News of the Day (February 24)

Practitioners rail against Communist cell phone hate campaign: Falun Gong practitioners met at the New York Press club to note and condemn the Communist crackdown against their faith, which has expanded to include “the wave of hundreds of calls” (Epoch Times) aimed at cell phones of practitioners abroad (seventh item).

Zhao Ziyang’s children defend him: Their father refused to support the Tiananmen Square massacre, and for that he was deposed as Communist General Secretary and put under house arrest for fifteen and a half years, until the day he died. His children stand by his decision in a letter published by China E-weekly and reprinted by the Epoch Times.

Real estate in Communist China very profitable, because it’s corrupt: The Epoch Times noted a Gong Ming Magazine survey which listed real estate as the most profitable industry in Communist China. The paper noted these reasons: “the Chinese government has a land monopoly that it manipulates to benefit the wealthy few within the real estate industry at a heavy cost to the rest of the nation’s people”; “real estate industry took a huge amount of land from farmers with little to no compensation”; and “tax evasion.”

Bill Clinton to meet Chen Shui-bian: Former President Bill Clinton, arguably the friendliest president to Communist China, will meet with Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian next week. Communist China is already registering its disapproval (Newsmax).

Chen meets with James Soong: Chen’s meeting with one of the leading opposition figures led to “a joint declaration saying Taiwan would not rule out any kind of relationship with Beijing if China's leadership expressed goodwill” (BBC). That was vague enough to please Soong, who opposes formal Taiwan independence and is leader of the “pan-blue” People First Party. If Chen can manage to split Soong from his Nationalist Party allies, it could give him a majority in the elected Taiwanese legislature.

What is the Chinese Communist Party? That is the question Li Shun – whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution – asks in the Epoch Times. The answer Li came to was: “inhumane and immoral.”