The John-Henry Westen Show - April 19, 2022


The most likely reason for the lockdowns in Shanghai has nothing to do with COVID

Topics
brutal lockdown protests Xi Jinping's speech and regulations on religion
Hosted by
John-Henry Westen
Mentioned
Xi Jinping Vladimir Putin John Henry Steve Mosher Jiang Zemin Zhu Rongji Trump Cardinal Parolin Cardinal Zen Francis Easter Biden
Inside the disturbing mind of a prominent gay atheist at the World Economic Forum The astonishing revelation recorded in St. Faustina's diary on the day of Pope Francis' birth

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

152.19

Word count

5,019

Sentence count

290

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Shanghai has been on lockdown for the last few weeks, and it s not just the Chinese people in the financial capital of China, Shanghai has been locked down tight, leaving 26 million people in their apartments, unable to leave their apartments for fear of arrest and incarceration. The Chinese Communist Party claims that every single person who tests positive for COID has died, and that it s an insane situation. We talk to Stephen Mosher, who understands all of the Chinese languages, to try and make sense of it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm sure by now you've seen many of those videos with people in China screaming outside of their
00:00:06.020 apartment buildings. It's hard to figure out what they're saying. People saying it has something to
00:00:10.520 do with starvation. Of late this week the internet had been flooded with videos of these white-dressed 0.87
00:00:17.520 hazmat-suited white sort of guards or whatever they are brutally beating up Chinese people.
00:00:24.960 People kneeling down heads to the ground begging for I guess mercy or whatever it looks like. 0.74
00:00:30.440 Very difficult to figure out. We have with us today one of the very few people who can tell us the truth
00:00:36.100 about what's going on here because he understands all the Chinese languages.
00:00:40.740 We have with us Stephen Mosher. Stay tuned. This is the John Henry Weston Show.
00:01:00.000 Steve welcome to the program. Good to be here John Henry. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of
00:01:09.440 the cross. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. So all of Easter even
00:01:19.260 Holy Week leading up to it has been sort of the internet flooded with these very strange videos.
00:01:24.740 people yelling outside of their buildings in China. A lot of confusion as to what it is.
00:01:31.540 Unpack that for us if you will. Well for the last few weeks and in fact in some cases in some
00:01:37.740 neighborhoods in Shanghai it's been a month now. For the last few weeks the financial capital of
00:01:42.980 China Shanghai has been locked down tight. Now we're talking about 26 million people
00:01:48.400 languishing in their apartments. Staring at their now empty refrigerators. Unable to set foot outside
00:01:54.900 the forage for food for fear of arrest and incarceration. And you talked about some of
00:02:00.260 those brutal videos that have been aired on the internet. There would be a lot more except the
00:02:04.660 Chinese Communist Party censors are working overtime to take down those videos as soon as they're posted.
00:02:11.000 But and you know it's it's not just Chinese are being locked down. I mean there are foreigners in
00:02:17.580 Shanghai as well. And and I came across some tweets from from some of them looking the other day.
00:02:23.160 And let me read you one. Day 16 of our COVID lockdown in Shanghai today. And food is the key
00:02:29.980 thing on people's minds. We aren't allowed to leave home. So delivery is the only way to get food. I was up
00:02:35.700 at 6am yesterday trying to get any kind of delivery. But nothing was available all day. So far same
00:02:41.400 results today. And yet and yet John Henry the homebound ones the people who are stuck at home
00:02:49.300 and in quarantine and lockdown are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are the ones who test positive for
00:02:55.400 COVID. You know and and every day you've got everybody in China everybody in Shanghai tested for
00:03:01.540 COVID. And every day they come up with 15 20 25,000 positive tests. Now just having a positive test
00:03:08.960 is meaningless if you don't have symptoms. And 95 96 97 percent of the people who test positive
00:03:15.580 don't have symptoms. In other words they have a few packets of the virus in their nose that come
00:03:21.620 through on the nose swab. They test positive and they're hauled off by force if they don't go
00:03:27.160 willingly to hastily erected quarantine camps. Now the quarantine camps are not places where you have
00:03:36.960 a lot of food or or blankets or anything else. These are generally large warehouse like buildings
00:03:45.280 that have been hastily converted into quarantine centers and people are just being thrown in
00:03:50.060 without enough food and water and without anything like sleeping bags. I saw some pictures of one
