EXCLUSIVE: Insiders say today’s Flushing parade, billed as celebrating America’s 250th anniversary by groups including the American Prosperity Chinatown Association, was actually a $500,000 welcome rally for Xi Jinping ahead of his U.S. visit. Many participants waved PRC flags and plan to greet Xi in DC. Shortly after starting, they ran into anti-Xi protesters from the China Democracy Party International Alliance, China Democracy and Human Rights Alliance, and Christian Justice Alliance outside Changfa Supermarket. Democracy activists shouted: “If you love the CCP so much, go back to China! Don’t milk U.S. welfare while yelling ‘Long live the Communist Party!’ CCP get out of America! The Communist Party is garbage!”

EXCLUSIVE: Dual rallies in Flushing, NY today as anti-Xi Jinping protesters and pro-CCP supporters faced off at the same time. A pro-Beijing man suddenly attacked a democracy activist, kicking him and snatching his banner, before police arrested the assailant on the spot.

[ Margin Notes ] As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is most likely a duck. No matter how he is packaged, Xi Jinping remains the party boss of the evil Chinese Communist Party. He is not the leader of a normal country. Not a single word he says can be trusted. Do not be fooled by him. — Aric

[ Margin Notes ] The whole world is watching how Xi Jinping will walk that day. Not his speech. Not the talking points. Not the handshake choreography with President Donald Trump. The walk. The stairs. The moment the camera refuses to look away and CCTV’s editing room cannot save him. That is the real verdict on a regime that spent decades building a cult of the invincible core, then discovered the core has knees, a left side that sags, and a gait that no amount of patriotic music can disguise. They can disappear generals. They can rewrite textbooks. They can make entire cities vanish from maps. They cannot make an unsteady descent look like a vigorous stride. So they cut the footage. They broadcast the wave from the top of the stairs and the red-carpet arrival, as if gravity itself were a hostile foreign force. Peng Liyuan’s hand becomes a prop instead of a support. State media treats a man’s balance like classified nuclear data. And still the clips leak, because physics is not a Party member. The satire writes itself. A system that claims historical inevitability now lives in terror of a single unscripted step. The same party that lectures the world about “stability” cannot admit its paramount leader might need the railing. The same propaganda machine that once sold “common prosperity” now sells the fiction that the emperor’s body is as eternal as the Party. This is not gossip about one man’s health. It is the logical endpoint of a political order that replaced institutions with one man’s will and then discovered that will is housed in aging flesh. No successor. No transparent medical bulletin. No plan B except more secrecy, more cuts, more denials that only make the next video louder. The world is not watching because it loves rumor. It is watching because the Chinese Communist Party turned a human body into a state secret, and secrets have a way of walking themselves into the light. — Aric

[ Margin Notes ] Xi Jinping is really sick, and it is not a mild case. On August 30 the “core” of the Chinese Communist Party stepped off his plane in Bishkek looking pale, puffy-faced and unsteady. Video that circulated outside the Great Firewall shows him gripping Peng Liyuan’s hand as if it were a banister. She, in turn, quietly slipped her arm under his. CCTV’s official footage jumps from a distant wave at the cabin door to a handshake on the tarmac. The stairs themselves vanished into the editing suite. The Party that never lies simply decided the public did not need to see its leader negotiate gravity. This is not an isolated clip. In 2022 he nearly missed a step in Kazakhstan. In 2023 South African footage of the same painful descent was also cut. Last December, walking down steps with Emmanuel Macron at Dujiangyan, Xi again used his wife as a walking stick, one leg dragging. The pattern is now a running gag among overseas Chinese: the man who demands “absolute loyalty” cannot be trusted to walk down a jetway without a spouse acting as human scaffolding. The regime’s response is always the same. State television airbrushes the stumble, Xinhua prints poems about “golden periods” and “shared futures,” and anyone who notices the tremor or the swollen features is accused of “smearing China.” Meanwhile the only remaining deputy director of the Central Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, is a career oncologist. Coincidence, the Party insists. Just as it is coincidence that the same man who once strode across stages now blinks rapidly, speaks in a thin voice, and lists to one side. A system built on the myth of an infallible helmsman cannot admit the helmsman is listing. So the cameras are positioned, the scissors come out, and the first lady is quietly recast as a discreet nurse. The same Party that lectures the world on “national rejuvenation” cannot even let its own people see their leader walk down a set of stairs. That is not strength. That is a regime terrified of its own mortality, and of the day the video can no longer be cut. — Aric

