June 4 marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which the Chinese Communist Party put down a pro-democracy protest movement that had bubbled up in Tiananmen Square and throughout mainland China. For many, it served as a stark reminder the brutality of the country that, under the autocratic leadership of Mao Zedong killed between 40 and 80 million of its own people, could still be just as brutal.
Tiananmen happened just three years before Benedict Rogers moved to China to begin teaching English. For Rogers, this marked the beginning of a professional career focused on issues in and around China and Hong Kong that saw him work as a journalist in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover to traveling to China’s borders with Myanmar/Burma and North Korea to document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed satellite dictatorships and then campaigning for human rights in China, especially for Uyghurs, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners, human rights defenders, journalists and dissidents, and the people of Hong Kong.
Rogers, who today runs the organization Hong Kong Watch, a watchdog organization which researches and monitors threats to Hong Kong’s basic freedoms, the rule of law and autonomy as promised under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle which is enshrined in the Basic Law and the Sino-British Joint Declaration, is the author of the new book, “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny.”
In the book, Rogers takes the readers on a journey through some of the leaders and participants in the Human rights activities that China has suppressed since its inception in 1949. He goes on to dispute and lays to rest all of the specious claims by the tyrants in Beijing that all Chinese citizens are equal and are afforded human and civil rights. Currently, the regime is engaged in re-education, cultural assimilation, and multiple genocides, leading to better citizens for China and the world if one believes Chinese officials.
Today, Eric Kohn talks with Benedict Rogers about his book, China’s history, its rise as a global power, its record on human rights, and what the future holds the Chinese Communist Party and the people under it’s thumb.
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