ruining their lives.

Source: Epoch Times, June 13, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/13/n137588in57.htm

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources Government/Politics