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The CCP Is Trying to Block the UN from Publishing a Xinjiang Report

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to block the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet from publishing the Xinjiang Human Rights report, which was planned to be published by the end of August.

Beijing sent Michelle Bachelet a letter asking her not to publish it. Beijing also tried to get diplomats from other countries to sign a joint letter to support Beijing.

Liu Yuyin, a spokesperson for China’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said that nearly 100 countries supported China on the Xinjiang issue, “opposing using human rights as an excuse to interfere with China’s internal affairs.” He said at the last UN Human Rights Council, which ended on July 8, that these countries issued public statements and a “joint letter.”

Source: Epoch Times, July 20, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/7/20/n13784940.htm

Briefings | | |   Government/Politics

U.S. Congressional Leader Plans to Visit Taiwan

The European Parliament Vice President, Nicola Beer, led a delegation to visit Taiwan from July 19 to July 21. This is the first time that a European Parliament Vice President officially visited Taiwan. Beer told reporters that, “Now is the moment to stand firm on the side of Taiwan,” calling Europe and the island part of a “family of democracies.” She said,“We won’t turn a blind eye to China’s threats to Taiwan.”  “Europe was late for Hong Kong, we won’t be late for Taiwan.”

In the U.S. the Speaker of the House,  Nancy Pelosi, has also been reported as planning to visit Taiwan in August. However, Biden said that the military believes it is not a good idea at the moment. China strongly opposed the Speaker’s trip both publicly and privately.

An article ridiculing Pelosi was widely published among Chinese media. It said that Pelosi’s trip was the Democrats’ plan to show that they are not too “soft” on Beijing. It also said that Pelosi’s plan was to gain some political points and get herself out of pressures from scandal. The article said many factors can still impact whether there will indeed be a trip. Maybe one day Pelosi will become “tactically COVID positive again.”  That statement referred back to April when Pelosi announced a planned trip to Taiwan but later cancelled it by claiming that she caught COVID.

Sources:
1. Radio France International, July 19, 2022
https://www.rfi.fr/cn/国际/20220719-欧洲议会副议长到访台湾-强调支持台湾民主
2. SINA, July 21, 2022
https://news.sina.com.cn/c/2022-07-21/doNc-imizmscv2950539.shtml

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend US-China Relations

Many Chinese Home Buyers Collectively Decide to Stop Paying Their Mortgage on an Unfinished Home

The Chinese real estate industry has faced several ripple effects after many developers struggled or defaulted on their debt payments. Not only do investors and banks face losses, but constructions of many buildings have also been halted for months if not years and home buyers were not sure when they will eventually receive their homes. For some buildings, the builders have no intention to complete the construction and will just leave them in the unfinished status forever; the Chinese call them the “rotten-tail buildings.”

Unlike the U.S. the home-selling practice where the home buyers sign a contract with the builder when the building is constructed and take out a mortgage when the home is delivered, Chinese buyers take out the mortgage at the time of signing the contract and start the payment right away, even though they don’t have the house.

This presents a big, unfair problems for the home buyers.  They are paying mortgages to banks while seeing no progress in the construction of their homes.

Getting no help on these unfinished buildings from the builders, the banks, and the government, many home buyers resolved to a new approach: collectively announcing they would stop their mortgage payment.

On June 30, all home buyers of an unfinished construction project in Jingdezhen City, Jiangxi Province announced jointly on social media that they would stop mortgage payments until the builder resumes construction. This started a wave of home buyers’ stopping their mortgage payments. By June 16, according to NTDTV’s report, home buyers of at least 270 project (a project may consist of multiple buildings) throughout China, including Jiangxi, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, and other provinces, have made similar announcements,

Technically, the unfinished building is a dispute between the home buyers and the real estate developers, not involving the bank. Banks can still hold the buyers accountable for their payments and have the option to freeze and auction buyers’ own personal properties and put them on a bad credit list, if they stop their payment. However, since home purchasing accounts for a significant portion of spending for many Chinese families, these home buyers feel that they have nothing more to lose.

Some home buyers have also found ways to accuse the banks. Some banks didn’t put their payment in proper escrow accounts, some banks released the funds to real estate developers though the construction didn’t reach the required funding stage, and some banks purposely created bad mortgage contracts to steal the home buyers’ money.

This stopping payment wave also spread to real estate developers’ suppliers and contractors. On July 15, an announcement circulated on the Internet that suppliers and contractors in Hubei Province supporting the Evergrande Group decided to stop providing funding and materials and stop doing work if they do not receive Evergrande’s payment up front.

Sources:
1. SINA, July 13, 2022
https://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/cyxw/2022-07-13/doc-imizmscv1383585.shtml
2. Epoch Times, July 14, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/7/14/n13781035.htm
3. NTDTV, July 16, 2022
https://www.ntdtv.com/gb/2in022/07/16/a103480739.html

Briefings | | |   @CS Economy/Resources

Chinese Military Attaché Driven Out of Pacific Islands Forum

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been trying to expand its influence over the Pacific Islands for years. It successfully signed a security treaty with the Solomon Islands which allows for police and military exchanges. However, at the China-Pacific Island Countries Foreign Ministers’ meeting in May, its recent push for a similar security treaty with the whole group of island countries did not go through.

The latest development was at the Pacific Islands Forum which was held in Suva, Fiji from July 12 to 15. When U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was delivering an online speech on July 13, two Chinese officials entered the media section without proper identification. A Fiji news reporter recognized one of them and asked what his identity was. Was he a Chinese embassy official or a Xinhua news reporter? The Chinese official shook his head as if he didn’t understand English. The Fiji reporter then informed the meeting organizer and the police came to remove those two Chinese officials.

Later people in the diplomat circle confirmed that these two people were the Military Attaché and Deputy Military Attaché from the Chinese Embassy in Fiji.

Source: Radio France International, July 13, 2022
https://www.rfi.fr/cn/中国/20220713-贺锦丽正说着话-两名中国使馆武官遭太平洋岛国论坛会议警方驱离

Briefings | | |   @CS Geo-Strategic Trend

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