30th Anniversary

In China, a Reuters Partner Blocks Articles on the Tiananmen Square Massacre
By Marc Tracy

In Taipei, Taiwan, people gathered Tuesday to commemorate the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military squashed student protests, killing an unknown number of demonstrators.

A financial-information company partly owned by the news organization Thomson Reuters removed articles related to the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre from the feeds of its data terminals in China last week. 

The move came under pressure from the Chinese government, Reuters reported Monday.
The data firm that complied with the censorship demands, Refinitiv, is Reuters’s biggest customer. 

It prevented some articles that included mentions of the pro-democracy demonstrations from appearing on its Eikon software and mobile app in China.
In a statement, Refinitiv pointed to legal realities in China, whose government previously blocked websites from publishing stories it deemed politically sensitive. 

The Chinese authorities have also denied visas to journalists working for news outlets that have published articles that were critical of the nation’s leaders.
In recent days, with the 30th anniversary of the uprising approaching, China has made efforts to quash public mentions of the day when tanks and troops moved into the Beijing plaza and crushed student-led protests. 

Reuters reported on Monday that the Cyberspace Administration of China, which censors online speech, had threatened to suspend Refinitiv if it did not go along with its demand to pull articles that mentioned what took place in Tiananmen Square.
In a statement, Refinitiv said, “As a global business, we comply with all our local regulatory obligations, including the requirements of our license to operate in China.”
The Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to a faxed list of questions. 

There was apparently little discussion of the Tiananmen Square anniversary on the Chinese internet. A small number of people shared the news and other articles related to the crackdown by posting images that appeared upside down or were otherwise manipulated to fool censoring software.
The move by Refinitiv echoed a decision by Bloomberg News in 2013 to stop publication of an investigative article on links between a wealthy businessman in China and the families of the country’s leaders, including that of Xi Jinping.
While that decision was made about a year after Bloomberg reported the personal wealth of several leaders’ families, it also followed an order from Chinese officials to various companies to halt their subscriptions to Bloomberg’s terminals, which have generated billionsfor Bloomberg L.P. 

At least three Bloomberg journalists resigned after the company gave in to official pressure.
Fifty-five percent of Refinitiv is owned by a consortium of private-equity funds managed by the Blackstone Group. 

Thomson Reuters owns the rest, having sold the majority portion last year at a valuation of $20 billion. 

Under the deal, Refinitiv licenses Reuters news services for roughly $325 million annually.
Just as Bloomberg News makes money from Bloomberg terminals, Refinitiv’s bread and butter is Eikon, not the Reuters news articles it includes on the platform. 

On its website, Refinitiv bills Eikon as a digital product that allows users to “turbocharge your analysis of the financial markets with the ultimate set of tools.”
A Blackstone spokesman referred questions on the pulled articles to Refinitiv. 

So did a Reuters spokesman, after standing up for the company’s journalism in a statement.
“Reuters reports around the world in a fair, unbiased and independent manner,” the spokesman, David Crundwell, said. 

“And we stand by our China coverage.”
“We continue to provide Refinitiv with the same scope of content that we always have, including stories relating to China, and its decisions will not affect the breadth or quality of our coverage,” he said.
In a memo emailed to Reuters staff members that was obtained by The New York Times, the company president, Michael Friedenberg, and the editor in chief, Stephen J. Adler, said they had “expressed our concern” to Refinitiv.
“We urge you all to continue reporting as you always would: to pursue the truth, without fear or favor,” they said.
Last month, two Reuters journalists were released from prison by Myanmar’s government, which had held them for 16 months for covering the military’s attacks on the Rohingya minority.
Days before the journalists were set free, Mr. Friedenberg and Mr. Adler released a statement: “These are treacherous times for journalists and — consequently — for the billions of people around the globe whose lives can be informed, improved and sometimes even saved by the work journalists do.”

How iPhones Are Helping Chinese Espionage

When Trump iPhones Friends, the Chinese Listen and Learn
By Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman

Trump has two official iPhones that have limited abilities and a third that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world.

WASHINGTON — When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.
Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. 

