News of the Day (February 9)

On the North Korea Conundrum: Yours truly has tried for three years to squeeze the answer to this question into one column: what should be done about Stalinist North Korea? Unfortunately, it took a series of four columns. Here’s the first (Epoch Times).

Hong Kong Legislative Candidate details persecution in Communist China: Alex Ho - nominated by Hong Kong’s Democratic Party for last year’s Legislative Council elections before the Communists sent him to jail on the false charge of soliciting prostitution (The Velvet Crackdown) - is back home. He adamantly denied the charge, and says the Communists forced him to sign a false confession (Epoch Times).

Exile author fears for his life: Chen Yuansen, an exile in Canada, spoke to the Epoch Times about what has happened to him since he wrote The Campaign to Incite Hatred in Fo-Huai Village. The book “depicts the massacre of two million landlords and analyzes the main reasons why the CCP launched the land reform, which were to destroy the countryside’s morals, to eliminate rural gentry to set up the communist regime, to plunder people’s properties to prepare for the Korean War and to recruit sufficient cannon fodder.” One can only imagine how the cadres reacted to this.

Horoscopes banned: Communist China has now added horoscopes to its ever expanding list of what is unacceptable to speak or print. Report: BBC

Survivors of Tiananmen Square massacre pay respects to Zhao Ziyang: This past weekend, six survivors of Tiananmen Square, “who had been under house arrest” (Epoch Times) before and during the funeral of Zhao Ziyang visited his family to pay their belated respects to the man who opposed the massacre.

Chinese Christian details torture by Communists: Liu Xianzhi, a member of the underground South China Church, spoke of how she was tortured into “into falsely testifying that the pastor of the South China Church, Gong Shengliang, ‘raped’ her” (World Net Daily). Over 8,000 South China Church followers are now in jail. Over 10 million Catholics, and 40-70 million Protestants, refuse to put the Chinese Communist Party between themselves and their God, and as such risk fates similar to Liu and Gong.

Rumsfeld to go to Communist China; Bolton rips cadres: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “agreed to visit China this year and the Pentagon is discussing the creation of a telephone hot line to the Chinese military” (Bill Gertz, Washington Times). Meanwhile, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, whose days at the Bush Administration may, sadly, be numbered (third item), blasted the Communists for having “ignored U.S. appeals to help halt Chinese companies from transferring arms to nations such as Iran, including proliferation activities by the China North Industries Corp.” For more on North Industries, a.k.a. Norinco, see here and here.

Japan 2, Stalinist North Korea 1: The World Cup qualifier had, understandably, quite a bit of baggage (both links from BBC).