Xi Jinping
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FILE PHOTO: China’s President Xi Jinping attends a meeting with Portugal’s Parliamentary President Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues at the Parliament in Lisbon, Portugal, December 5, 2018. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes
March 21, 2019
ROME (Reuters) – Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Rome on Thursday at the start of a three-day visit during which he will sign an accord drawing Italy into his giant “Belt and Road” infrastructure plan despite U.S. opposition.
Italy, seeking a welter of new export deals to boost its stalled economy, will become the first Group of Seven major industrialized nation to join the multi-billion-dollar project which is designed to improve Beijing’s global trade reach.
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Alison Williams)
Source: OANN
People are reflected in a puddle as they pass by a mural near the EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Toby Melville
March 21, 2019
By Robin Emmott and Philip Blenkinsop
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union will discuss a more defensive strategy on China on Thursday, potentially signaling an end to the unfettered access that Chinese business has enjoyed in Europe but which Beijing has failed to reciprocate.
Caught between a new U.S.-Chinese rivalry for economic and military power, EU leaders will try to find a middle path during a summit dinner in Brussels, the first time they have discussed at the highest level how to deal with Beijing.
“We are fully open,” European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen said of the EU’s economy. “China is not, and it raises lots of questions,” Katainen told Reuters, arguing that the world’s second-largest economy could no longer claim special status as a developing country.
Meeting as Chinese President Xi Jinping starts a tour of France and Italy, EU leaders – who have often been divided over China – want to present a united front ahead of an EU-China summit on April 9.
According to a draft April summit statement seen by Reuters, the EU is seeking to set deadlines for China to make good on trade and investment pledges that have been repeatedly pushed back, although Beijing must still agree to the final text.
That was a message delivered to State Councillor Wang Yi by EU foreign ministers on Monday. It marked a shift toward what EU diplomats say is a more “assertive and competitive mindset”.
“In the past, it has been extremely difficult for the EU to formulate a clear strategy on China, and past policy documents have not been strategically coherent,” said Duncan Freeman at the EU-China Research Centre at the College of Europe. “There is now a clear effort to do that.”
In a document to prepare the EU summit, the European Commission called China a “systemic rival”.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to warn against Huawei telecommunications equipment in next-generation wireless networks has accelerated EU discussions about its position.
The deepest tensions lie around China’s slowness to open up its economy, a surge of Chinese takeovers in critical sectors and an impression that Beijing has not stood up for free trade.
GERMANY IS KEY
With over a billion euros a day in bilateral trade, the EU is China’s top trading partner, while China is second only to the United States as a market for European goods and services.
Chinese trade restrictions are more severe than EU barriers in almost every economic sector, according to research firm Rhodium Group and the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Unlike the United States, which has a naval fleet based in Japan to wield influence over the region, the EU lacks any military power to confront China, so its approach is technical.
But any new EU policies could prove complicated to implement, as EU capitals continue to court Chinese investment. Italy plans to join China’s multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure project, while free-traders Ireland, Sweden and the Netherlands are wary of any restrictions on commerce.
Germany’s views will be important as Berlin has at times pressed for a tougher response to unfair competition from Chinese rivals but also championed a closer relationship with Beijing.
“Their position needs to stabilize. At the moment it changes on almost every day of the week,” the senior envoy said.
(Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Source: OANN
Red flags flutter outside the Great Hall of the People during the closing session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Beijing, China March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer
March 20, 2019
By Ben Blanchard and Robin Emmott
BEIJING/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – China will invite Beijing-based European diplomats to visit its far western region of Xinjiang, the foreign ministry told Reuters, furthering its outreach to fend off criticism about a de-radicalization program.
The visit would be the first by a large group of Western diplomats to the region as China faces growing opprobrium from Western capitals and rights groups for setting up facilities that U.N. experts describe as detention centers holding more than one million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims.
Several diplomatic sources said the invitation to visit by the end of March had been issued informally, specifically to ambassadors, with one source describing it as a “sounding out” of interest, and the government had not explicitly said who they would meet or where they would go.
It is also not clear if the Europeans would accept the invitation, or how many of their diplomats or ambassadors would go.