But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. 

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.
Trump’s use of his iPhones was detailed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss classified intelligence and sensitive security arrangements. 

The officials said they were doing so not to undermine Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president’s casual approach to electronic security.
American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.
The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. 

In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.
Among those on the list are Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group chief executive who has endowed a master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Steve Wynn, the former Las Vegas casino magnate who used to own a lucrative property in Macau.
The Chinese have identified friends of both men and others among the president’s regulars, and are now relying on Chinese businessmen and others with ties to Beijing to feed arguments to the friends of the Trump friends. 

The strategy is that those people will pass on what they are hearing, and that Beijing’s views will eventually be delivered to the president by trusted voices, the officials said. 

Steve Wynn, who owned a resort in Macau, is among the friends of Trump the Chinese hope to use to influence the president.

L. Lin Wood, a lawyer for Wynn, said his client was retired and had no comment. 

A spokeswoman for Blackstone, Christine Anderson, declined to comment on Chinese efforts to influence Schwarzman, but said that he “has been happy to serve as an intermediary on certain critical matters between the two countries at the request of both heads of state.”
Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said.
China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. 

The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.
The Chinese and the Russians “would look for any little thing — how easily was he talked out of something, what was the argument that was used,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.
Trump "friends" like Schwarzman, who figured prominently in the first meeting between Xi Jinping and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, already hold pro-China and pro-trade views, and thus are ideal targets in the eyes of the Chinese, the officials said.

Targeting the friends of Schwarzman and Wynn can reinforce the views of the two, the officials said. 

The friends are also most likely to be more accessible.
One official said the Chinese were pushing for the friends to persuade Trump to sit down with Xi as often as possible. 

The Chinese, the official said, correctly perceive that Trump places tremendous value on personal relationships, and that one-on-one meetings yield breakthroughs far more often than regular contacts between Chinese and American officials.
Whether the friends can stop Trump from pursuing a trade war with China is another question.
Officials said the president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their abilities — and vulnerabilities — and a third personal phone that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world. 

Trump keeps the personal phone, White House officials said, because unlike his other two phones, he can store his contacts in it.
Apple declined to comment on the president’s iPhones. 

Mr. Trump has been pressured into using the secure White House landline more often, but has still refused to give up his iPhones.

The calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. 

The issue of secure communications is fraught for Trump. 

As a presidential candidate, he regularly attacked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign for her use of an unsecured email server while she was secretary of state, and he basked in chants of “lock her up” at his rallies.
Intercepting calls is a relatively easy skill for governments. 

American intelligence agencies consider it an essential tool of spycraft, and they routinely try to tap the phones of important foreign leaders. 

In a diplomatic blowup during the Obama administration, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, showed that the American government had tapped the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Xi and Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.
Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. 

He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. 

It had no camera or microphone, and it could not be used to download apps at will. 

Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.
“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. 

“So basically, it’s like — does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”
When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.
Trump has insisted on more capable devices. 

He did agree during the transition to give up his Android phone (the Google operating system is considered more vulnerable than Apple’s). 

And since becoming president, Trump has agreed to a slightly cumbersome arrangement of having two official phones: one for Twitter and other apps, and one for calls.
Trump typically relies on his cellphones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. 

Many of those Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.
Administration officials said Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. 

They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.
In an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal, Trump quipped about his phones being insecure. 

When asked what American officials in Turkey had learned about the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, he replied, “I actually said don’t give it to me on the phone. I don’t want it on the phone. As good as these phones are supposed to be.”

But Trump is also famously indiscreet. 

In a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office with Russian officials, he shared highly sensitive intelligence passed to the United States by Israel. 

He also told the Russians that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was “a real nut job” and that firing him had relieved “great pressure.”
Still, Trump’s lack of tech savvy has alleviated some other security concerns. 

He does not use email, so the risk of a phishing attack like those used by Russian intelligence to gain access to Democratic Party emails is close to nil. 

The same goes for texts, which are disabled on his official phones.
His Twitter phone can connect to the internet only over a Wi-Fi connection, and he rarely, if ever, has access to unsecured wireless networks, officials said. 

