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In this mailing:
* Judith Bergman: China's Belt and Road Being Built with Forced Labor
* Chris Farrell: George Soros Gets a COVID Loan


** China's Belt and Road Being Built with Forced Labor ([link removed])
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by Judith Bergman • June 2, 2021 at 5:00 am
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https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gatestoneinstitute.org%2F17403%2Fchina-belt-road-forced-labor&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=China%27s+Belt+and+Road+Being+Built+with+Forced+Labor [link removed]
* Almost all the workers had been deceptively recruited with promises of certain wages and legal work visas. Instead, their passports were confiscated right after they disembarked the plane, leaving them unable to leave unless they paid a heavy fine to the Chinese employer.... They were locked up in poor living and working conditions on the work premises, which were guarded by security guards.... They suffered excessive work hours of up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holiday allowance... Many workers were injured during work with no access to medical treatment.... After a worker from a Chinese mining company in Indonesia was diagnosed positive for Covid-19 in November 2020, he was put in isolation in an empty dormitory room for more than 20 days without any medical treatment. Later other workers found his dead body.
* The Chinese embassy also seems to have actively worked to suppress... complaints.... "Several workers said they tried to call the Chinese Embassy to report that their passports were detained by their employing company. The embassy's reply was that it had no right to intervene and the workers were told to file a report at the local police station. However, these workers, cannot even get out of the gate of the work site, and they also face language barriers. It is quite unrealistic for them to call the local police. — "Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China's Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic", China Labor Watch, April 30, 2021.
* Forced labor exists in two distinct forms in China. One form is modern slavery, not directly sanctioned by the state, as exemplified by the BRI workers mentioned above. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, "on any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China.... This estimate does not include figures on organ trafficking."
* The other form of forced labor is systematic and legal under China's penal system. Communist China has used forced labor and labor camps, citing "reeducation", since the 1950s. In 2013, the CCP claimed that it was abolishing the practice, only to reinstate it again some years later to "reeducate" Uyghurs. A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, published in September 2020, found that the Chinese government had built nearly 400 detention camps in Xinjiang.
* "Tens of thousands of former detainees are likely to have been transferred into forced labour programmes.... They contaminate the supply chains of hundreds of multinational companies with forced labour, and they implicate not only Chinese authorities, but much of the rest of the world in a concerted campaign of ethnic replacement that credible reports suggest may well amount to genocide". — Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The Guardian, September 24, 2020.
* [A] much less known fact is that China also subjects Tibetans to forced labor on a large and organized scale. In the first seven months of 2020, China drove more than half a million Tibetans into forced labor according to a 2020 report, "Xinjiang's System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet," by the Jamestown Foundation.

"The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor," according to Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch, an organization that recently published a report detailing the conditions of some overseas Chinese workers who are building China's Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the world. Pictured: Chinese workers building the first rail line linking China to Laos, a key part of Beijing's Belt and Road initiative across the Mekong, on February 8, 2020 in Luang Prabang, Laos. (Photo by Aidan Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

"The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor," according to Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch. "Chinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers."

A new report, "Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China's Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic" by China Labor Watch, published on April 30, details the conditions of some of those overseas Chinese workers, who are building China's Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the world. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forms a crucial part of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) foreign policy and is a key tool in China's ambition to become a global superpower.

China Labor Watch spoke to approximately 100 Chinese BRI workers in Indonesia, Algeria, Singapore, Jordan, Pakistan and Serbia. Many shared similar stories. According to the report:

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** George Soros Gets a COVID Loan ([link removed])
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by Chris Farrell • June 2, 2021 at 4:00 am
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George+Soros+Gets+a+COVID+Loan [link removed]
* We need to ask ourselves how "the system" -- our government -- facilitates this sort of racket without checks or oversight. Harvard University can be publicly shamed into returning COVID relief money, but a Soros group gets a pass? Why the disparity of treatment and accountability?
* Those Americans would be repulsed at the idea [George Soros's East-West Management Institute] getting a PPP "loan," assuming they even knew about it -- 99.9% probably had no idea.
* Think about it: a Soros-backed operation that manages a big chunk of the State Department's international development operations, pretending it is like any other American "small business," was seeking paycheck protection subsidies because of COVID. It is an insult. It is grotesque.
* As reported by the Wall Street Journal on October 17, 2017, George Soros transferred $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations. EWMI is part of the greater Soros operation. Why are American taxpayers subsidizing any part of his operations?

(Image source: iStock)

In March, the Small Business Administration gave a $234,548 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) "loan" to George Soros's East-West Management Institute (EWMI).

The official description of the transaction is "to aid small businesses in maintaining workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic", but federal grants and contracts to EWMI (its primary source of revenue) rose from $9,185,194 in FY 2019 to $14,859,293 in 2020. EWMI previously received a $226,179 PPP loan in May of 2020. As a supposedly small business struggling through the pandemic, EWMI enjoys office space at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City and 1101 Connecticut Ave NW in Washington, DC.

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