China's Ukrainian jet engines

The Ukrainians are getting away with taking the U.S. taxpayer’s money in the one hand while stabbing the U.S. in the back with the other
By Bill Gertz
"Today we are the most powerful military in the world and find ourselves in a competition among great powers," said Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis. This week he issued a memorandum to the military that emphasized the need for discipline and lethality. "We must have better individual and unit discipline than our enemies," Mr. Mattis said.

China has deployed one aircraft carrier and has plans for at least three more of the strategic power projection platforms as part of Beijing’s large-scale military buildup.
As part of its carrier operations, state media announced on Tuesday the roll out of a new jet trainer, the JL-10, that Chinese officials say will be used by People’s Liberation Army navy pilots to train in the challenging task of aircraft carrier landings.
The official China Daily newspaper conveniently omitted in its report on the first 12 JL-10s that the trainer is powered by Ukrainian jet engines. 

The supersonic trainer is also known as the L-15.
Aircraft jet engines have been a major weakness for China’s aviation industry for at least a decade. 

To solve the problem, China has purchased both Ukrainian and Russian jet engines to power their warplanes after trying unsuccessfully to produce copies of the engines indigenously.
Critics say the Trump administration should pressure Ukraine to halt the engine sales along with other military transfers to China. 

William C. Triplett, a China expert and former counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Ukrainians are helping China solve jet engine production problems.
“We sure as hell don’t want to help Chinese pilots learn to land on aircraft carriers at an accelerated pace,” he said.
Disclosure of the new Ukrainian-powered carrier training jet comes a month after the Pentagon announced the supply of $200 million in military assistance to Ukraine’s military.
The American aid will fund command and control systems, secure communications, military mobility, night vision equipment and military medical gear. 

“Basically the Ukrainians are getting away with taking the U.S. taxpayer’s money in the one hand while stabbing the U.S. in the back with the other,” Mr. Triplett said.
A second argument for pressuring Kiev is that China for the first time in decades is now identified by the U.S. government as a strategic competitor that American forces could one day face in the shooting war. 

Thus Ukraine should be pressed to end sales of jet engines and other military gear that are bolstering China’s military.
The deal for trainer engines was concluded in 2016 with Ukraine’s Motor Sich company in Zaporizhzhya when the first 20 engines were supplied. 

The $380 million deal calls for a total of 250 engines for the trainers.
Ukraine recently delayed China’s attempt to buy Motor Sich.
Rick Fisher, a China expert at the InternationalStrategy and Assessment Center, said the United States should pressure Kiev to block the sale.
“For China, gaining control of Motor Sich will result in the accelerated arrival of the PLA’s global airmobile power projection capabilities,” Mr. Fisher said.
China remains a major arms buyer from Ukraine. 

In addition to JL-15 engines, recent Ukraine-China arms transfers have included some 50 diesel engines for tanks, and gas turbines for Luyang-2 and Luyang-3 guided missile destroyers.
In 2009, China bought two large Zubr-class hovercraft landing ships that were shipped to China shortly before Russia launched its covert military takeover of the Crimean peninsula.
Two more landing craft will be built in China under Ukrainian supervision. 

China also spent $45 million in 2016 to Ukraine’s state-owned Ukroboronprom for three Il-78M aerial refueling tankers.
The Chinese navy said in a statement last week that the JL-10s were commissioned in a ceremony at the Naval Aviation University in Shandong province.
The twin engine JL-10 is powered by two Ukraine-made Ivchenko-Progress AI-222-25F turbofan engines. 

The jet is used for training Chinese navy pilots to flight the J-15 carrier-based fighter jet.

Xi Jinping's Pope: Francis is abandoning China's Christians to Beijing's brutal regime

The Vatican is cozying up to Communist officials despite the fact at least 1,000 church leaders have been arrested and churches ransacked, blown up

By Terry Glavin

Chinese Christians pray during a service at an underground independent Protestant church on Oct. 12, 2014, in Beijing.

Owing to Ash Wednesday falling this week, and because the day’s observances mark the commencement of Lent, there is no more suitable moment in the liturgical calendar for this country’s Roman Catholics to start paying attention to an unconscionable betrayal that Francis appears determined to visit upon the clandestine Catholic faithful in the People’s Republic of China.
This is not to be clever or gratuitously offensive. 

Lent sets aside 40 days to a righteous discipline of sacrifice and devotion, abstinence and repentance. It’s supposed to be a time to reflect upon the obligations of resistance to worldliness and the necessarily personal battles Catholics are duty bound to wage with evil. 

In that vein, then, in that struggle, in China, Francis himself is giving every appearance of offering up abject surrender.
Even worse, says Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Pope is counselling China’s long-persecuted Catholics to follow his example and capitulate to the deepening tyranny of Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party. 