Last year, more than a dozen ambassadors from Western countries, including France, Britain, Germany and the EU’s envoy in Beijing, wrote to the government to seek a meeting with Xinjiang’s top official, Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo, to discuss their concerns about the rights situation.
Diplomats say the government never responded to that letter, aside from publicly denouncing it as a violation of diplomatic norms.
It was not clear if a meeting with Chen would be on the agenda.
“In order to increase the European side’s understanding of Xinjiang’s achievements at economic and social development, and promote bilateral exchanges and cooperation, China plans in the near term to invite European envoys based in China to visit Xinjiang,” the foreign ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
The date and other details were still being worked it, the ministry added.
“Hearing something for a hundred times is not as good as seeing it for yourself,” the ministry’s statement said.
The European Union’s mission in Beijing declined to comment.
Chinese President Xi Jinping travels to Europe on Thursday for a state visit to Italy, Monaco and France.
‘HAPPY LIVES’
Beijing has been ramping up its efforts in defense of its measures in Xinjiang, which it says are aimed at stemming the threat of Islamist militancy. It calls the camps vocational training centers.
China “believes that through this trip, European envoys based in China will be able to personally experience the real situation of Xinjiang’s calm, order and peace and the happy lives of all its people”, the ministry said.
Last week, the U.S. State Department said China’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang marked the worst human rights abuses “since the 1930s”.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including Chen.
Some diplomats briefed on the situation said there was concern the European diplomats could be used for propaganda purposes, pointing to pictures taken by and stories in state media about recent visits by other foreign envoys to Xinjiang.
“There’s no point in going if we’re just going to be portrayed as supporting the camps,” said one diplomat.
EU foreign ministers raised the issue of the Uighurs with the government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, on Monday at a lunch in Brussels, sources told Reuters.
While Wang was keen to focus on a list of issues of cooperation and agreement, EU ministers underlined the issue of human rights and the Uighurs, asking for explanations about why the people were being held and on reports of crackdowns on Muslims, sources said.
One EU diplomat said Wang’s reply was “not satisfactory”.
Wang said China was a big country with a lot of people so it could not be avoided that some individuals complain about treatment, and China was a developing country and measures were not against Uighurs but against extremists, the diplomat said.
“He was puzzled about why we are worried about it,” the diplomat said.
The foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wang’s Xinjiang discussions in Brussels.
Premier Li Keqiang will visit Brussels next month for a China-EU summit.
There have been two visits by groups including European diplomats to Xinjiang this year. One was a small group of EU diplomats, and the other by a group of diplomats from several countries, including EU members Hungary and Greece.
There have also been at least two other trips to Xinjiang for foreign diplomats.
A diplomat who has been on a government-organized trip to Xinjiang, said during the entire program reporters from state media accompanied them, taking pictures and trying to interview the envoys.
“It was impossible to avoid them,” the diplomat said.
There is also concern that the European envoys would be taken to the same camps and sites that previous foreign visitors have been taken to on tightly controlled and carefully choreographed trips, including one Reuters went on in January, the sources said.
“There’s no point in going just to see the same places,” said another diplomat familiar with the invitation.
All the diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity.
China’s diplomatic efforts have included a briefing in Beijing late last month, where two former camp inmates spoke in front of envoys to describe how they had been rescued from radical Islam, people who attended the briefing told Reuters.
China has strongly defended the camps.
Xinjiang governor Shohrat Zakir told reporters in Beijing last week the facilities were “boarding schools” and not concentration camps.
Beijing says it must tackle radical Islam in Xinjiang, where hundreds have been killed in violence in recent years blamed by the government on militants and separatists.
Reuters last year reported on conditions inside the camps and took pictures of guard towers and barbed wire surrounding some. (https://tinyurl.com/y9zzouss)
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard, Robin Emmott; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Source: OANN
Chinese President Xi Jinping claps at the closing session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China March 15, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
March 20, 2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – Misunderstandings over China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are “hard to avoid”, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Wednesday ahead of a trip to Europe by President Xi Jinping during which Italy is set to join the multi-billion dollar trade scheme.
Italy has angered its EU partners by planning to sign infrastructure deals with China, pushing itself as a big backer of the initiative at the heart of Beijing’s foreign policy strategy that is Xi’s signature diplomatic and trade push.
