Freelance journalist, author, lecturer and presenter working mainly for hr and ZDF. / Freier Journalist, Autor, Dozent und Moderator. Hauptsächlich beim hr, ZDF
A glimpse of Jimmy Lai years before his unjust imprisonment, out on the water, at home, living the life he worked so hard to build.
Today, at 78, he sits in solitary confinement, serving a 20-year sentence for defending the freedoms that made moments like these possible.
Jimmy Lai deserves to be free again. #FreeJimmyLai
@CooperG06041989@DWalpiri Absolutely. Critical voices need to be heard and amplified. Taiwanese voices need to be heard and amplified. Otherwise, the PRC succeeds in spreading their lies and narrative unopposed.
Chinese dissident reminds Cheng Liwen, chair of KMT
"China is a dictatorship"
"Xi Jinping is a dictator"
"Xi jinping wants to take Taiwan because Taiwan is a democracy. Dictatorships do not allow democracies to exist."
Truer words have never been spoken.
Chinese authorities have confirmed the detention of U.S. citizen U Min Zin, a prominent scholar of Myanmar politics, on allegations of endangering national security.
He was arrested on June 3 at Kunming Airport in Yunnan Province. U Min Zin is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the head of a Myanmar-focused think tank based in Thailand.
For years, he has written extensively about the Chinese government’s role and influence in Myanmar’s politics, as well as Beijing’s close relationship with Myanmar’s military regime.
Notably, his detention came shortly after the Trump–Xi meeting. It is a stark reminder that the CCP no longer hesitates to detain American citizens when it believes its interests are at stake. It means that concerns about diplomatic repercussions and bilateral relations no longer weigh heavily in Beijing’s decision-making when it comes to national security matters.
Today, medical doctor Gulshan Abbas will spend yet another birthday in a Chinese prison. In 2019, Dr. Abbas was sentenced in a secret trial to 20 years in prison on spurious charges, after her sister spoke out against CCP oppression of the Uyghurs. The CCP continues to deny her humanitarian parole and sufficient medical care. WATCH to learn more about her tragic story.
In his prison cell, Jimmy Lai sketches the Crucifixion in colored pencil. Nearly six years in solitary confinement, his faith has not broken.
George Weigel on the strength of Jimmy Lai and the weakness of the regime that jailed him.
Read here: https://t.co/91TWLiHgei
#FreeJimmyLai
The man in these photos is a father, an entrepreneur, and a defender of a free press. His name is #JimmyLai.
For nearly six years, he has been held in solitary confinement for defending democracy. At 78 years old with deteriorating health, he doesn't have much time left.
He deserves to come home.
#FreeJimmyLai
Shocking old footage from Tibet
CCP forces brut@lly beating& dragging monks out of their monasteries for practicing their Buddhist faith. This is the systematic erasure of Tibetan religion & culture that continues today. Why is the world silent on this? @TibetPeople@BAFoTTibet
Today I Spoke at Dam Square for #Tiananmen37. Honored the brave Uyghur students of 1989 & leader #ÖrkeshDölet. From Beijing’s tanks to China’s transnational repression in NL, our resistance is unbroken. Freedom for #EastTurkestan & all oppressed nations!
#June4#Uyghurgenocide _
37 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese Communist Party still fears the memory of that night, because it reveals who they truly are.
On June 4 at the Tiananmen Memorial in Washington, DC, I spoke about the slaughter that should have changed everything, the decades of quiet accommodation that followed, and why standing with those who still resist the regime’s demand for total (actual or performative) submission is more urgent than ever.
I also highlighted a remarkable new series of never-before-seen photographs from June 4, 1989, published today on the front page of The Epoch Times. Please take a moment to view them (the link is in the thread below!)
Here are my full remarks 37 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, at the Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) Memorial, Washington, DC, June 4, 2026:
Good evening, everybody.
My name is Jan Jekielek. I'm the senior editor at the @EpochTimes and author of a book titled Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary. And this nature is something that we haven't gotten right, and we should have when Tiananmen Square happened, when the massacre happened.
So, tonight we remember the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the students, the workers, and the ordinary citizens murdered on June 4, 1989 for daring to imagine a freer China.
On the front page of The Epoch Times today we are publishing a whole series of never-before-seen photos that were contributed to us recently. They were taken by a state media photographer 37 years ago. These are very powerful images. I encourage you to check it out. The person who put these together, Eva Fu (@EvaSailEast), she's actually here doing an article on this event, so I hope you get a chance to speak with her later today.
It's a striking historical fact that the same day, June 4, 1989, Poland held its first semi-free parliamentary election since the communist era. Solidarity won a landslide victory, and hope began to spread across Eastern Europe, and the Berlin Wall fell. In Poland, people chose freedom, but in China, the regime chose slaughter.
The massacre itself was monstrous, but hope died twice that year, first in the blood of the streets of Beijing, and again when the United States responded not with sustained accountability but with quiet accommodation.
Just weeks after the killings, the administration at the time secretly dispatched the National Security Advisor and the Deputy Secretary of State to Beijing. Their mission was to signal to the Chinese leadership that America would ride out the storm of public outrage and work to restore the strategic relationship. Most Americans never knew about this back-channel.
For decades, we pursued a policy of engagement, telling ourselves the comforting story that trade and money would change China, that economic integration would liberalize the regime and make it a responsible stakeholder. The opposite happened: The Chinese Communist Party changed us.