00:03:56.280 quarantine site where people are sleeping in cardboard boxes. In other words the government
00:04:02.580 of Shanghai managed to round up a few thousand big cardboard boxes the size that you'd use to ship a
00:04:08.760 refrigerator in. And those are the beds that the people in these quarantine centers have been given
00:04:14.240 to sleep in. I've seen other pictures of people in quarantine centers fighting over food packets
00:04:19.900 and fighting over blankets because there isn't enough food or blankets in the quarantine centers
00:04:25.440 to go around. And so actual fights break out as people struggle to get the basic necessities
00:04:31.380 after they've been ripped away from their families, after they've been taken out of their apartments
00:04:35.600 and put in these quarantine centers. And then and then to top it all off you have people who have been
00:04:41.840 ejected from their apartments because the government, well I say the government, I mean the Chinese 1.00
00:04:46.660 Communist Party in its wisdom has decided that their apartment building would make a nice quarantine
00:04:52.040 center. So all of a sudden you're on the you know 12th floor of a high-rise apartment building the police
00:04:58.300 come and they tell you leave the building now because your building is being turned into a quarantine
00:05:03.800 center. And these people are simply ejected out on the street. I don't know where they go quite frankly
00:05:08.920 after their residence has been turned into a quarantine center and people by the hundreds are piling into their
00:05:15.280 apartments. It's it's just an insane insane situation. The few thousand people every day that test positive
00:05:24.480 for COVID. The Chinese Communist Party tells us that no one has died in Shanghai. Now I'm suspicious of every
00:05:33.680 number of every claim that comes out of China because the Chinese Communist Party has zero.
00:05:40.560 Next, nada regard for the truth. They say whatever is politically convenient they massage the data to
00:05:49.440 make themselves look good. So have there only been no deaths in in in Shanghai? Have there been a large 0.72
00:05:57.920 number of deaths in Shanghai? I think if there had been we would know about it. So I think that the number
00:06:02.880 of deaths is probably pretty small. I think the number of people who are actually infected symptomatically
00:06:08.560 is very small. I think the number of people who test positive is completely irrelevant. Who cares if
00:06:14.000 you test positive if you don't have the disease itself, right? So this is a tremendous overreaction.
00:06:21.040 It makes no sense whatsoever in epidemiological terms. They don't have a deadly virus on the loose
00:06:27.840 in Shanghai. They don't have some sort of deadly new variant. If they did, they'd be shouting it from the
00:06:33.440 rooftops. We'd see massive numbers of dead bodies as we did in Wuhan two years ago. What they're
00:06:39.360 dealing with is Omicron, which I pronounce as I'm a cold. It's a mild variant. When you get it,
00:06:46.960 you recover from it, and you have lifelong natural immunity thereafter. So this terrible overreaction
00:06:53.360 cannot be explained in terms of fighting a disease. Something else is going on here, John Henry.
00:07:01.360 Just before we get to this something else, is it related to these videos? I'm going to play a couple
00:07:06.400 of these now. These are brutal. These are what look like normal citizens begging for and totally
00:07:14.080 peaceful, even totally subservient, but they're being beaten, dragged away. Let's watch this and I'll
00:07:20.320 get your reaction to it.
00:07:35.280 Yankees board seemingly calculating.
00:07:38.080 Yankees know it.
00:08:00.040 So, Steve, tell us, what do you make of those?
00:08:27.680 Well, the one scene of people kneeling on the ground, these are people who've been ejected from their apartments.
00:08:34.660 The state has simply expropriated their apartments.
00:08:38.140 The actual owner of the building denied responsibility for the fact that his tenants were being forced out on the street.
00:08:47.080 He said, all the buildings in China are owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:08:50.900 So if the party wants them, we have to give it to them.
00:08:53.120 So these people are on the street begging, begging the police to let them go back home.
00:08:58.360 And now they're, of course, they've been rendered homeless by this.
00:09:01.980 The people standing on the balconies and screaming in the middle of the night aren't just engaging in kind of a primal scream, screaming into the darkness, meaningless sounds.
00:09:11.280 You can actually hear them saying, if you speak Chinese, things like, we're dying.
00:09:15.820 We haven't eaten in a long time.
00:09:17.860 We need food.
00:09:19.300 Please help us.
00:09:20.460 It's heart rending.
00:09:21.320 And then, of course, if you stand out on your balcony too long, a drone will come outside your apartment building.
