The most likely reason for the lockdowns in Shanghai has nothing to do with COVID
Summary
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
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I'm sure by now you've seen many of those videos with people in China screaming outside of their
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apartment buildings. It's hard to figure out what they're saying. People saying it has something to
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do with starvation. Of late this week the internet had been flooded with videos of these white-dressed
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hazmat-suited white sort of guards or whatever they are brutally beating up Chinese people.
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People kneeling down heads to the ground begging for I guess mercy or whatever it looks like.
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Very difficult to figure out. We have with us today one of the very few people who can tell us the truth
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about what's going on here because he understands all the Chinese languages.
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We have with us Stephen Mosher. Stay tuned. This is the John Henry Weston Show.
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Steve welcome to the program. Good to be here John Henry. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of
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the cross. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. So all of Easter even
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Holy Week leading up to it has been sort of the internet flooded with these very strange videos.
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people yelling outside of their buildings in China. A lot of confusion as to what it is.
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Unpack that for us if you will. Well for the last few weeks and in fact in some cases in some
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neighborhoods in Shanghai it's been a month now. For the last few weeks the financial capital of
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China Shanghai has been locked down tight. Now we're talking about 26 million people
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languishing in their apartments. Staring at their now empty refrigerators. Unable to set foot outside
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the forage for food for fear of arrest and incarceration. And you talked about some of
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those brutal videos that have been aired on the internet. There would be a lot more except the
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Chinese Communist Party censors are working overtime to take down those videos as soon as they're posted.
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But and you know it's it's not just Chinese are being locked down. I mean there are foreigners in
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Shanghai as well. And and I came across some tweets from from some of them looking the other day.
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And let me read you one. Day 16 of our COVID lockdown in Shanghai today. And food is the key
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thing on people's minds. We aren't allowed to leave home. So delivery is the only way to get food. I was up
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at 6am yesterday trying to get any kind of delivery. But nothing was available all day. So far same
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results today. And yet and yet John Henry the homebound ones the people who are stuck at home
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and in quarantine and lockdown are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are the ones who test positive for
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COVID. You know and and every day you've got everybody in China everybody in Shanghai tested for
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COVID. And every day they come up with 15 20 25,000 positive tests. Now just having a positive test
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is meaningless if you don't have symptoms. And 95 96 97 percent of the people who test positive
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don't have symptoms. In other words they have a few packets of the virus in their nose that come
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through on the nose swab. They test positive and they're hauled off by force if they don't go
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willingly to hastily erected quarantine camps. Now the quarantine camps are not places where you have
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a lot of food or or blankets or anything else. These are generally large warehouse like buildings
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that have been hastily converted into quarantine centers and people are just being thrown in
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without enough food and water and without anything like sleeping bags. I saw some pictures of one
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quarantine site where people are sleeping in cardboard boxes. In other words the government
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of Shanghai managed to round up a few thousand big cardboard boxes the size that you'd use to ship a
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refrigerator in. And those are the beds that the people in these quarantine centers have been given
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to sleep in. I've seen other pictures of people in quarantine centers fighting over food packets
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and fighting over blankets because there isn't enough food or blankets in the quarantine centers
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to go around. And so actual fights break out as people struggle to get the basic necessities
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after they've been ripped away from their families, after they've been taken out of their apartments
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and put in these quarantine centers. And then and then to top it all off you have people who have been
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ejected from their apartments because the government, well I say the government, I mean the Chinese
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Communist Party in its wisdom has decided that their apartment building would make a nice quarantine
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center. So all of a sudden you're on the you know 12th floor of a high-rise apartment building the police
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come and they tell you leave the building now because your building is being turned into a quarantine
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center. And these people are simply ejected out on the street. I don't know where they go quite frankly
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after their residence has been turned into a quarantine center and people by the hundreds are piling into their
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apartments. It's it's just an insane insane situation. The few thousand people every day that test positive
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for COVID. The Chinese Communist Party tells us that no one has died in Shanghai. Now I'm suspicious of every
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number of every claim that comes out of China because the Chinese Communist Party has zero.
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Next, nada regard for the truth. They say whatever is politically convenient they massage the data to
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make themselves look good. So have there only been no deaths in in in Shanghai? Have there been a large
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number of deaths in Shanghai? I think if there had been we would know about it. So I think that the number
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of deaths is probably pretty small. I think the number of people who are actually infected symptomatically
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is very small. I think the number of people who test positive is completely irrelevant. Who cares if
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you test positive if you don't have the disease itself, right? So this is a tremendous overreaction.