“I think anything new will have a development process,” Vice Foreign Minister Wang Chao told a news briefing when asked about recent controversy in Italy over the accord to be signed this month.
“It is hard to avoid misunderstandings occurring during the process of advancing the construction of the Belt and Road. Of course, the facts are the best proof,” Wang said.
More than 150 countries, regions and international groups have already signed BRI cooperation pacts bringing some benefits to all, he added.
Italy, which is expected to send a high-level delegation to the second Belt and Road summit in Beijing in late April, will be the first stop on Xi’s tour from March 21 to 26 that will also take in France and the tiny principality of Monaco.
With ports that offer easy gateways into Europe’s richest markets, Italy is a promising and prestigious prize for China.
Asked about China’s possible investment in a port in Italy, Wang said investment decisions by its companies would be based on market conditions.
Xi will hold talks with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in Rome, and visit the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Wang said.
The two sides will sign commercial pacts on infrastructure, machinery and finance, he added.
Italy’s drive to be the first Group of Seven industrialized nation to join the ambitious venture has upset Washington and alarmed Brussels, raising fears of a sellout of sensitive technology and the handover of critical infrastructure.
On Tuesday, Conte said the commercial and economic deals he will seal with China have no implications for Italy’s geo-political position, in a bid to reassure the European Union and the United States.
In France, Xi and French President Emmanuel Macron will witness the signing of cooperation agreements on energy, transportation, agriculture, finance, culture and science and technology, Wang said.
(Reporting by Tom Daly and Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Liangping Gao; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: A man cycles past chimneys of facotries at the Keihin Industrial Zone in Kawasaki, Japan September 12, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
March 19, 2019
By Tetsushi Kajimoto and Izumi Nakagawa
TOKYO (Reuters) – Confidence among Japanese manufacturers hit its weakest in two-and-a-half years in March, a Reuters poll showed, as global trade friction fueled concerns that a postwar record growth cycle driven by Abenomics may be over.
The monthly poll, which tracks the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) closely watched tankan quarterly survey, found confidence fell for a fifth straight month while sentiment in the service sector held steady, suggesting domestic demand is unlikely to offset external risks such as the trade war and China’s slowdown.
Both manufacturers’ and service-sector morale is expected to rise just slightly over the coming three months, underscoring a bumpy road ahead for the world’s third largest economy, according to the Reuters Tankan.
The central bank will closely read the results of its official tankan due out April 1 for clues on strength of sentiment and capital expenditure at its policy meeting next month when it issues fresh economic and price projections.
The BOJ stood pat at its policy review last week, citing an economy posting gradual growth, but cut its views of exports and output due to increasing headwinds from overseas.
Slowing growth in Europe and China, the Sino-U.S. trade war and uncertainty surrounding Britain’s exit from the European Union have strained businesses around the world.
While U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear to be closer in striking a truce in the U.S.-China trade war, Japan’s export sector remains vulnerable to the fallout from trade friction between the world’s two largest economies.
In the Reuters poll of 479 large- and mid-sized companies, completed by 250 firms on the condition of anonymity over the March 4-15 period, managers also complained about costs of raw materials squeezing profits.
Sluggish consumer spending makes it difficult to pass on such costs to thrifty customers, they wrote in the survey.
“Our clients are turning cautions on capital expenditure due to the U.S.-China trade war, spreading protectionism and political jitters in emerging countries,” a manager of a machinery maker wrote in the survey.
The Reuters Tankan sentiment index for manufacturers fell three points to 10 in March, with exporters of electronics, precision equipment, steel and nonferrous metals especially gloomy.
The manufacturers’ index was down 13 points from three months ago, indicating the possibility of a similarly sharp decline in the BOJ tankan. The Reuters Tankan index is expected to inch up to 11 in June.
The service-sector index held steady at 22 in March from a month earlier but was down from 31 seen three months ago, indicating a likely decline for the sector in the official tankan, which measures confidence on a quarterly basis.
The service-sector index is seen edging up to 23 in June.
The BOJ’s last tankan out in December found the business mood held steady from three months ago, but business conditions were seen worsening ahead amid trade war and slowdown in China.
The Reuters Tankan indexes are calculated by subtracting the percentage of pessimistic respondents from optimistic ones. A positive figure means optimists outnumber pessimists.
(Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by Sam Holmes)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte presents plans on how the 500th anniversary of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci’s death will be marked in Italy, in Rome, Italy March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Yara Nardi
March 19, 2019
ROME (Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Tuesday that commercial and economic deals he will seal with China have no implications for Italy’s geo-political position, in a bid to reassure the European Union and the United States.
Conte told parliament that a Memorandum of Understanding to be signed with President Xi Jinping hooking Italy up to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative “do not remotely put into doubt our euro-Atlantic alliance”.
The United States has warned Italy against signing the MOU on what it calls a Chinese “vanity project”, but Conte, speaking ahead of an upcoming EU summit, left no doubt that the deal would go ahead.
The MOU “is fully in line with the strategy of the EU and in fact it promotes it as no other member state has done so far in its dealings with Beijing,” he said.
(Reporting by Giuseppe Conte, writing by Gavin Jones; editing by Agnieszka Flak)
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Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (L) and China’s Premier Li Keqiang leave after a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 3, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee/Pool
March 19, 2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – China played a “constructive role” in reducing tension between Pakistan and India, the foreign ministry said, after the nuclear-armed rivals almost came to blows last month following an attack on an Indian paramilitary convoy in disputed Kashmir.
The sparring threatened to spiral out of control and only interventions by U.S. officials, including National Security Adviser John Bolton, headed off a bigger conflict, five sources familiar with the events have told Reuters.
At one stage, India threatened to fire at least six missiles at Pakistan, and Islamabad said it would respond with its own missile strikes “three times over”, said Western diplomats and government sources in New Delhi, Islamabad and Washington.
A Pakistani minister said China and the United Arab Emirates also intervened to lessen tension between the south Asian neighbors.
In a faxed statement to Reuters late on Monday, responding to a question on China’s role in reining in the crisis, its foreign ministry said peaceful coexistence between Pakistan and India was in everyone’s interest.
“As a friendly neighbor of both India and Pakistan, China pro-actively promoted peace talks and played a constructive role in easing the tense situation,” it said.
“Some other countries also made positive efforts in this regard,” the ministry added.
China is willing to work with the international community to continue to encourage the neighbors to meet each other half way and use dialogue and peaceful means to resolve differences, it said, without elaborating.
The Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, is set to meet Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in Beijing later on Tuesday.
The Feb. 14 attack that killed at least 40 paramilitary police was the deadliest in Kashmir’s 30-year-long insurgency, escalating tension between the neighbors, who said they shot down each other’s fighter jets late last month.
China and Pakistan call each other “all-weather” friends, but China has also been trying to improve ties with New Delhi.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held an informal summit in China last year agreeing to reset relations, and Xi is expected to visit India sometime this year, diplomatic sources say.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: China’s President Xi Jinping attends a meeting with Portugal’s Parliamentary President Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues at the Parliament in Lisbon, Portugal, December 5, 2018. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes/File Photo
March 19, 2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese educators must respond to “false ideas and thoughts” when teaching political and ideological classes, President Xi Jinping said, in a sensitive year that marks the 30th anniversary of student-led protests around Tiananmen Square.
Beijing has campaigned against the spread of “Western values” in education, especially at universities, and the ruling Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog has sent inspectors to monitor teachers for “improper” remarks in class.
Addressing a symposium for teachers of ideological and political theory in Beijing, Xi said the party must nurture generations of talent to support its leadership and China’s socialist system, state media said late on Monday.
“It is essential to gradually open and upgrade ideological and political theory courses in primary, secondary and tertiary schools, which is an important guarantee for training future generations who are well-prepared to join the socialist cause,” media paraphrased Xi as saying.
“Ideological and political courses should deliver the country’s mainstream ideology and directly respond to false ideas and thoughts,” Xi added. The report did not elaborate.
The government has previously admitted that political education for university students was outdated and unfashionable, though the education minister said last year this problem had been fixed.
Xi alluded to that in his comments.
“We are fully confident of and capable of running ideological and political theory courses better,” he said.
“Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era should be used to educate people and guide students to strengthen their confidence in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics and to boost patriotism,” Xi added.
Crackdowns on what academics and students can say and should think are nothing new in China.
Courses and speech at universities, in particular, are tightly controlled by the government, fearful of a repeat of pro-democracy protests in 1989 led by students and eventually bloodily crushed by the military.
