Chinazi's Self-Victimisation

China’s Israel envoy compares Chinese coronavirus travel bans to Holocaust
Dai Yuming likened Israel's closure of borders to “the Holocaust, the darkest days in human history”
Associated Press

China’s acting ambassador to Israel apologised on Sunday after comparing the closure of several national borders to Chinese citizens amid fears of a new virus from China to the turning away of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.
Dai Yuming told reporters at an English-language press conference in Tel Aviv that the “errors to limit or even ban entries of Chinese citizens” reminded him of “the old days, the old stories that happened in World War Two, the Holocaust, the darkest days in human history”.

Dai Yuming is seen giving a speech on March 19, 2012. 

“Millions of Jewish were killed, and many, many Jewish were refused when they tried to seek assistance from other countries. Only very, very few countries opened their door, and among them is China,” Dai said.

Israel halted direct flights to China on Thursday, and Israel’s Health Ministry has authorised border control agents to deny entry to non-Israelis who have visited China in the past two weeks. 

Israeli citizens who returned from China have been instructed to remain quarantined at home for two weeks in order to prevent the spread of the Chinese coronavirus, which has killed more than 300 people and sickened thousands of others in China.

The number of Chinese coronavirus cases worldwide has passed 17,488, according to China’s National Health Commission and other countries.
Most reported incidents are in China, but around 150 cases have been reported in two dozen countries around the globe.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ministers on Sunday that the country had “closed land crossings, seaports and airports to arrivals from China” for the time being. 

He said he has instructed the country’s Health Ministry to develop a vaccine for the fast-spreading virus.
“We are also updating the Palestinian Authority on all preventive steps and public health measures that they must take into account here as well,” he said.
The world marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp last week.

China’s Orwellian War on Religion

Concentration camps, electronic surveillance and persecution are used to repress millions of people of faith.
By Nicholas Kristof

Police patrolling near the Id Kah Mosque in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony.

Let’s be blunt: China is accumulating a record of Orwellian savagery toward religious people.
At times under Communist Party rule, repression of faith has eased, but now it is unmistakably worsening. 

China is engaging in internment, monitoring or persecution of Muslims, Christians and Buddhists on a scale almost unparalleled by a major nation in three-quarters of a century.
Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch argues that China under Xi Jinping “poses a threat to global freedoms unseen since the end of World War II.”
China’s roundup of Muslims in concentration camps appears to be the largest such internment of people on the basis of religion since the collection of Jews for the Holocaust. 

Most estimates are that about one million Muslims have been detained in China’s East Turkestan region, although the actual number may be closer to three million.
Muslims are being ordered to eat pork or drink alcohol, against their religious principles.

China has also offered “free health checks” that are used to get fingerprints, photos and DNA samples from Muslims for a surveillance database.
While China hasn’t established concentration camps for Christians, it has harassed congregations, closed or destroyed churches, in some areas barred children from attending services and last year detained Christians about 100,000 times, according to China Aid, a religious watchdog group (if one person was detained five times over the year, that would count as five detentions).
China installed monitoring cameras in churches, including on the pulpit aimed at the congregation. 

With China’s facial recognition software, that would enable security authorities to identify who shows up at services.
The country is also experimenting with even more Orwellian technology, including the Ministry of Public Security’s mass surveillance system and a “Social Credit System” that can create a blacklist for those who don’t pay debts or who cheat on taxes, break traffic rules or attend an unofficial church.
Blacklisted individuals can be barred from buying plane or train tickets: Although the system is still being tested in different ways at the local level, last year it barred people 17.5 million times from purchasing air tickets, the government reported. 

It could also be used to deny people promotions or assign a ring tone to their phone warning callers that they are untrustworthy.
The system isn’t focused on religious people, and some argue that it isn’t as menacing as it is sometimes portrayed, but it’s easy to see how the Social Credit System could punish faith communities — especially if it is integrated with a mass surveillance network. 

The East Turkestan mass surveillance system explicitly targets people who collect money for a mosque “with enthusiasm.”
Through it all, Chinese people of faith have shown enormous courage. 

One Catholic bishop, James Su Zhimin, 87, has been detained by China since he led a religious procession in 1996. 

Counting previous detentions, he has spent a total of four decades in prisons and labor camps.
The paradox is that for half a century before the Communist revolution in 1949, Western missionaries traveled around China, operated schools and orphanages and had negligible impact on the country — yet these days missionaries are banned, ministers are persecuted and Christianity has grown prodigiously. 

There are many tens of millions of Christians, mostly Protestants, with some estimates as high as 100 million.
Some are part of officially recognized churches that pledge loyalty to the government, but most are part of the underground church that has been the main target of the crackdown.
Tibetan Buddhists have likewise suffered brutally. 

Most extraordinary is the fate of the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.
The previous Panchen Lama died in early 1989. 

Following tradition, Tibetans in 1995 chose a 6-year-old boy as the next incarnation of the Panchen Lama. 

Shortly afterward, the Chinese authorities kidnapped the boy and his family, and they haven’t been seen since. 

In his place, the Chinese helped pick a different person as a rival Panchen Lama. (When the Dalai Lama dies, something similar may happen, so at that point there would be two Dalai Lamas and two Panchen Lamas.)
The true Panchen Lama, once the world’s youngest political prisoner, has now apparently been detained for 24 years, along with his entire family, through reformist Chinese leaders and repressive ones.
We can’t transform China, but we can apply levers like targeted sanctions on individuals and companies participating in abuses of freedom — plus we can certainly do more to speak up for prisoners of conscience of all faiths. 

It’s as important to push for their freedom as to seek more soybean exports.