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It makes no sense whatsoever in epidemiological terms. They don't have a deadly virus on the loose
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in Shanghai. They don't have some sort of deadly new variant. If they did, they'd be shouting it from the
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rooftops. We'd see massive numbers of dead bodies as we did in Wuhan two years ago. What they're
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dealing with is Omicron, which I pronounce as I'm a cold. It's a mild variant. When you get it,
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you recover from it, and you have lifelong natural immunity thereafter. So this terrible overreaction
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cannot be explained in terms of fighting a disease. Something else is going on here, John Henry.
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Just before we get to this something else, is it related to these videos? I'm going to play a couple
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of these now. These are brutal. These are what look like normal citizens begging for and totally
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peaceful, even totally subservient, but they're being beaten, dragged away. Let's watch this and I'll
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Well, the one scene of people kneeling on the ground, these are people who've been ejected from their apartments.
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The state has simply expropriated their apartments.
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The actual owner of the building denied responsibility for the fact that his tenants were being forced out on the street.
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He said, all the buildings in China are owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
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So if the party wants them, we have to give it to them.
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So these people are on the street begging, begging the police to let them go back home.
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And now they're, of course, they've been rendered homeless by this.
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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.
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You can actually hear them saying, if you speak Chinese, things like, we're dying.
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And then, of course, if you stand out on your balcony too long, a drone will come outside your apartment building.
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And from a loudspeaker, the robotic voice from the drone will say something like, please do not make a scene.
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Those drones are all over the skies in Shanghai, telling people to just be quiet and actually quietly starve to death inside their apartments.
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Now, what happens to those people who actually break quarantine and go out on the streets?
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Well, nothing good, because there are hazmat-suited police everywhere who are under orders to arrest anyone who dares venture from their apartment.
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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.
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So the big whites are out arresting everybody who breaks quarantine.
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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.
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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.
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And one thing they do, of course, to make sure you stay inside your apartment, is they lock you in.
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They actually put a padlock on the outside of your door so that you can't go out.
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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.
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A gentleman who owned the apartment had eaten all of his food, had no way to leave his apartment.
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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.
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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.
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There are actually people who go out in their balconies to jump off and end their lives because they're in such despair.
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You know, it is a form of cruel and inhuman punishment to subject people to solitary confinement.
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And there are lots and lots of elderly people in Shanghai, lots and lots of singletons living in Shanghai alone in their apartments.
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And basically, they've been condemned for almost a month now to solitary confinement.
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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.
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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,
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they're going to find lots of dead bodies, they're going to find elderly people who died of strokes and heart attacks,
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maybe because they ran out of medication, they couldn't get resupplied with their heart medication or whatever other medication they're taking.
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People with diabetics, for example, couldn't get their insulin.
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People are simply going to have starved to death because of these lockdowns.
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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.
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And again, the government claims no one has died of COVID in Shanghai, despite engaging in this brutal, brutal lockdown.
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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,
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if they test your one-year-old baby and your one-year-old baby tests positive and you test negative,
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your baby is taken away from you and put in a quarantine center with hundreds of other babies.
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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,
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but the pain that the parents experience in being separated from their child in this way at this time.
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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,
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they will kill your cat or your dog on the spot.
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Again, this makes no sense in epidemiological terms because we know that not just cats and dogs can get COVID.
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We know that other mammals can get COVID, rats and rodents of all kinds.
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So unless you were to kill every mammal in Shanghai and imprison everybody in Shanghai for the next couple of months,
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you will never completely eliminate the virus, the COVID virus in Shanghai.
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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,
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You know, and the senior health official in China was asked, why are you continuing with the lockdown?
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Why are you continuing with the COVID zero policy?
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And he said, it's an amazing thing to think about.
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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.
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Well, yes, everything you've done up to this point has been in vain and you're unwilling to admit that you failed.
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So you're still pursuing this nonsensical COVID zero.
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That's why I think this has nothing to do with health anymore.
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But politics in the face of killing your whole population, just so that people understand, 26 million people,
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it's more than half the population of Canada, all in one city.
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But you're talking with countless lives you're fooling around with, not only threatening their physical deaths,
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but the mental torture and mental death you're fooling with here is legion as well.
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What do you mean by, you know, it's the politics and to what end?
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Well, I mean, everybody knows that politicians of all stripes, I hate to ever admit that they were wrong about anything.
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They prefer just to move on or they prefer to make excuses like the reason gas prices are rising in the United States
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all because of that terrible, you know, Vladimir Putin, when gas prices have been rising for the last 18 months.