In 2013, a liberal Chinese economist who had been an outspoken critic of the party was expelled from the elite Peking University.
A year later, the university, once a bastion of free speech in China, established a 24-hour system to monitor public opinion on the internet and take early measures to rein in negative speech, a party journal said at the time.
China aims to build world-class universities and some of its top schools fare well in global rankings, but critics argue curbs on academic freedom could inhibit those ambitions.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Source: OANN
Last week, when a deranged lunatic gunned down dozens of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand it suddenly became the biggest news story in the world, and rightly so.
It was a major news event, and it needed to be reported. But shouldn’t mass killings of Christians be given the same sort of media coverage? Sadly, we all know that doesn’t happen. Whenever there is a mass killing of Christians, it is usually entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why this is happening. Those that control the mainstream media consider Christians to be one of the main obstacles to “progress” in this country, and so any story that would put Christians in a positive or sympathetic light simply does not fit any of the narratives that they are pushing.
As a result of the lack of media coverage, the vast majority of Americans do not know that “4,136 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons” last year.
That number breaks down to an average of 11 per day.
In Nigeria, more than 120 Christians have been gunned down or killed with machetes over the past three weeks, but Breitbart was the only big media outlet to report on it…
As Breitbart News alone reported among major news outlets, Fulani jihadists racked up a death toll of over 120 Christians over the past three weeks in central Nigeria, employing machetes and gunfire to slaughter men, women, and children, burning down over 140 houses, destroying property, and spreading terror.
The New York Times did not place this story on the front page; in fact, they did not cover it at all. Apparently, when assessing “all the news that’s fit to print,” the massacre of African Christians did not measure up. The same can be said for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the LA Times, and every other major paper in the United States.
And of course Breitbart is not exactly “mainstream” media.
So why won’t anyone else report on this?
And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Last June, twelve entire Christian villages in central Nigeria were completely wiped out…
In only days, a dozen villages in Nigeria’s Plateau state were wiped out. The affected communities surround the city of Jos—known as the epicenter of Christianity in northern Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
As many as 200 Christians had been killed, however, some residents fear the death toll may be even higher, as more bodies are yet to be recovered, while others were burned beyond recognition. On Sunday, 75 of the victims were buried in a mass grave.
I’ll bet that most of you had not heard about that until now.
On the other side of the world, 20 innocent people were slaughtered when Muslim radicals bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral in January…
On January 27, Muslim extremists bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral on the Philippine island of Jolo, killing some 20 people and injuring dozens of others.
Once again, this is yet another mass killing that was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.
Is the anti-Christian bias among the mainstream media so strong that they can’t even bring themselves to report the basic facts to us?
People deserve to know what is happening. Christian persecution is rising in almost every nation on the planet, and this huge ongoing crisis should be on our front pages on a continual basis.
But instead, we never get to hear any of these stories unless we seek out alternative sources of information.
Over in China, the persecution of Christians has reached a frightening crescendo. Recently, officials have been going house to house and replacing pictures of Jesus Christ “with pictures of dictator Mao Zedong and/or China’s current authoritarian president, Xi Jinping”…
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to harass and persecute Christians and, in recent months, has taken to removing pictures of Jesus Christ from inside homes and replacing them with pictures of dictator Mao Zedong and/or China’s current authoritarian president, Xi Jinping.
In addition, Communist officials have removed Christian symbols and phrases on the outside of homes and replaced them with phrases praising socialist materialism.
But they aren’t stopping there. Bibles are being burned, and any churches that do not “cooperate” with Chinese officials are being either shut down or destroyed. Earlier in 2019, one of the largest megachurches in the entire country was literally blown to pieces with dynamite…
Chinese authorities blew up a well-known Christian megachurch earlier this year, inflaming long-standing tensions between religious groups and the Communist Party.
Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People’s Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province
We are talking about evil that is on a level that is difficult to comprehend.
So why won’t the mainstream media talk about any of this?
Similar things are happening on the other side of the world too. In Eritrea, Christians are being imprisoned in “small shipping containers in scorching heat”…
Since 1993, President Afwerki has overseen an authoritarian brutal regime that rests on massive human rights violations. During the 2019 World Watch List reporting period, government security forces conducted many house-to-house raids and imprisoned hundreds of Christians in inhumane conditions, including small shipping containers in scorching heat.