But the security of the device ultimately depends on the user, and protecting the president’s phones has sometimes proved difficult.
Last year, Trump’s cellphone was left behind in a golf cart at his club in Bedminster, N.J., causing a scramble to locate it, according to two people familiar with what took place.
Trump is supposed to swap out his two official phones every 30 days for new ones but rarely does, bristling at the inconvenience. 

White House staff members are supposed to set up the new phones exactly like the old ones, but the new iPhones cannot be restored from backups of his old phones because doing so would transfer over any malware.
New phone or old, though, the Chinese and the Russians are listening, and learning.

American Quislings

Stephen Schwarzman: China’s Lobbyist, Trump’s “Advisor” 

By William F. Jasper

President Donald Trump may be famously riled over China’s “very unfair” trade practices and its “economic aggression” against the United States, but Stephen Schwarzman (shown), one of his former top business advisors, remains famously bullish on investment in China.
While President Trump is attempting to block Beijing’s “Made In China 2025” master plan for technology supremacy, Schwarzman is doing all within his power to help the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) successfully carry out its central-planning blueprint for global dominance.
Schwarzman is the CEO of the Blackstone Group, reportedly “the world's largest private equity firm and private real estate investor.”
When it comes to investment in China, Schwarzman is recognized as the dealmaker with unparalleled access.
The Washington Post has referred to him as “the New York investor, who has one of the closest relationships to Beijing of any American executive.”

Toxic Prescription
On August 15, Blackstone announced its latest China deal, a $400 million investment in YiChang HEC ChangJiang Pharmaceutical Co. (HEC Pharma).
In financial terms, the HEC deal is not huge, as Blackstone’s investments go.
In June 2017, for example, it sold Logicor, a logistics company, for $13.8 billion to the China Investment Fund, which is but one of many investment entities controlled by the Chinese government.
However, Blackstone’s HEC Pharma investment should be sending danger signals to American political and business leaders, as well as to consumers and health professionals.
For one thing, it is certain to provide assistance to Xi Jinping’s “Made In China 2025” campaign, which specifically targets pharmaceutical production technology as one of the “core” technologies it is ramping up to dominate.
More urgently important, however, is the danger that deals such as the Blackstone-HEC investment pose to the American public, which has become dependent on drugs made in China, a country notorious for contaminated food and drug products that have caused deaths and injuries worldwide. (See here, here, here, and here.)
According to Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh, co-authors of the newly-released book, China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America's Dependence on China for Medicine, 80 percent of the ingredients in U.S.-branded pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter drugs originate in China.
This overwhelming dependence on a foreign hostile source not only compromises the health of millions of Americans, who are unsuspectingly at risk of consuming adulterated made-in-China drugs, but it also dangerously compromises our national security, warn Gibson and Singh.
Mike Osterholm agrees.
He is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and an expert on biosecurity.
“It’s a major national security risk for us in two ways," said Osterholm, in a recent interview with NBC News.
“We are very concerned about the quality of these drugs,” he noted, but the national security implications are much more frightening.
“Now we are caught up in an economic war in the sense of tariffs,” Osterholm continued in the interview.
“If we were ever in an international incident with China, they would literally have their hands around our necks in terms of critical drugs. They wouldn’t even have to fire a shot.”
The pharmaceutical field is one of the critical battlefields where China has been waging strategic economic warfare against America. 
“Food has been used as a weapon of war. Our medicines can be used like that, too,” Ms. Gibson said, in an interview with NBC.
She pointed to penicillin as Exhibit A.
“Penicillin is a good example,” she told NBC.
“We don’t make penicillin ingredients in this country anymore. That happened because Chinese companies came in and dumped it on the global market at a very low price. Now they are the largest producer of penicillin industrial ingredients in the whole world.”
If the United States and China should ever go to war against each other — or even enter into confrontation short of outright war — our vulnerability on this front would be immense.
However, an earthquake, tsunami, or other natural disaster or civil war in China could also disrupt America’s supply of critically-needed drugs.
“It would be disastrous,” says Gibson.
“India still produces some of the drugs for us but most of the essential compounds for them come from China, so they would shut down too.”
“I can think of nothing that would make us more vulnerable than shutting off all these drugs we depend on every day,” she said.
“Hospitals would become centers of chaos and death. We are not talking about expensive designer drugs. You couldn’t do surgery. You wouldn’t have anesthesia. You couldn’t provide dialysis.”

