CHINA – TYRANNY and BRUTALITY
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