It turned us, it turned our openness into vulnerability. It captured influence in our institutions. It made us economically dependent on a system built on lies, on repression, and on brutality.
And then, in the year 2000 the regime launched something even darker, a large-scale industrialized forced organ harvesting industry built on the bodies of Falun Gong practitioners, which they had started persecuting the year before.
The crime rested on two pillars, very vicious dehumanizing propaganda, and also a vast system of mass arbitrary detention that eventually ended up serving as the source of the organs.
For 14 or 15 years, the world largely turned away, and emboldened by this, the regime expanded the same machinery of dehumanization and mass incarceration to the Uyghur people, and perhaps even to others.
This is why the memory of Tiananmen remains so urgent. The Chinese Communist Party has never abandoned its core demand, total submission, or at least the appearance of it. Anyone who refuses, whether through faith, through conscience, or simple human dignity, becomes a target.
That is why we must stand with those who still resist:
• Falun Gong practitioners who continue to practice and speak the truth,
• and the millions who have joined the Quit the CCP or the @TuidangMovement to renounce their ties to the communist party, the youth league and the young pioneers,
• the white paper protesters of 2022 including brave young people like Zhang Junjie who stood alone in Beijing holding a blank sheet of paper a silent indictment of censorship and tyranny and paid a terrible price,
• Christians worshiping in underground churches,
• Tibetans demanding their culture and faith,
• and of course Uyghurs and Kazakhs enduring camps and surveillance,
• and every individual across China who chooses conscience over performative or actual loyalty.
Their courage is living proof that the spirit the regime tried to crush in 1989 is not dead today.
We are finally beginning to move in the right direction, I think, recognizing the true nature of the threat and starting to correct the mistakes of all-out engagement, but we must go further by remembering Tiananmen and standing firmly with all those who resist. We honor the dead and keep the flame of hope alive.
Thank you.
@FalunInfoCtr@TuidangMovement@hrichina@ZhouFengSuo@chinaaid@TibetPeople@UyghurCongress@UyghurProject
Der Bundestag hat im März eine China-Kommission eingesetzt. Beijing hat gerade klargemacht, dass Mitglieder, die Taiwan besuchen, 'den Preis zahlen' werden. Warum ist das keine Schlagzeile wert? 🧐
"Will China ban lawmakers from Germany and other countries that have visited Taiwan from entering China?
Mao Ning: Taiwan is part of China, and the one-China principle is a prevailing international consensus and a basic norm in international relations. Anyone who crosses the red line on the Taiwan question must pay the price."
https://t.co/3OYkpYJdhN
As was reported last month, the CCP attempted to spy on the Select Committee via recruiting on LinkedIn. Now, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are warning that China is attempting to use job platforms to recruit people with access to sensitive information. The Select Committee encourages all Americans to be vigilant regarding suspicious outreach they receive. https://t.co/D6UGbV8pBw
If you criticize the Chinese government from overseas, your parents can lose their pensions, your siblings can lose their jobs, and your children can be barred from universities. This is not a side effect of CCP policy. It is the policy.
Human rights organizations Safeguard Defenders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders have documented what they describe as a systematic revival of lianzu, China's ancient collective punishment system, adapted for the Xi Jinping era. When an overseas dissident speaks out, the consequences flow to everyone who shares their blood inside China.
The documented forms are specific. Parents and siblings lose jobs in state enterprises or government positions. Family businesses face sudden, relentless tax audits with no resolution. Pensions and social benefits are frozen without formal charges. Children, nieces, and nephews receive political black marks on their records that block university admission, passport applications, and the political vetting required for any stable career in China.
The cases are real and named. Dong Jianbiao, father of activist Dong Yaoqiong, who threw ink on Xi Jinping's portrait in a 2018 video, was detained after his daughter's act and died in prison under circumstances that remain unexplained. Activist He Fangmei's young children, including a newborn, were placed in psychiatric facilities or disappeared from contact after she continued speaking out. Wang Quanzhang, a lawyer arrested in the 2015 crackdown on human rights attorneys, had his child face school difficulties while he was held incommunicado for years.
In December 2023, China's own Legislative Affairs Commission quietly acknowledged that some local governments had been applying collective punishment in anti-fraud campaigns, restricting family benefits and loans of suspects' relatives, and called it unconstitutional. The rebuke was narrow. It covered those specific campaigns. It did not address the same practices applied to political dissidents, which continued without interruption.
The United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all raised concerns. China denies systematic collective punishment and describes these actions as lawful enforcement. The families living under these measures are not in a position to publicly disagree.
The CCP reaches through borders, through blood, and across generations to ensure that the cost of speaking is paid by everyone who loves you.
#China #CCP #HumanRights #TransnationalRepression #Lianzu #Dissidents #Geopolitics #CollectivePunishment #XiJinping #FreedomOfSpeech
Over 180,000 posts are trending on X, dedicated to the 37th anniversary of the China's Tiananmen Square Massacre. I’m honoured to be the relevant person at the top. Raising awareness of the threats posed by the Communist regime is the least I can do to honour the heroes in 1989.
The Chinese government works tirelessly to erase the memory of June 4, 1989 from the internet. The CCP's censorship of Tiananmen is not just about the past—it's about controlling the present. China remains the world's worst environment for internet freedom, with pervasive censorship, surveillance, and punishment for peaceful online expression. Explore Freedom House's latest findings from our #FreedomOnTheNet report: https://t.co/eJIefVoHmo