Traders, Traitors, and “Scholars”
The drug safety and national security concerns of Gibson, Osterholm and other experts don’t appear to perturb Schwarzman in the least.
The Blackstone/HEC deal syncs up nicely with Schwarzman’s big investment in Tsinghua University, which boasts one of China’s premier pharmaceutical research centers.
Schwarzman, who, according to Forbes’ 2018 rating, has a personal net worth of $13.8 billion, donated $100 million toward building Schwarzman College at Tsinghua.
Along with his namesake college, he is endowing the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua.
To fund the college and scholars program, Schwarzman is reportedly on track to raise an additional $500 million from fellow billionaires in the U.S. and China.
Beijing’s Tsinghua University is one of China’s most prestigious educational institutions and the alma mater of many of the country’s top Communist Party leaders, including Xi Jinping and former President Hu Jintao.
It is noteworthy that Schwarzman has explicitly modeled his Schwarzman Scholars program after the famous Rhodes Scholarship program.
Cecil Rhodes, the legendary South African “diamond king” of fabled wealth, funded his scholarship program as a vehicle to advance his scheme for world government.
“The government of the world was Rhodes’ simple desire,” wrote Sarah G. Millin in her sympathetic biography, Cecil Rhodes: Empire Builder (1933).
In his own words to his close confidant William Stead, Rhodes described his vision as a “scheme to take the government of the whole world.”
In an obituary/eulogy following Rhodes’ death, the New York Times reported in 1902, that “Rhodes was indeed carried away by his tremendously exciting scheme to control the world. He wrote: ‘What a scope! What a horizon of work for the next two centuries for the best energies of the best people in the world.’”
The Times further noted that toward achieving this goal of global control, “Mr. Rhodes believed the most important factor would be ‘a secret society,’” to be “supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is a desire to do something.”
The principle instruments of Rhodes “secret society” were (and remain) the Rhodes Scholarships, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House) in London. (We have reported extensively on Rhodes’ scheme and the role of the Rhodes Scholarships in that scheme here, here, here, and here.)
Schwarzman is a leading member of the Rhodes-spawned CFR, and his Blackstone Group is a corporate sponsor of the Council.
The Advisory Board of his Schwarzman Scholars reads like a list of the CFR’s top luminaries: Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, John Thornton, Colin Powell, Richard Haass. 
Schwarzman College and the Schwarzman Scholars program, also include, of course, top Communist Party members of China’s brutal totalitarian regime. 
Schwarzman’s close personal relationship with Xi Jinping, says the Washington Post’s Michael Kranish, “is rooted in business: Until recently, the Chinese government had a significant stake in Blackstone, which does billions of dollars in business in China. Schwarzman has said others consider him an ‘unofficial ambassador’ between the countries.”
The Post article by Kranish, titled “Trump's China whisperer,” noted that Schwarzman’s special “access was evident when, days after Trump's inauguration, Xi pulled Schwarzman aside at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland” for “an animated conversation about Trump's perception of China."
Schwarzman was not a Trump supporter, either in the volatile 2016 Republican presidential primaries, or in the general election in November.
During the 2016 primaries, he had poured $100,000 into Jeb Bush’s campaign. 
Even after Trump won the Republican nomination, Schwarzman refused to help. 
However, after Trump defied establishment wisdom and defeated Hillary Clinton, the Blackstone wonderworker apparently saw the advantage of getting involved.
“Schwarzman called Trump to congratulate him on his victory and offered to help,” Kranish wrote in the Post. 
“Trump lacked connections to corporate leaders outside of real estate, and he determined that Schwarzman would be the best person to help him develop relationships with some of the country's most influential chief executives. He asked Schwarzman to head a White House group of business advisers.”
According to Kranish, Schwarzman’s “influence grew as he arrived at the White House on Feb. 3, [2017] to chair the first meeting of the President's Strategic and Policy Forum.”