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So they don't want to admit, the people in the health service in China don't want to admit they were wrong.
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Xi Jinping's attitude, however, is very reminiscent of what I saw at the beginning of the one-child policy back in 1980.
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The senior official, communist official in charge of the one-child policy of enforcing it, said famously,
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We can control reproduction of people in the same way we control production under a state plan.
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In other words, just as we control bicycles and the production of automobiles under a state plan,
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we can control human being production, reproduction, because we're a socialist country.
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That sort of hubris, that sort of drive for all, you know, all-powerful totalitarian control over the people,
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I think is being exemplified in China right now.
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I think that Xi Jinping is basically saying to the Chinese people,
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we are a socialist country, by which he means communist.
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We can control the replication of a highly infectious airborne respiratory disease under a state plan.
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In the same way we control reproduction, in the same way we control production, we will control the virus.
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And of course, it's insane, but I think it represents the totalitarian mindset that is dominant in China today.
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The communist system or totalitarian system, I think, has to carry out purges and persecutions of different groups of people over time
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just to maintain the muscular tone of the system,
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just to maintain the people in the state of fear on the one hand,
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and just to maintain the enforcers in a state of constant readiness to enforce any order they're given.
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And so you see, over time, the forced abortion of 400 million women in China.
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So you see the genocide of the Uyghurs in the Far West.
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So you see the persecution of Catholics in China.
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At one level, they're all a way of maintaining the muscular rigor of the system,
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like someone who wants to stay in good physical condition goes to the gym every week to work out or twice a week.
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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
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just to keep everything in a state of readiness.
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So that, at one level, I think, is what's going on.
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But there's another, there are wheels within wheels here in China.
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And there is a leadership election coming up in China this October.
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The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, several hundred senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party,
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almost all men, by the way, will meet, and they will decide whether or not Xi Jinping, the Red Emperor,
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Now, the opposition, the opposition to Xi Jinping serving a third five-year term,
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which would mean a fourth and a fifth, he would die in office, effectively, if he gets this.
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And they were in power in the 1990s and in the early years of the 2000s, when Jiang Zemin was the president of China
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They were, you know, Jiang Zemin was from Shanghai.
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Senior leaders in the party that he put in power in the military and in the party and the government were from Shanghai.
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Now, Xi Jinping has purged a lot of them, but they're not done.
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They want to stop him from getting a third term.
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They want to stop him from being president for life.
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Zhu Rongji, the former premier, has actually spoken out and said he should step down.
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So I think the response of Xi Jinping to the Shanghai Clique has said,
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I'm going to show the whole world and the 1.4 billion people of China that you guys are powerless
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because I'm going to lock down your city, the source of your political strength, for as long as I want,
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At one level, it's a power play by Xi Jinping to become dictator for life.
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Because obviously right now, China's in the news for another reason.
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We still have this ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
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We have, though, China backing Russia in terms of the ruble and the sort of threat of the West
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to basically bankrupt Russia is not going very well because China's backing them.
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Give us your take on what all of that is, what it means for Xi Jinping, for China,
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Well, first of all, John Henry, I would just like to amend a little bit what you just said,
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that we are in the West or in the business of bankrupting Russia.
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We're not because we haven't stopped the sale of oil and natural gas by Russia
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to Western Europe or other countries in the world.
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We haven't sanctioned the bank Gazprom, the Russian bank that handles the oil and natural
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So if we really wanted to bankrupt Russia and put Putin in a very bad situation economically,
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those are the kinds of things we would be doing.
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We're sanctioning some of the people around him.
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But we really haven't gotten serious in the sanctions.
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And so in part, our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is a horrible thing,
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which has cost many, many lives and which was totally unnecessary, could have been avoided
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with the right foreign policy on the part of the United States and other Western countries.
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In part, we're doing a lot of posturing, but we haven't taken the kind of actions that would
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actually have forced Putin to reconsider his invasion.
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One of the reasons that Putin has continued with his invasion, in fact, one of the reasons
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he started in the beginning was because he knew he had the support, the full support and backing
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Remember, Vladimir Putin went to Beijing in February for the opening ceremony of the Winter
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And what he did when he was there was he signed a 5,000-word agreement, including, I believe,
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16 different trade agreements between China and Russia.
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And basically, the 5,000-word agreement, which, I mean, couldn't have been negotiated overnight
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I mean, this sort of thing was months in the making.
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The trade agreements were months in the making, which allow China to buy oil and natural gas
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Those things were all laid out, all in place before he invaded Ukraine.
