Publisher of the Hong Kong tabloid Pingguo Ribao (Apple Daily), Beijing critic Jimmy Lai was sentenced Friday (28) to an additional 14 months in prison – and barely noticed outside of China.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken came to tweet about Hong Kong, but criticizing the electoral law changes, bureaucratically. Lai ceased to be a priority in U.S. coverage even before Blinken and Joe Biden took office.
It was six months ago, when it emerged that he had funded through his newspaper, in NBC’s terms, a “false intelligence document” with a “conspiracy theory” involving Biden and his son Hunter in business. in China. He has never hidden his preference for Donald Trump.
With Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s opposition to the new government’s diplomatic and media artillery against China was a priority. Attention has turned to Taiwan and, in particular, Xinjiang.
Accompanying his predecessor Mike Pompeo, who the day before his departure proclaimed Beijing’s “genocide” in the region, Blinken adopted the phrase and has since focused on human rights in Xinjiang. He has already imposed sanctions on bureaucrats in the region for “genocide”.
China is trying to respond in kind, against the United States and Australia, a government more in line with the American policy of surrounding Beijing. State News Agency Xinhua and others released the report on human rights violations in the United States in 2020 in the aftermath of the sanctions.
Before the recent wave of attacks against Chinese and other Asians, he pointed to the “systematic discrimination” of ethnic minorities in the country, for example “one in four young Asian Americans is targeted”.
He did the same with Australia, with a document calling on the UN Human Rights Council to close detention centers held in neighboring countries for immigrants and refugees.
The complaint against the Australian government was consistently echoed in the Australian media (above, one of the Australian ABC centers) and Western media, but the US report was limited to Chinese media.
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Conversely, a report by Australian academics was published this month by The New York Times, claiming that China “has used its power to create an alternative to global media dominated by vehicles like the BBC.”
The British Crown corporation and Voice of America are presented as reflective today, given the global penetration of Xinhua and even the China Daily – it’s the English-language foreign newspaper run by the Chinese Chancellery.
Either way, the painting recognizes the newspaper and makes reference to the Cold War. The expression is used daily in the news today in the United States and also in China, generally as a potential risk, a threat.
However, in countries which are trying to balance themselves out, like Germany, the “cold war” is already emerging as a benchmark of reality. Thus, by defending the maintenance of contracts with Russia and China, as she did this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel maintains that “what was possible during the Cold War must be possible today”.
One of the current public exhibitions in Germany, according to the DPA agency, was called In the Footsteps of the Cold War.
With attractions such as a nuclear bunker and coverage of the Korean wars in Afghanistan, in addition to the “reciprocal boycott” of the Moscow and Los Angeles Games, “he shows visitors when the fear of atomic warfare overshadowed everyday life “.
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