The Schwarzman-chaired Forum was stacked against Trump from the beginning, with CEOs who were either themselves members of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations or were representing corporations that are CFR “corporate members.” 
It included:
• Stephen Schwarzman (CFR) — Blackstone Group (CFR corporate member)
• Jamie Dimon (CFR) — JPMorgan Chase (CFR corporate member)
• Larry Fink (CFR) — BlackRock (CFR corporate member)
• Jack Welch — General Electric (CFR corporate member)
• Daniel Yergin (CFR) — IHS Markit
• Ken Frazier — Merck & Co. (CFR corporate member)
• Doug McMillon — Walmart Stores (CFR corporate member)
• Jim McNerney — Boeing (CFR corporate member)
• Indra Nooyi — PepsiCo (CFR corporate member)
• Ginni Rometty — IBM Corporation (CFR corporate member)
Not surprisingly, almost from the get-go the high-powered, Schwarzman-led Forum found itself at odds with the president they were supposedly serving. 
Not only did they oppose him on tariffs, but also vigorously defended China against President Trump’s charges that China was manipulating its currency to the detriment of America. 
Kranish says that, according to an unnamed source who was in the Forum meeting, “Trump seemed stunned” by the apparent unanimity of the assembled corporate execs in opposition to his proposed policies.
However, it was another matter entirely that caused many of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum members to jump ship — or was used as an excuse to do so.
In August 2017, President Trump became embroiled in one of his most contentious of many bouts with the “Fake News” media.
It concerned the violent confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia between members of various “Alt-Right” groups and leftist Antifa groups.
The anti-Trump media seized on the president’s comments condemning the violence on “both sides” as equivalent to him endorsing racism and naziism.
According to accounts by the New York Times and other sources, Larry Fink led the mutiny.
As CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager (with $6.29 trillion under management), Fink swings a lot of weight.
Fink actually started out under Schwarzman at Blackstone, but branched off on his own in 1988 under the BlackRock label.
Like Blackstone, BlackRock is deeply invested in China and considers itself a “world company,” not an “American company.” 
In a letter to BlackRock shareholders in April, Fink said “One of the most critical priorities for BlackRock today and into the future is increasing our presence and penetration in high-growth markets around the world, particularly in Asia and especially China.”
Fink was the first to resign from the President's Strategic and Policy Forum and urged others to also resign.
However, President Trump had gotten wind of the brewing trouble and beat them to the punch. Before they were able to arrange a staged resignation en masse to deliver a crippling blow to his administration, he disbanded the Forum.
Shwarzman and Fink are prime examples of the Wall Street globalist elites who are undermining America’s national security and sovereignty in the pursuit of convergence with China in a “new world order.” 
This has been spelled out by fellow globalists such as billionaire George Soros (CFR), who said in 2015, “I think you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order.”
In fact, he said, China should “own it in the same way as the United States owns the current order.”
Soros, who for decades has been funding leftist groups that are trying to subvert and tear down America’s limited constitutional government, says that communist China’s totalitarian regime is “actually a better functioning government than the United States.”
In spite of the fact that China has been growing increasingly repressive under Xi, globalists such as Schwarzman, Fink, Soros, and a host of their comrades are doing everything possible to assure that China “owns” the new world disorder they are helping it build. 
President Trump and a growing number of awakening Americans are standing in their way.
That is why the globalists of the China Lobby are growing increasingly shrill and nasty in their attacks, and are funding radical “Resistance” groups that have adopted the violent tactics of Mao Zedong’s “Red Guard” in China’s Cultural Revolution during the decade of 1966-1976.
The Blackstone/BlackRock tycoons and their ilk intend to become even more fabulously wealthy and powerful by partnering with the Beijing communist elite on an even grander scale. 
The battle lines have been drawn and it should be unmistakably clear whose side Schwarzman, Fink, Soros, and their globalist comrades are on.