China Archives -

25Feb2026

CHINA – TYRANNY and BRUTALITY

February 25, 2026

China, Chinese Communist Party, dictatorship, Jimmy Lai, labour camps China

In a fast changing world there is one thing that never seems to change and that is the brutality and tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party ever since it shot its way into power in 1949 and has remained a dictatorship to this day. Such a tyranny can never hold an election as it knows that it would be voted out of office. After all, people don’t usually vote for their oppressors.

Its latest outrage was the sentencing in Hong Kong of 78 year old Jimmy Lai to 20 years imprisonment on trumped up charges that he “endangered Hong Kong’s security by collaborating with foreign powers”. The real reason why he was charged and given such a long sentence was that his former newspaper in Hong Kong, the enormously popular Apple Daily, ran certain editorials and stories that were not to the liking of the post-1997 Hong Kong authorities – people who are nothing more than puppets of the brutes in Beijing.

Jimmy Lai was born in China but as a young man he escaped its tyranny for the free society of British ruled Hong Kong. Full of enterprise and energy he built up a business of clothes shops on the cutting edge of fashion. These were hugely successful and he then branched out into the media – not by buying an existing newspaper but by establishing his own, Apple Daily. Like Jimmy himself it was committed to free enterprise and free speech. Although generally supportive of British rule it nevertheless would criticise the authorities if it felt that it was necessary to do so. This was never a problem as free speech was part and parcel of British rule.

However, after Britain so foolishly and gutlessly handed Hong Kong over to the Communists in 1997, the new and insecure authorities took a dim view of any criticism from any newspaper and so they arrested Apple’s owner, Jimmy Lai, and seven of his editors and executives. All these were sentenced in February, 2026, to long terms of imprisonment.

This is only the latest manifestation of tyranny by China’s authorities and comes on the back of China’s shooting to order healthy prisoners so as to obtain their body parts for transplants to high-up Party officials, and the imprisonment of millions of people in prisons and labour camps. Many of these prisoners are used as unpaid slave labour in the factories where they produce consumer goods for export to the West, including New Zealand.

The prisons are built alongside factories in which the senior prison officials have a financial interest. This is especially so in the great export hub of Shenzhen and Guangzhou on the lower reaches of the Pearl River delta, reputedly the world’s largest export manufacturing centre. A prime purpose of prison in China is to provide free labour to factories. That is why there are more than two million people in China’s jails and work camps. For example, around the Dongguan Prison complex are built fifteen factories in which the prisoners provide free labour.

Prisoners who don’t produce their required daily quotas with their over-worked hands are subject to ritual beatings, torture and solitary confinement. “The [prison] boss is not just the director of a prison but the manager of a business”, explained the former China “justice” minister, Zhang Fusen. Both guards and managers have their salaries tied directly to the output of the prisoners, hence the brutality towards anyone who might not reach the daily quota.

Those New Zealand politicians, like Todd McLay, who are forever promoting trade with China and those businessmen who import all these things to Australia and New Zealand are contributing to one of the greatest crimes in history.

Westerners who buy Chinese goods are also collaborators in the crime of propping up the most murderous and exploitive regime on the planet. The bigwigs at Briscoes, the Warehouse, Walmart and other China dependent retailers would declare that their goods are not made by prison labour but, as the Sunday Star-Times reported on 30 June, 2013, “Such is the opacity and diversity of global supply chains to-day that establishing a clear link can be difficult”. In the words of New Zealander, Danny Cancian, who spent some time in one of these wretched prisons, “Most of the companies wouldn’t even know where their products are made”.

One could go on and on but a Blog is inadequate to relate and explain the horrors of China and the absolute folly, if not treason, of successive New Zealand governments in making our economy more and more dependent on China by exporting to it ever greater amounts of agricultural products. After all, China is a country that threatens its neighbours, that violates trade and other international agreements, and uses torture as a normal part of arrest procedures. China is the only potential enemy that New Zealand has. So why trade with it in such a big way and buy its products so as to boost its capacity for military spending?

In addition to this Blog, Tross Publishing has just reissued an updated version of our book, “In the Jaws of the Dragon; How China is Taking Over New Zealand and Australia”. It has been updated to 2026. It gives a detailed and frightening picture of the pickle that our governments have got us into by making our economy so dependent on such a brutal and insecure country as China under its current and aggressive dictatorship. It also shows the lack of imagination and patriotism of New Zealand’s exporters and importers who have been too lazy to diversify into other markets.

This latest version of “In the Jaws of the Dragon” is 432 pages of text (plus 12 photo pages), and costs $35 (including postage within New Zealand). It can be obtained from independent bookshops or direct from the publisher: www.trosspublishing.com

28Jul2024

“It’s time to boycott “Made in China’ Products”

July 28, 2024

admin

boycott, CCP, China, democracy, xi jinping China, Democracy

China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949, is New Zealand’s only potential enemy. Its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, is not only threatening other Pacific nations such as Taiwan and the Philippines with war but is also at war by other means with all Western democracies, including New Zealand.