00:09:30.620 And from a loudspeaker, the robotic voice from the drone will say something like, please do not make a scene.
00:09:38.020 Please control your soul's hunger for freedom.
00:09:40.980 Please go back inside and stop making noise.
00:09:43.320 Those drones are all over the skies in Shanghai, telling people to just be quiet and actually quietly starve to death inside their apartments.
00:09:52.080 Now, what happens to those people who actually break quarantine and go out on the streets?
00:09:57.360 Well, nothing good, because there are hazmat-suited police everywhere who are under orders to arrest anyone who dares venture from their apartment.
00:10:07.840 And in Chinese, they call them da'bai, which means big whites, because they're very impressive, right, in their white hazmat suits with their helmets on and everything.
00:10:15.940 So the big whites are out arresting everybody who breaks quarantine. 0.85
00:10:19.940 And because people have gotten very hungry and because the crowds on the streets have gotten bigger in recent days, the Chinese Communist Party, instead of backing down off the quarantine, has instead brought in the military.
00:10:33.940 They brought in trainloads of People's Liberation Army soldiers with their weapons in order to control the crowds and force people back into their apartments.
00:10:45.220 And one thing they do, of course, to make sure you stay inside your apartment, is they lock you in.
00:10:51.100 They actually put a padlock on the outside of your door so that you can't go out.
00:10:55.900 There are all kinds of protests going on.
00:10:57.680 I mean, we've talked about the protests on the streets, but there are protests like a picture I saw of an empty refrigerator on a balcony.
00:11:07.120 A gentleman who owned the apartment had eaten all of his food, had no way to leave his apartment.
00:11:12.760 And so in a kind of mute, silent protest, he rolled his refrigerator out on the balcony and opened the doors, letting the whole world see that his refrigerator was empty.
00:11:23.420 You know, please save me.
00:11:24.940 And of course, there are people who go out in their balconies, not just to say they have no food or to say, send me food.
00:11:30.980 There are actually people who go out in their balconies to jump off and end their lives because they're in such despair.
00:11:36.900 You know, it is a form of cruel and inhuman punishment to subject people to solitary confinement.
00:11:45.480 And there are lots and lots of elderly people in Shanghai, lots and lots of singletons living in Shanghai alone in their apartments. 0.97
00:11:52.700 And basically, they've been condemned for almost a month now to solitary confinement.
00:11:58.900 And that in itself is wearing on your psyche and can grind you down emotionally, especially if you're starving to death at the same time.
00:12:08.260 So at the end of the day, I think when this lockdown is finally over and when the police go in and actually visit some of the people who've been confined in their apartments for the last 30 days,
00:12:20.680 they're going to find lots of dead bodies, they're going to find elderly people who died of strokes and heart attacks,
00:12:25.700 maybe because they ran out of medication, they couldn't get resupplied with their heart medication or whatever other medication they're taking.
00:12:34.040 People with diabetics, for example, couldn't get their insulin.
00:12:37.980 People are simply going to have starved to death because of these lockdowns.
00:12:40.680 The number of people who are going to die from the lockdown is going to be far greater than the number of people who die of COVID in Shanghai.
00:12:51.340 And again, the government claims no one has died of COVID in Shanghai, despite engaging in this brutal, brutal lockdown.
00:12:58.260 Final point on the brutal lockdown, John Henry, if the testers, the 38,000 healthcare workers who have been sent into Shanghai to do the testing,
00:13:10.460 if they test your one-year-old baby and your one-year-old baby tests positive and you test negative,
00:13:17.280 your baby is taken away from you and put in a quarantine center with hundreds of other babies.
00:13:22.780 You can imagine the suffering and pain, not just of the babies, the two-year-olds, the toddlers, the three-year-olds being taken away from their parents,
00:13:31.440 but the pain that the parents experience in being separated from their child in this way at this time.
00:13:37.200 And if you test positive for COVID and they take you out of your apartment and you happen to have a pet, like a cat or dog,
00:13:43.540 they will kill your cat or your dog on the spot.
00:13:52.780 Again, this makes no sense in epidemiological terms because we know that not just cats and dogs can get COVID.
00:14:14.640 We know that bats can get COVID.
00:14:16.420 We know that other mammals can get COVID, rats and rodents of all kinds.
