The clumsy-but-creepy tailing and front-page exposé of Macquarie University’s Kevin Callico by Beijing’s Wen Wei Po has been reported by such outlets as the Guardian, ABC and HK Free Press. But curiously there is no mention of it in the South China Morning Post (to which he has been a contributor).
The NYT recently quoted him on the (alleged) Chinese Communist Party harassment of New Zealand’s Anne-Marie Brady. He described it as an ‘insane situation in which a scholar focused on PRC interference operations is falling victim to those same interference operations’. Does Wen Wei Po have a grand sense of irony or what?
The guy is apparently not easily intimidated, even completing a course in Xi Jinping Thought – surely the academic world’s equivalent of extreme sports.
The SCMP does, however, regale us with generous coverage of Xi’s much-awaited speech on the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party’s decision to stop making China as impoverished and backward as possible.
Western commentators had assumed that the Chairman of Everything for Life would publicly concede that his counter-reformist, Leninist, nationalistic, insecure-hubristic-paranoid control-freakery had been getting the nation into deep doo-doo, and he would reverse the error and relax the Communist Party’s grip on the economy and society, and allow markets and people to flourish freely. To their utter astonishment, he did not.
The other big news coming out of the 40th anniversary celebration was that China has foreign friends. Ten of them, to be precise. They include the guys behind Davos and the Olympics (the archetypal bloated self-important globalist bore-fests), Lee Kuan Yew (every crotchety bigoted eugenicist authoritarian’s inspiration), some German and Japanese suckers who gave away industrial know-how, assorted obscure shoe-shiners, and a few others I can’t recall but who are doubtless very wonderful and noble people.
Ten! Who’d have thought it?
The irony of China honoring some of the most despised “free-markets with hyprocrisy” globalists of the West, embracing “multilateral” institutions which are just havens for corruption, only 10-20 years too late.
These organizations have lost all credibility and influence. The world has shifted towards populism and instability, two things the PRC cannot afford.
It would be interesting to know who or what alerted Wen Wei Pooh to the academic’s presence in HK
Saw some American suckers 20 years ago …
China: You give us three dollars and we’ll give you one.
American: Such a deal … they’d come back from China with smiles on their faces from the “bonuses” er, red packets …
in three years out of that business
More like ’10 most ugly people in history’ list.
Economist Xiang Songzuo said that “a very important institute” in China just predicted in an internal report that Chinese growth in 2018 would come in at 1.67%.
Economist Xiang obviously has not completed a course in Xi Jinping Thought.
Which raises the question, is “Who’d have thought it?” preferable to “Who’d a thunk it?”?