Shortly after he came to power in 2013 Xi (now Fuhrer for life) launched a war against what he called the West’s “Seven Deadly Sins” in Document No. 9. These “sins” are, in fact, the very foundations on which our democracy and freedoms rest and for which our servicemen gave their lives in two world wars. According to Xi these “Deadly Sins” include: constitutional democracy (including the rule of law), universal values (freedom, democracy, human rights, etc.), a civil society, neo liberal economics (free enterprise), a free media, and teaching any history that is outside the CCP’s narrative.

The Chinese embassy in Wellington – and its various agents – spy on both students from China at New Zealand universities as well as New Zealanders, e.g. businessmen doing business with China and indeed anyone who expresses any criticism of its brutal government. In 2021 state-sponsored Chinese hackers made a cyber attack on the New Zealand parliamentary network just as they had done to the Australian parliament in 2019. These are not the actions of a friendly country.

China is seeking economic dominance of New Zealand in order to prise us away from our traditional friends and allies (Australia, Britain, U.S.A., Canada), these being the only countries that could protect our sovereignty and our rights from an aggressive bully – be it the Japanese Empire in the 1940s or China in the 2020s.

To build up its power so that it can intimidate other (and smaller) Pacific nations China is engaged in a programme of great military expansion, spending more on weaponry than all the other Asian countries combined. Why?

It is able to finance this massive military expenditure by its growing economy which is largely funded by trade with other countries, including New Zealand which so foolishly put its head in the jaws of this dragon in 2008 by means of the notorious China-New Zealand Free Trade deal. Every time that you buy a China made shirt at the Warehouse or a China made electric heater at Briscoes you are contributing to the strengthening of the economy – and the military – of the only country that can arguably be classified as a potential enemy of New Zealand’s.

Furthermore, you are also contributing to one of the worst slave labour systems on the planet. An important reason for China’s economic success is that millions of its people in detention (prison and labour camps) are forced to work like slaves in factories producing consumer goods for the West.

Take Dongguan prison for example in the booming factory area of Guangdong province. The reason why this area contains so many prisons is its proximity to the great export hubs of Shenzen and Guangzhou on the lower reaches of the Pearl River delta, reputedly the world’s largest export manufacturing centre. All the prisoners are required to work like unpaid slaves all day in the factories in which, in many cases, the senior prison officers have a financial interest.

The 15 factories in which the 5,400 inmates of Dongguan prison are forced to work are built around the prison complex – so interwoven is the prison system with the manufacturing sector. It certainly beats having to pay wages which, of course, is why so many China made products are so cheap. The prisoners have to march to work each morning, kicking their legs high and singing “We are happy to go to work to-day” – a song that dates back to the Mao era and which countless millions of prisoners have been forced to chant over the years. “A missed step or a false note will see the guards bring out their tasers and pepper spray,” wrote Angus Grigg and Lisa Murray in the Australian Financial Review.

If one does not produce the required daily quota with one’s over-worked hands, ritual beatings, torture and solitary confinement are meted out by the sadistic guards. “The [prison] boss is not just the director of a prison but the manager of a business”, explained the former “justice” minister, Zhang Fusen. Both guards and managers have their salaries tied directly to the output of the prisoners, hence the brutality towards anyone who might not reach the daily quota.

This prison system, with more than two million victims, is worse than slavery, and those politicians who promote trade with China and those businessmen who import all these things to New Zealand are contributing to one of the greatest crimes in history.

Westerners who buy Chinese goods are also collaborators in the crime of propping up the most murderous and oppressive regime on the planet. The bigwigs at Briscoes, the Warehouse, Walmart and other Chinese dependent retailers and importers would declare that their goods are not made by prison labour but, as the Sunday Star-Times reported on 30th June, 2013, “Such is the opacity and diversity of global supply chains to-day that establishing a clear link can be difficult”. Most of the companies importing Chinese goods don’t know where or how their products are made and they make no effort to find out for fear of learning the truth. So, those who buy Chinese made goods are not only aiding the rearmament of New Zealand’s only potential enemy but are also supporting a system of brutal slave labour.

Even when it is not prison labour the conditions of workers inside China’s factories are deplorable. In those factories that make iPads for Apple the workers toil for 15 hours a day, week in and week out, with no holidays apart from about five days over Chinese New Year. After each day’s long shift is completed they are taken to dormitories near their workplace to sleep. These dormitories, segregated for men and women, have no privacy. Children as young as twelve are employed on the work chains. The workers on the chain have to insert a particular electronic component, having only one to two seconds to do so. The repetitive nature of the work causes permanent injuries. Some have to use a dangerous chemical to clean the screen of each product. Wages are about $2 an hour, preventing them from affording accommodation outside the dormitories.