00:14:21.760 So unless you were to kill every mammal in Shanghai and imprison everybody in Shanghai for the next couple of months, 0.83
00:14:31.700 you will never completely eliminate the virus, the COVID virus in Shanghai.
00:14:36.100 And even if you did do that, the next time somebody came in from Hunan or from Guangzhou or from Beijing in the north carrying COVID,
00:14:44.420 the whole thing would start up all over again.
00:14:46.420 You know, and the senior health official in China was asked, why are you continuing with the lockdown?
00:14:54.040 Why are you continuing with the COVID zero policy?
00:14:57.020 And he said, it's an amazing thing to think about.
00:15:00.520 He said that we can't stop now because if we stop now, everything we've done up to this point would be in vain.
00:15:08.000 Well, yes, everything you've done up to this point has been in vain and you're unwilling to admit that you failed.
00:15:15.700 So you're still pursuing this nonsensical COVID zero.
00:15:18.720 That's why I think this has nothing to do with health anymore.
00:15:22.800 It has to do with politics.
00:15:24.840 But politics in the face of killing your whole population, just so that people understand, 26 million people,
00:15:36.800 it's more than half the population of Canada, all in one city.
00:15:40.380 Yes, humongous city.
00:15:42.120 But you're talking with countless lives you're fooling around with, not only threatening their physical deaths,
00:15:49.160 but the mental torture and mental death you're fooling with here is legion as well.
00:15:57.120 Yeah.
00:15:57.720 What do you mean by, you know, it's the politics and to what end?
00:16:03.160 Well, I mean, everybody knows that politicians of all stripes, I hate to ever admit that they were wrong about anything.
00:16:10.380 They prefer just to move on or they prefer to make excuses like the reason gas prices are rising in the United States
00:16:16.680 all because of that terrible, you know, Vladimir Putin, when gas prices have been rising for the last 18 months.
00:16:23.320 So they don't want to admit, the people in the health service in China don't want to admit they were wrong.
00:16:28.760 Xi Jinping's attitude, however, is very reminiscent of what I saw at the beginning of the one-child policy back in 1980.
00:16:37.960 The senior official, communist official in charge of the one-child policy of enforcing it, said famously,
00:16:47.100 we are a socialist country, she said.
00:16:49.900 We can control reproduction of people in the same way we control production under a state plan.
00:16:56.520 In other words, just as we control bicycles and the production of automobiles under a state plan,
00:17:01.060 we can control human being production, reproduction, because we're a socialist country.
00:17:05.940 We have state plans.
00:17:07.560 That sort of hubris, that sort of drive for all, you know, all-powerful totalitarian control over the people,
00:17:16.280 I think is being exemplified in China right now.
00:17:20.120 I think that Xi Jinping is basically saying to the Chinese people,
00:17:25.180 we are a socialist country, by which he means communist.
00:17:27.980 We can control the replication of a highly infectious airborne respiratory disease under a state plan.
00:17:36.860 In the same way we control reproduction, in the same way we control production, we will control the virus.
00:17:44.840 And of course, it's insane, but I think it represents the totalitarian mindset that is dominant in China today.
00:17:53.900 All right?
00:17:54.900 So that's the general picture.
00:17:56.580 The communist system or totalitarian system, I think, has to carry out purges and persecutions of different groups of people over time
00:18:05.220 just to maintain the muscular tone of the system,
00:18:08.460 just to maintain the people in the state of fear on the one hand,
00:18:11.660 and just to maintain the enforcers in a state of constant readiness to enforce any order they're given.
00:18:16.880 And so you see, over time, the forced abortion of 400 million women in China.
00:18:21.440 So you see the genocide of the Uyghurs in the Far West.
00:18:24.560 So you see the persecution of Catholics in China.
00:18:27.540 At one level, they're all a way of maintaining the muscular rigor of the system,
00:18:31.380 like someone who wants to stay in good physical condition goes to the gym every week to work out or twice a week.
00:18:36.760 A communist system, a one-party state, has to do something to single out a class of its people for persecution from time to time
00:18:43.420 just to keep everything in a state of readiness.
00:18:46.980 So that, at one level, I think, is what's going on.
00:18:49.360 But there's another, there are wheels within wheels here in China.
00:18:52.380 And there is a leadership election coming up in China this October.
00:18:59.280 The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, several hundred senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party,
00:19:05.240 almost all men, by the way, will meet, and they will decide whether or not Xi Jinping, the Red Emperor,
00:19:11.880 can serve a third five-year term.
