Free Republic

In July of 2015, China’s state media aired footage of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducting a simulated special forces operation. Generally, for an authoritarian regime to display its military might is not out of the ordinary — it’s a means of deterring a state’s adversaries abroad and its own citizens from dissent. However, this was no generic military footage. Those watching from Taiwan couldn’t help but notice a crucial detail: the building that the PLA is assaulting looks identical to the Presidential Office Building in Taipei. Satellite imagery of the Zhurihe Training Base, situated deep within Inner Mongolia, later...

The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Russell sailed through the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea on Wednesday, challenging China's demands that foreign military vessels ask for permission before sailing through the area, the Navy said. The Spratly Islands are contested territories in the South China Sea. China, which claims almost all of the 1.3 million-square-mile waterway, has built up its military presence in this area, constructing fortified outposts on artificial reefs. The Spratlys are also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines, some of which put restrictions on the operations of foreign military vessels, as China...

President Biden faced swift criticism Tuesday night for remarks on how he plans to approach human rights abuses in China. Biden just recently had a phone call with President Xi Jinping and said his counterpart was focused on maintaining a “united, tightly controlled” China. Biden said that focus is what guides Xi. But as president of the U.S., Biden said during a CNN town hall event in Milwaukee, he has to speak out against Beijing’s aggression in Hong Kong, “what’s he’s doing with the Uighurs in the western mountains of China,” and Taiwan. Biden said Xi understands that. “Culturally, there...

As a Chinese immigrant watching my first pro game, it was obvious to me that such pride and patriotism wasn't coerced by the state, but a genuine expression by free people.Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, recently decided the national anthem would not be played at Mavericks’ home games, citing his desire to listen to voices of “those who feel that the anthem doesn’t represent them.” But to me, a Chinese immigrant, Cuban’s decision did not feel inclusive, but ignorant of what the anthem does represent. I never went to a professional sports event when I was...

China’s Year of the Ox, which began on Friday, is a fitting metaphor for the most formidable, and potentially dangerous, geopolitical challenge facing Joe Biden and the western democracies. In Chinese mythology, the ox is large, powerful and adept on land and water. It’s determined, stubborn, and takes a lot of stopping. Biden is well aware he has a fight on his hands that, if mishandled, could swiftly turn physical. Some analysts fear war with China is inevitable, sooner or later. So he is moving fast. In a first phone call to China’s president, Xi Jinping, last week, he raised...

The world needs to wake up to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) bullying and lay down its own rules to deter the regime's aggressions, the China adviser to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Miles Yu, a Chinese-born academic who helped shape the Trump administration's China policy, called out the CCP's tactic of threatening the United States, telling it not to interfere in issues deemed to be the regime's 'internal affairs,' including Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang—which it dubs 'red lines.' 'This is [the] Chinese Communist Party's 'red line,' that's all. It's not red lines based upon international law,'...

South Korea and the US will begin their biannual joint military exercises in the second week of March, carrying out computer simulations of war against North Korea for nine days, sources said Sunday. Seoul and Washington, which have held them to deter aggression from Pyongyang since the 1953 Korean War armistice, now take part in computer-based war games rather than all-out field exercises. The two allies still do not see eye to eye on testing Korea’s readiness to take over the wartime operational command from the US, which has been responsible since the war broke out. They skipped stage two...

A senior Biden National Security Council member – Kurt Campbell – has worked with Chinese Communist Party front groups, even keynote-ing a major conference alongside a man Hunter Biden worked with and called “the f*__ing spy chief of China,” The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.The details including the connections to the 46th President’s son, Hunter, will no doubt cause consternation in national security and China-hawk circles, as well as raise questions as to Campbell’s relationship with a company charged with bribing U.S. figures.Campbell – President Biden’s new “Asia Czar” – has bounced around the Washington, D.C. “think tank” circuit for...

Peter Ben Emerek of the World Health Organization (WHO) proclaims it “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). According to the WHO, the issue warrants no further study. But evidence is emerging that the Wuhan lab deliberately engineered the virus. The story begins in Canada. This month Canada removed Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a virologist from Tianjin, China, and her husband, Keding Cheng, from the nation’s Public Health Agency because, as Karen Pauls of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported on February 6, the pair had previously been removed from Canada’s National Microbiology...

The Mission of the Committee The mission of the Committee on the Present Danger: China is to help defend America through public education and advocacy against the full array of conventional and non-conventional dangers posed by the People’s Republic of China. As with the Soviet Union in the past, Communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom—one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat. And for this purpose, it is necessary to bring to bear the collective skills, expertise and energies...