It is as though Francis is telling faithful Chinese Catholics “You are stupid for being loyal for so many years. Now surrender,” Cardinal Zen told reporters the other day.Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen hands a letter to Francis at the end of his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Jan. 10, 2018. 

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, Francis succeeded the dour, unpopular and private Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. 

Ever since, he has cultivated a glamorous reputation for championing social justice causes and the plight of the put-upon and marginalized. 

He routinely weighs in with uplifting and earnest homilies about refugees, climate change, violence against women, poverty, fake news and nuclear weapons. 

This is all very delightful.
But in China, Francis has lately sided with an establishment faction in the Vatican’s diplomatic corps that is intent upon rapprochement with Beijing. 

Talks are closing in on a kind of merger between the Communist-controlled “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association,” established by Mao Zedong in 1957, and China’s underground Catholic parishes.
The Communist-controlled church appoints its own bishops in defiance of Rome and disavows communion with Catholics who have kept faith with the Holy See. 

About half of China’s 10 million Catholics persist in the pre-Mao parishes, risking imprisonment by attending mass. 

Catholics are already a small minority among the 80-100 million Christians in China — estimates vary wildly owing to the tradition of worshipping in secret, the complexity of denominations, and overlaps between officially tolerated churches and clandestine “house” churches.Tu Shouzhe stands on his Protestant church’s roof on July 29, 2015, hours after Chinese government workers cut down the building’s cross, at right, in Muyang Village, in Zhejiang Province.

Beijing’s persecution of China’s Catholics is similar to the approach the Communist Party has taken with Tibetan Buddhists. 

Those whose loyalties remain with the exiled Dalai Lama are considered followers of a dangerous separatist and a traitor. 

The Communist Party has appointed its own puppet to serve as Panchen Lama, the second-highest authority in the religion. 

The 28-year-old Gyaltsen Norbu is being groomed as the frail, 83-year-old Dalai Lama’s successor. Over the past 10 years, China’s Uyghur Muslims, meanwhile, have been subjected to an unprecedented regime of persecution. 

Their home province of Xinjiang is now the most heavily policed region in the world, a dystopia of security checkpoints, re-education camps, artificial-intelligence surveillance systems and anti-religious propaganda.
While Pope Benedict went so far as to excommunicate the Communist-appointed bishops of China’s “patriotic” Catholic church, the Vatican and Beijing have struck agreements on the assignment of bishops to various dioceses as far back as the 1980s. 

But in 2016, Francis approved the ordination of three Communist bishops, and last December the Vatican asked two bishops in Shantou and Mindong to step down to make way for Communist-appointed replacements. 

And last month, the Vatican recognized the authority of seven Communist-appointed bishops.This image taken on April 30, 2014, shows a Christian church in the town of Oubei, outside the city of Wenzhou, that Chinese authorities had begun demolishing on April 28, according to internet postings, after a weeks-long stand-off between worshippers and the local government.

On Feb. 1, new regulations came into force governing all religious institutions in China. 

The new rules shed some light on the sort of church Francis appears willing to reassemble from the catacomb Christianity of his flock under Beijing’s rule. 

The new laws give Communist Party officials the authority to bar children from religious services, decide the content of religious instruction, and approve or disapprove of the time and place of religious services. 

The clampdown comes as part of a renewed effort by Xi Jinping to obliterate any ideological deviation from approved modes of thinking.
The Christian rights group China Aid reckons that at least 1,000 church leaders have been arrested for conducting unauthorized services over the past three years. 

Police have ransacked churches. 

Informal chapels have had their crosses pulled down. 

Christians have been instructed to replace pictures of Jesus Christ with portraits of Xi Jinping. 

Last month, in Shanxi, a church that served roughly 50,000 Christians was demolished by dynamite.
“Unfortunately,” Cardinal Zen wrote in a recent dispatch to China’s Catholics, “as of February 2018, we can expect a much stricter control by the Government on the activities of our brothers and sisters, also because the Government knows that it now has the Holy See’s consent.”

The Vatican’s accommodation of totalitarianism under Francis is not, of course, without precedent, and to appreciate the folly of it you only have to go back to the Vatican’s intimacies with the Spanish fascists of the 1930s, or recall Pius XI’s Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany. 

During the 1960s, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, with the blessing of Paul VI, pursued an accommodationist policy of “Ostpolitik” with several Warsaw Pact dictatorships. 

Among the Catholics of Eastern Europe, the policy ended up leaving the Vatican’s reputation in tatters.
The current Pope’s entreaties to Xi Jinping will only end up feeling like “a slap in the face” to China’s Catholics, according to Duke Divinity School professor Xi Lian. 

“The Vatican risks losing its spiritual authority and dampening the spirit of the Catholics.”
That’s putting it mildly. 

It’s just one consideration Catholics might reflect upon in the coming days of Lent.