00:19:14.180 Now, the opposition, the opposition to Xi Jinping serving a third five-year term,
00:19:22.340 which would mean a fourth and a fifth, he would die in office, effectively, if he gets this.
00:19:28.080 The opposition is based in Shanghai.
00:19:31.240 There is something called the Shanghai Clique.
00:19:33.380 And they were in power in the 1990s and in the early years of the 2000s, when Jiang Zemin was the president of China
00:19:43.240 and Zhu Rongji was the premier of China.
00:19:46.720 They were, you know, Jiang Zemin was from Shanghai.
00:19:51.620 Senior leaders in the party that he put in power in the military and in the party and the government were from Shanghai.
00:19:57.560 They were the Shanghai Clique. 0.96
00:19:59.560 Now, Xi Jinping has purged a lot of them, but they're not done.
00:20:03.120 They want to stop him from getting a third term.
00:20:06.080 They want to stop him from being president for life.
00:20:08.240 Zhu Rongji, the former premier, has actually spoken out and said he should step down.
00:20:13.040 So I think the response of Xi Jinping to the Shanghai Clique has said,
00:20:17.480 I'm going to show the whole world and the 1.4 billion people of China that you guys are powerless 1.00
00:20:23.620 because I'm going to lock down your city, the source of your political strength, for as long as I want,
00:20:30.320 just to show you who's in charge.
00:20:32.240 So I think that's going on as well.
00:20:34.900 At one level, it's a power play by Xi Jinping to become dictator for life.
00:20:41.080 Wow.
00:20:42.420 That is totally fascinating.
00:20:46.000 Do you mind letting us in on another thing?
00:20:49.640 Because obviously right now, China's in the news for another reason.
00:20:54.900 We still have this ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
00:20:58.320 We have, though, China backing Russia in terms of the ruble and the sort of threat of the West 0.72
00:21:06.860 to basically bankrupt Russia is not going very well because China's backing them.
00:21:13.840 Give us your take on what all of that is, what it means for Xi Jinping, for China,
00:21:19.640 and on the world stage.
00:21:23.360 Well, first of all, John Henry, I would just like to amend a little bit what you just said,
00:21:30.440 that we are in the West or in the business of bankrupting Russia. 0.61
00:21:35.500 We're not because we haven't stopped the sale of oil and natural gas by Russia
00:21:40.440 to Western Europe or other countries in the world.
00:21:43.140 We haven't sanctioned the bank Gazprom, the Russian bank that handles the oil and natural
00:21:48.980 gas sales.
00:21:50.000 So if we really wanted to bankrupt Russia and put Putin in a very bad situation economically,
00:21:55.320 those are the kinds of things we would be doing.
00:21:58.280 And we're not.
00:21:59.940 We're sanctioning him on the margins.
00:22:01.900 We're sanctioning some of the people around him.
00:22:03.960 But we really haven't gotten serious in the sanctions.
00:22:07.500 And so in part, our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is a horrible thing,
00:22:15.340 which has cost many, many lives and which was totally unnecessary, could have been avoided
00:22:20.960 with the right foreign policy on the part of the United States and other Western countries.
00:22:26.760 In part, we're doing a lot of posturing, but we haven't taken the kind of actions that would
00:22:34.760 actually have forced Putin to reconsider his invasion.
00:22:40.960 One of the reasons that Putin has continued with his invasion, in fact, one of the reasons
00:22:45.480 he started in the beginning was because he knew he had the support, the full support and backing
00:22:51.460 of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:22:53.800 Remember, Vladimir Putin went to Beijing in February for the opening ceremony of the Winter
00:23:02.820 Olympics in Beijing.
00:23:04.720 And what he did when he was there was he signed a 5,000-word agreement, including, I believe,
00:23:13.240 16 different trade agreements between China and Russia.
00:23:17.740 And basically, the 5,000-word agreement, which, I mean, couldn't have been negotiated overnight
00:23:22.440 on his trip, right?
00:23:23.340 I mean, this sort of thing was months in the making.
00:23:25.720 The trade agreements were months in the making, which allow China to buy oil and natural gas
00:23:32.080 and grain from Russia at preferential prices.
00:23:35.420 Those things were all laid out, all in place before he invaded Ukraine.