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And basically, if you want to summarize the 5,000-word document that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
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signed, you can summarize it by saying, it's as if Xi Jinping said to Vladimir Putin, I've
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But if they try to stop buying your oil and natural gas, you can ship it to us.
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If they stop buying your grain, you can ship it to us.
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I think that was a clear indication that the Chinese Communist Party and its leader was 100%
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And I think they did it for a number of reasons.
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One reason is they would love to have Vladimir Putin, Russia, driven into the arms of China
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They would like to reconstitute the old Sino-Soviet bloc.
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Remember back in the 1950s, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China worked together
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It was called the Sino-Soviet bloc, and it dominated much of the Eurasian landmass.
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And China, I think, would like to reestablish that alliance.
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Only now, it would be the senior partner, and Russia would be the junior partner.
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It would be the empire, and Russia would be the tributary state.
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And truth be told, if you combine Russian mineral resources, oil and natural gas, and everything
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else they possess abundantly in terms of natural resources, with China's industrial base and
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population, you've got a power capable of dominating not just Asia, but the entire world.
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So I fear that that is the goal of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
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And I think that would be a grave, grave strategic blunder on the part of the West to inadvertently
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allow that to happen, because it would create a much bigger danger than China would or Russia
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So I think I agree with President Trump, who recently texted out that we need to work for
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a peaceful settlement of the war in Ukraine now, before it gets out of hand, before more
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people die, before more people starve to death.
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And that's what we ought to be working for instead.
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We seem to be determined, at least some people in Washington seem to be determined to add fuel
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And I don't think that works in the best interest of the people of Ukraine, the people of Canada,
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the people of the United States, or the people of Russia, for that matter.
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On that same tack, President Trump warned, exactly as you did just now, of the grave blunder
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of Biden and company, of sort of forcing China together with Russia and creating this thing.
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Do you think there's any coming back from it at this point?
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Well, I think we have to look beyond Vladimir Putin in this conflict.
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And he's a dictator, but he doesn't have the kind of institutional support that Xi Jinping
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does by means of the 94 million members of the Chinese Communist Party.
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In other words, Xi Jinping can leave the scene.
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The Communist Party will ensure that China remains a one-party totalitarian dictatorship.
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But there is hope that once Vladimir Putin leaves the scene, that Russia, the Russian people
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could come back to their historic Christian, their historic Western roots.
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I think naturally they would want to look, the Russian people would want to look West
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And we don't want to foreclose that possibility.
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We don't want to drive them permanently into the arms of China and create the kind of strategic
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nightmare that we seem well on the way to creating right now.
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And one last thing for you, Steve, before you go.
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I'm sorry to keep you so long, but it's so fascinating to be with you.
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In all of this crisis with China, we've seen, as you said, the persecution of the church,
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We're seeing all sorts of persecution, the cooperation, and not only cooperation, but allowing
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or even promoting of what's going on in the war in Ukraine from China.
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All of this, but nary a word from Pope Francis.
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And we still have this ongoing deal that's still secret with the Catholic Church in China
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No retracting of various cardinals who have talked about how China's the exemplar in terms
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of the world, both for ecological things and stuff like that.
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Well, Cardinal Pietro Perolin has recently indicated that he would like to see the agreement
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It was extended in September of 2020, and it's up for another extension in September,
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And he said, well, we might want to tweak the agreement a little bit.
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We might want to modify it on the margins, but we'd like to see it continued.
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For the life of me, John Henry, I don't see why, especially because the Chinese Communist
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Party leader, the new Red Emperor Xi Jinping, in December of last year, a few months ago,
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gave a speech on religious behavior, religious organizations in China today.
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And he said very clearly that every religious organization has to promote socialism, by which
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Every religious organization has to promote, first and foremost, the policies of the Chinese
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Communist Party and its leaders, by which he means he himself.
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And any religious organization which doesn't do those things is engaged in illegal activity
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And those organizations that should be exterminated include any that are governed by foreign powers,
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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
00:30:27.540
After all, the head of the Catholic Church is an Argentinian, and the Vatican is located
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
00:31:00.920
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
00:31:14.700
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
00:31:31.280
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.
00:32:02.840
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
00:32:28.240
Well, over the last four years, how many of those 54 have we filled?
00:32:37.380
So, if that was the pathway to filling those vacancies, it has led mostly nowhere.
00:32:47.040
Steve Mosher, it's always fascinating to be with you.
00:32:55.160
So, to all of you, God bless you, and we'll see you next time.