In May, 2010, seven workers committed suicide and so they put “anti-suicide” netting around the dormitory windows. But Apple made a profit of US$6 billion in the first quarter of 2011 and that was all that mattered.

A further reason not to support China by buying its goods or services is the murderous and oppressive nature of its gangster regime. Since 1949 the CCP have murdered more people than any other regime in history. It suppresses all the basic freedoms that Westerners take for granted such as freedom of speech, of association and of religion. Christian bishops and ministers are imprisoned, churches demolished and Christmas and Easter worshippers beaten up. The regime, based on the power of the gun, uses torture as a routine part of police investigation and oversees a system of child labour and environmental destruction without precedent in history.

It has brutally killed and suppressed the Tibetans and the Uighurs and is now threatening the peaceful democracy of Taiwan with invasion. One would have to be a morally debauched person even to contemplate buying anything that is made in that toxic country. Since no National or Labour government would ever have the courage, that patriotism or the human decency even to suggest that there is something wrong with making ourselves economically dependent on China it is up to each and every New Zealander – all five million of us – to do the deed ourselves by refusing to buy anything that is China made or has a China made component in it.

For further information on China’s increasing economic dominance of New Zealand, see In the Jaws of the Dragon: How China is Taking over New Zealand and Australia” by Ron Asher. Available from Tross Publishing.

21Jun2024

Welcome to China!

June 21, 2024

admin

China, dictatorship, Ki Qiang, surveilance China

During his unwelcome visit to New Zealand in June, 2024, Chinese Premier Ki Qiang said that China would grant visa-free entry to any New Zealand passport holders who might feel like visiting China to get a taste of its dictatorship and a smell of its unhygienic markets, malls and public toilets. This was announced at a joint conference with New Zealand Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, who looked on smilingly as he no doubt relished the opportunity of getting to know this Chinese brute who has so much to offer National Party Prime Ministers in the way of “China business” after they leave politics – e.g. the nauseating, if not utterly treacherous, way that Jenny Shipley and John Key have enriched themselves post-retirement from a China that they went out of their way to oblige while in office. The fact that China, under the iron-fisted rule of the C.C.P., is a gangster state with no rule of law is something that they conveniently put out of their minds so as not to impair their financial prospects after their retirement from politics. Also, the fact China in its current form is New Zealand’s only potential enemy is something that they were either too dumb to realise or too traitorous to acknowledge.

Luxon knows – as Shipley and Key knew – that China is probably the most untrustworthy nation on earth. It is the only country that, when New Zealand government ministers visit, they take “clone phones” with no stored e-mails or text messages since they don’t trust China not to interfere with their devices.

So, what will be the prospects for any New Zealander who is naive enough to take up this visa-free offer to visit China – the country that finances so much of the National Party through its agents and hangers-on?

Your ‘welcome’ begins at Immigration where the normally surly, arrogant, officials are incredibly friendly. They chat away, and one chats back. And your voice is recorded.

Past Immigration is the Customs Hall where 86 cameras record every inch of the body – eyes, skull (more on that later), hands, height, girth, gait, etc.

Finally, you are outside and can start enjoying China’s delights. Just one problem. China is cashless. All transactions are on Alipay or WeChatpay. An issue that can be overcome by downloading the various apps. Which instantly connect you to Beijing security. For emergency, of course.

The apps, once downloaded, are in the local lingo, ie. Chinese. Just ask a helpful local in the street. Recorded on CCTV and instantly transmitted to city security. All interactions with foreigners are recorded. There is no escape.

To be honest, there are a few folk who might, just might, accept Chinese paper money. Just don’t expect change.

Foreign credit cards? Seldom accepted. For example, out of 50,000 taxis in Shanghai, only 50 have been permitted to accept foreign cards.

You’ve got your app. Time to explore. Forget searching. Google is banned. Follow the street signs, you think. All in Chinese. There used to be an English translation. No more. “Security”, you are told.

Back to one’s 5 star hotel. There is a reason Chinese government officials are banned from meeting in 5 star hotels. All rooms, public areas, including toilets, are under audio and visual surveillance.

Humans are vain animals. That app that you downloaded conveniently allows the user to minutely inspect one’s scalp. For baldness, we are told. A big help. Especially for security who can then find the exact measurements of the skull to feed into their facial recognition software.

Spread the word. China’s welcome is real. And it all begins at any Chinese entry point.

For more on the truths about China and its danger to New Zealand, to our freedoms, our democracy and our way of life, see Tross Publishing’s book, “In the Jaws of the Dragon; How China is taking over New Zealand and Australia” Price: $35 (including postage within New Zealand). 432 pages.