00:23:41.180 And basically, if you want to summarize the 5,000-word document that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
00:23:47.840 signed, you can summarize it by saying, it's as if Xi Jinping said to Vladimir Putin, I've
00:23:55.600 got your back.
00:23:56.860 You're going to be sanctioned by the West.
00:23:59.080 But if they try to stop buying your oil and natural gas, you can ship it to us.
00:24:03.400 If they stop buying your grain, you can ship it to us.
00:24:06.520 I think that was a clear indication that the Chinese Communist Party and its leader was 100%
00:24:15.340 behind Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
00:24:19.020 And I think they did it for a number of reasons.
00:24:21.260 One reason is they would love to have Vladimir Putin, Russia, driven into the arms of China 0.83
00:24:30.540 permanently.
00:24:32.840 They would like to reconstitute the old Sino-Soviet bloc.
00:24:36.580 Remember back in the 1950s, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China worked together
00:24:42.840 on issues.
00:24:43.800 It was called the Sino-Soviet bloc, and it dominated much of the Eurasian landmass.
00:24:50.720 And China, I think, would like to reestablish that alliance.
00:24:53.660 Only now, it would be the senior partner, and Russia would be the junior partner.
00:24:59.900 It would be the empire, and Russia would be the tributary state. 0.81
00:25:05.080 And truth be told, if you combine Russian mineral resources, oil and natural gas, and everything
00:25:10.820 else they possess abundantly in terms of natural resources, with China's industrial base and
00:25:16.340 population, you've got a power capable of dominating not just Asia, but the entire world.
00:25:22.760 So I fear that that is the goal of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
00:25:29.100 And I think that would be a grave, grave strategic blunder on the part of the West to inadvertently
00:25:37.140 allow that to happen, because it would create a much bigger danger than China would or Russia 0.99
00:25:44.240 would alone.
00:25:45.840 So I think I agree with President Trump, who recently texted out that we need to work for
00:25:56.120 a peaceful settlement of the war in Ukraine now, before it gets out of hand, before more
00:26:04.840 people die, before more people starve to death.
00:26:08.540 And that's what we ought to be working for instead.
00:26:11.560 We seem to be determined, at least some people in Washington seem to be determined to add fuel
00:26:17.240 to the fire.
00:26:17.980 And I don't think that works in the best interest of the people of Ukraine, the people of Canada,
00:26:23.000 the people of the United States, or the people of Russia, for that matter.
00:26:27.040 Yeah.
00:26:27.140 On that same tack, President Trump warned, exactly as you did just now, of the grave blunder
00:26:33.900 of Biden and company, of sort of forcing China together with Russia and creating this thing.
00:26:41.920 How far down that road do you think we are?
00:26:44.680 Do you think there's any coming back from it at this point?
00:26:46.600 Or are we already too far?
00:26:49.100 Well, I think we have to look beyond Vladimir Putin in this conflict.
00:26:54.660 He's almost 70 years old.
00:26:57.580 He won't be around forever.
00:26:59.720 And he's a dictator, but he doesn't have the kind of institutional support that Xi Jinping
00:27:07.260 does by means of the 94 million members of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:27:12.580 In other words, Xi Jinping can leave the scene.
00:27:15.400 The Communist Party will ensure that China remains a one-party totalitarian dictatorship.
00:27:21.040 But there is hope that once Vladimir Putin leaves the scene, that Russia, the Russian people
00:27:28.260 could come back to their historic Christian, their historic Western roots.
00:27:33.140 I think naturally they would want to look, the Russian people would want to look West 1.00
00:27:36.600 and not East.
00:27:37.840 And we don't want to foreclose that possibility.
00:27:40.840 We don't want to drive them permanently into the arms of China and create the kind of strategic 1.00
00:27:47.100 nightmare that we seem well on the way to creating right now.
00:27:51.720 Amazing.
00:27:52.860 And one last thing for you, Steve, before you go.
00:27:55.260 I'm sorry to keep you so long, but it's so fascinating to be with you.
00:27:59.340 Thank you.
00:27:59.660 In all of this crisis with China, we've seen, as you said, the persecution of the church,
00:28:04.600 the genocide of the Uyghurs.
00:28:06.920 We're seeing all sorts of persecution, the cooperation, and not only cooperation, but allowing
00:28:15.420 or even promoting of what's going on in the war in Ukraine from China.
00:28:20.260 All of this, but nary a word from Pope Francis.
