Liberal Senator @SenPaterson says China’s threat to impose “economic sanctions” on Australia if it conducts an independent inquiry into the source of the coronavirus shows the Chinese Communist Party is “extremely anxious” to prevent it, Sky News tweeted.
The late dissident and Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo anticipated a terrible calamity for both China and the world if the regime continued on its authoritarian trajectory, a new book reminds us.
A zoo in China placed a big hairy Tibetan mastiff in a cage and tried to pass if off as an African lion. But a boy and his mother heard the animal bark, not roar. As news spread, the zoo’s visitors grew angry. “The zoo is absolutely trying to cheat us. They are trying to disguise dogs as lions!” declared the mother, writes Joanne Leedom-Ackerman.
In 2009 the Chinese government put Liu Xiaobo, celebrated poet, essayist, critic, activist, and thinker into a cage, labeled him “enemy of the state,” charged him with “inciting subversion of state power,” and sentenced him to eleven years’ imprisonment. Liu Xiaobo was not an enemy, but he was a “lion” the state feared, adds Leedom-Ackerman, co-editor of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate, published April 1 by Potomac Books.