And in North Korea, Christians are “being hung on a cross over a fire, crushed under a steamroller, herded off bridges, and trampled underfoot”…
According to charity Aid to the Church in Need, at least 200,000 Christians have gone missing in North Korea since 1953 — many of those have been summarily executed. As to the specific treatment of those persecuted, the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report discovered that the North Korean regime has been guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, violent incidents against Christians include “being hung on a cross over a fire, crushed under a steamroller, herded off bridges, and trampled underfoot.”
If you were to replace “Christians” with some other favored group in any of the examples that I have just shared, you would instantly have front page news all over the planet.
The mainstream media is definitely not “independent”, and they are not looking out for you.
They have their own agenda, and anything that does not fit that agenda does not get to be part of “the news”.
So far in 2019, there have been 453 Islamic terror attacks in which 1,956 people have been murdered. But you will never hear those numbers from the mainstream media.
Instead, when the mainstream media talks about Bible-believing Christians it is almost always an attack story. As a recent Breitbart article aptly observed, having “an anti-Christian bias” has become “the last acceptable prejudice”…
How much mileage can be gained from Muslims murdering Christians, when Christians in America are often seen as an obstacle to the “progress” desired by liberals? The left sees Christians in the United States as part of the problem and seeks to undermine their credibility and influence at every turn rather than emboldening them.
Anti-Christian bias has been rightly called “the last acceptable prejudice,” one that few bother condemning.
It is time to turn off the mainstream news for good.
They quit reporting “the news” a long time ago, and now it is all about promoting one left-wing narrative after another.
Today, trust in the media is at an all-time low, and it is easy to understand why so many Americans are absolutely sick and tired of being lied to by the big media companies.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: China’s President Xi Jinping attends a meeting with Portugal’s Parliamentary President Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues at the Parliament in Lisbon, Portugal, December 5, 2018. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes/File Photo
March 17, 2019
By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – A top Vatican official says China’s government should not fear “distrust or hostility” from the Roman Catholic Church, writing amid speculation over whether President Xi Jinping will meet Pope Francis this week.
Senior Vatican sources have said Francis is willing to meet Xi and that intermediaries had made overtures to the Vatican, but the Chinese side had not yet formally asked for a meeting. Any encounter would be the first between a Chinese leader and a pope.
Xi’s visit, starting Thursday, is his first to Italy following a historic agreement in September between the Vatican and the Chinese government on the appointment of bishops in China.
Beijing cut diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1951 and has remained concerned that an independent Church in China could threaten its authority.
“The Holy See (nurtures) no distrust or hostility toward any country,” Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin writes in the introduction of a new book on China to be published on Tuesday. An advance copy of Parolin’s comments in the book, “The Church in China – A Future Yet to be Written” – were made available to Reuters.
Parolin, second only to the pope in the Vatican hierarchy, said the Catholic Church’s work in China “cannot be separated from a stance of respect, esteem, and trust toward the Chinese people and their legitimate state authorities.”
This appeared to be another attempt by the Vatican to allay Beijing’s concerns.
While the historic September agreement initiated an unprecedented direct dialogue between the Vatican and China, Beijing and the Holy See have not resumed diplomatic, relations.
Parolin wrote that the previously “inextricable knots” in relations between China and the Vatican could be untied through a new, unified approach involving a mix of “theology, law, pastoral work, and even diplomacy.”
It is routine for heads of state and government visiting Italy to also meet the pope. A Vatican source said it could be inserted into Xi’s schedule “at the last minute”. A Vatican spokesman said it is not on the pope’s schedule.
The September deal, in the making for more than 10 years, gives the Vatican a long-sought say in the choice of bishops in China. Critics, particularly conservative Catholics, have labeled it a sellout to the Communist government.
China’s approximately 12 million Catholics have been split between an underground Church swearing loyalty to the Vatican and the state-supervised Catholic Patriotic Association. Now both sides recognize the pope.
Many believe the September deal is a precursor to resumption of diplomatic ties with Beijing.
That would mean severing relations with Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province. The Vatican is the self-ruled island’s last remaining diplomatic ally in Europe.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Toby Chopra)
Source: OANN
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