Judicial Watch Seeks Release of Sally Yates Records on Her Refusal to Defend President Trump’s Travel Ban Professor Charged with Stealing $1.75 Million in Research for China Judicial Watch Seeks Release of Sally Yates Records on Her Refusal to Defend President Trump’s Travel Ban It should surprise no one that on Joe Biden’s short list for attorney general was former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates , an Obama holdover “who shot to national prominence after President Donald Trump fired her, making her one of the first heroes of the #Resistance.” President Trump fired her after she refused in early...

It’s good to see allies take ownership of their own security, and of freedom of the sea. PLA commanders have predicated their access-denial strategy on disheartening their U.S. counterparts or convincing the U.S. administration the military effort cannot succeed at a cost the country is prepared to pay. Allies and partners should devise strategies and operations that hold down the price of access for U.S. forces—and thus make it thinkable if not easy for an American president to order them into combat. Last week the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Center (USSC) set policy circles aflutter when it issued...

Too few Americans understand the threat that China’s governing philosophy and structures pose to the US. China envy runs strong among America’s progressive elite. The Communist Party of China’s hold on power and centralized decision-making has long appealed to progressives infuriated with their inability to mandate solutions to global warming (and other progressive priorities). Tom Friedman, an established bellwether of elite opinion, has been voicing this exasperation for more than a decade. Last weekend he reduced the genocide in Xinjiang to “bad stuff with the Uighurs,” of less concern than Chinese excellence in high-speed rail. Far too few Americans grasp...

For years whenever China told Hollywood to jump, the industry had but one answer … how high? Studios drooled over China’s vast theatrical marketplace, with millions of eager movie goers ready to pony up for U.S. blockbusters. And they did just that while filmmakers followed the country’s strict rules at every step. * Adding Chinese characters to existing stories * Shooting product placement scenes for Chinese theatrical editions * Avoiding stories that depict China in a negative light Allowing films to be sliced and diced to appease Chinese censors What did Hollywood get in return? Billions in extra revenue, that’s...

US intelligence on the supposed origin of the coronavirus pandemic was not reliable, a member of the special WHO mission to China said Wednesday, after Washington cast doubt on the transparency of the probe.Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team, waded directly into the murky geopolitics which covers the pandemic origin story.President Joe Biden "has to look tough on China", he said in a tweet adding: "Please don't rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump & frankly wrong on many aspects."Daszak also tweeted that they worked "flat out under the most politically charged environment possible".Daszak heads...

China has delivered a warning to the new U.S. administration not to meddle in the sensitive South China Sea region, where President Joe Biden has ordered his first naval moves since assuming the commander-in-chief title just weeks ago. The U.S. Navy's Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group joined the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group on Tuesday for rare dual aircraft carrier exercises involving the massive Nimitz-class warships alongside accompanying vessels and aircraft. It was the first time two aircraft carriers trained together in the South China Sea since July, and the first time the two groups involved joined forces since June, when...

Many signs pointed to an inevitable conclusion that Myanmar's so-called transition to a democracy was a farce. Nevertheless, Obama embraced it wholeheartedly.The small South East Asian nation Myanmar became headline news last week after its military staged a coup, seizing power after detaining the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected political leaders.Only a decade ago, Myanmar’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy was celebrated as one of President Obama’s foreign policy accomplishments. Now, the small nation is President Joe Biden’s first foreign policy nightmare.A Proxy For PowerMyanmar, also known as Burma, is a country...

'When the government says on television that it’s ‘preventable and controllable,’ and when experts say there’s no human-to-human transmission, many ordinary people believe them.’More than a year after the Wuhan coronavirus exploded on to the global scene, an international team of investigators has—finally—gone to China to examine and investigate its causes. But as a new PBS documentary explores, they may not find much during their visit, because China’s Communist government has concealed or destroyed the evidence.The 90-minute “Frontline” episode, “China’s COVID Secrets,” provides additional details to a story most observers in the Western world have broadly learned since last spring:...

If you think state and federal government COVID-19 policies are too restrictive, you haven’t been to a college campus lately. Schools across the country have imposed extreme, micromanaging rules on 19-22 year olds—a demographic more likely to die from the seasonal flu and pneumonia than COVID.Paying top dollar at already overpriced institutions for vastly inferior remote learning, university students remain unnecessarily isolated and barred from using the services and facilities they and their families are paying for. Many schools, like Southern Methodist University, forbid students from having guests in their dorm rooms. Others have even installed security cameras in the...

SAN FRANCISCO - Hing Yiu Chung lives in a racially diverse San Francisco neighborhood hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. While vaccines have been difficult to come by, the 69-year-old got one by showing proof she lives where she does. She had to wait in line for two hours with other seniors, some who were disabled or leaning on canes, for a chance at a couple hundred shots available each day through a local public health clinic in the Bayview neighborhood. “Fortunately, it wasn’t a cold or rainy day, otherwise it would have been harder," she said in Chinese. The...