00:28:23.820 And we still have this ongoing deal that's still secret with the Catholic Church in China
00:28:29.280 in the midst of all this.
00:28:31.060 No retracting of various cardinals who have talked about how China's the exemplar in terms
00:28:37.900 of the world, both for ecological things and stuff like that.
00:28:42.220 What's your take on that situation right now?
00:28:46.200 Well, Cardinal Pietro Perolin has recently indicated that he would like to see the agreement
00:28:53.240 between the Vatican and China extended.
00:28:56.280 Now, it was originally signed in 2018.
00:28:59.120 It was extended in September of 2020, and it's up for another extension in September,
00:29:05.180 just a few months away.
00:29:06.760 And he said, well, we might want to tweak the agreement a little bit.
00:29:10.520 We might want to modify it on the margins, but we'd like to see it continued.
00:29:15.860 For the life of me, John Henry, I don't see why, especially because the Chinese Communist 1.00
00:29:23.160 Party leader, the new Red Emperor Xi Jinping, in December of last year, a few months ago,
00:29:29.140 gave a speech on religious behavior, religious organizations in China today.
00:29:35.540 And he said very clearly that every religious organization has to promote socialism, by which
00:29:42.840 he means communism.
00:29:43.800 Every religious organization has to promote, first and foremost, the policies of the Chinese 0.85
00:29:49.460 Communist Party and its leaders, by which he means he himself.
00:29:54.320 And any religious organization which doesn't do those things is engaged in illegal activity
00:30:01.700 and will be exterminated. 0.78
00:30:05.040 And those organizations that should be exterminated include any that are governed by foreign powers, 1.00
00:30:13.080 take their instructions from abroad, or receive funding from abroad.
00:30:18.260 Now, I don't know how you can read what Xi Jinping said and not take that as directly
00:30:25.080 targeting the Catholic Church.
00:30:27.540 After all, the head of the Catholic Church is an Argentinian, and the Vatican is located
00:30:36.300 in Rome, Italy, a foreign country.
00:30:38.900 And so, under the guidelines issued by Xi Jinping, all Catholics are naturally under suspicion.
00:30:45.380 And unless the Catholic Church becomes a part and parcel of the propaganda and united front
00:30:53.420 apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party, unless it serves the purposes of the Chinese Communist
00:30:58.700 Party, it will be eradicated.
00:31:00.920 And reading that, you think, what room does that leave for faithful Catholics in China to
00:31:07.780 practice their faith inside the so-called Patriotic Catholic Association, which is run by the Chinese
00:31:13.660 Communist Party?
00:31:14.700 And you have to think to yourself, the walls are not just closing in.
00:31:18.020 With Xi Jinping's speech and with the regulations that came out just a few weeks ago, the walls
00:31:23.800 have now crushed any semblance of religious freedom, any semblance of freedom of conscience
00:31:29.340 in China today.
00:31:31.280 And so, I reflected on the words of Cardinal Zen, who said several years ago, rather than join
00:31:37.820 the Patriotic Association, he said, priests and bishops would be better off getting a factory
00:31:45.140 job and proselytizing, evangelizing in the evening and weekends, continuing to practice
00:31:51.280 their faith in the underground, rather than make the kind of compromises that would basically
00:31:56.120 turn them into agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:32:00.420 So, why you'd want to extend that agreement?
00:32:02.840 I mean, I think the hope in the beginning was that somehow, if we had an agreement between
00:32:08.580 the Vatican and the Communist Party, that those 54 vacancies in China, who desperately need
00:32:16.060 bishops, the Vatican's thought, I think Cardinal Perlund's thought, was that we could somehow
00:32:20.920 work with the Communist Party to fill those 54 vacancies, install bishops, so that those
00:32:26.420 dioceses would not be leaderless.
00:32:28.240 Well, over the last four years, how many of those 54 have we filled?
00:32:31.800 We filled six.
00:32:34.600 So, almost 50 remain vacant.
00:32:37.380 So, if that was the pathway to filling those vacancies, it has led mostly nowhere.
00:32:44.860 Amazing.
00:32:45.800 Amazing.
00:32:47.040 Steve Mosher, it's always fascinating to be with you.
00:32:50.540 Thank you.
00:32:51.400 Thank you, John Henry.
00:32:53.320 And a happy Easter to you.
00:32:55.160 So, to all of you, God bless you, and we'll see you next time.