[ Field Footage ] Fujian, China. The flooding now submerging Fuding streets, shops and vehicles is officially blamed on Typhoon Saudel’s torrential rain. That rainfall was real and extreme. What remains harder to accept is how quickly ordinary residents were overtaken, many waking to water already at chest height with almost no time to move goods or flee. CCP China’s reservoir network is designed to store and release water. When operators open gates to protect larger cities or generate power, downstream towns often receive late, vague or no effective warning. The result is the same scene repeating across provinces: cars swept away, shops ruined, families left to salvage what they can. Treating smaller communities as expendable flood buffers is not an act of nature. It is a choice about whose safety comes first. Timely, specific public alerts and reservoir operations that put lives ahead of other priorities are the minimum a government owes its people. Without them, “disaster” becomes a convenient explanation for avoidable harm. — Aric

Three Days After the Crash, Beijing Posted a Radar Truck at China Zun. The Photo Outran the Censors. The footage circulating outside the firewall is brief and unmistakable: a special-purpose police vehicle parked at the base of CITIC Tower, its flat-panel antenna rotating slowly against the skyline of the building it failed to protect on Friday. The kit is the kind used to detect "low, slow, small" aerial targets — the precise profile of the Sunward SA60L Aurora light sport aircraft, registration B-12PP, that flew unauthorized for roughly twenty minutes across central Beijing and struck the upper east-side glass of the 528-meter China Zun at 17:55 on June 26, killing the pilot and injuring thirteen people on the ground. The placement is the message. China Zun is not a random skyscraper. It is the headquarters of state-owned CITIC Group, sits a few kilometers east of Zhongnanhai, faces the central state media complex across the street, and its upper observatory floors were reportedly absorbed by the national-security apparatus years ago because, on a clear day, they look directly into the leadership compound. The world's most heavily controlled urban airspace let a two-seat trainer cruise on a constant westward heading toward that compound before it terminated on a wall instead of a target. The countermeasure rolled in after the impact. So did the official acknowledgment — a terse weekend WeChat post from Chaoyang district, issued while domestic platforms scrubbed videos, photos, and search terms in real time. That is the contradiction the radar truck puts on the curb. A system that can erase an event from Weibo inside four hours cannot erase the equipment it was forced to deploy in physical space. The Party can deny the story. It cannot deny the antenna. The deeper problem is structural. Beijing's air defense is built outward — long-range missile batteries in the suburbs and hills, layered for jets and ballistic threats. The interior of the Fifth Ring was left thin at the low end of the threat curve because authorities long assumed no domestic light aircraft would ever reach it. That assumption broke on Friday. The response this week — radar trucks at China Zun, a nationwide grounding of private light fixed-wing flight reported by the Financial Times on Monday, a tighter cordon around the tower on day three — is not the posture of a confident state. It is the posture of a leadership that has just learned, in front of its diplomats and its own citizens, that the inner ring is not what the propaganda has been selling for years. Timing sharpens the picture. July 1 is the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The crash landed less than a week before a date Xi Jinping cannot afford to mark with images of debris, censorship, and visible nerves. Hence the antenna at the curb. Hence the grounding orders cascading nationwide. Hence the closed roads on day three of an "accident" the regime is still refusing to fully describe. What the camera caught is what the official statement could not contain: a regime that has decided every shadow is now a threat, and a capital whose leadership has stopped believing its own air-defense map. The hands have moved. They are still moving. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 CELEBRATING AMERICA’S 250TH BIRTHDAY. This weekend, families from across the Tri-State area gathered at the Annual America the Beautiful Festival, presented by The Epoch Times and New Century Festivals at New Century in Port Jervis, NY — a small-town celebration anchoring the run-up to America’s 250th birthday. Local bands played on the open-air stage. Children ran across the grass. Veterans, reenactors, and neighbors mingled under the stars and stripes. No politics. No pageantry. Just a community choosing, on its own, to show up. This is the American spirit in its purest form — voluntary, joyful, generational. It doesn’t need a podium or a slogan. It only needs a stage, a song, and people willing to stand together. Two and a half centuries on, that quiet strength remains the country’s deepest source of unity. Happy birthday, America! 🇺🇸 🎂

Tokyo Crossed Out "China." Wrote In "Taiwan." 321 Lawmakers Just Buried 53 Years of Diplomatic Fiction. Japan's biggest parliamentary caucus rebranded for democracy — and Beijing's playbook is out of pages. For 53 years, Japan's most powerful pro-Taiwan caucus carried a fossil in its name: "華" (Hua) — the character for the Republic of China, a Cold War euphemism designed to avoid Beijing's tantrums. On June 11, 2026, that fossil was chiseled out. Meeting in Tokyo, the body formerly known as the Japan–China (Hua) Parliamentarians' Consultation Council (日華議員懇談会) voted to rename itself the Japan–Taiwan Friendship Parliamentarians' League (日本台湾友好議員連盟). Chairman Keiji Furuya — the same lawmaker Beijing sanctioned in March for "colluding with Taiwan independence forces" — explained it plainly: "It has finally become what it was always meant to be." To Asahi, he was sharper still: "Now that the Takaichi administration is in place, I decided this was our chance." This is not a cosmetic edit. It is a strategic re-coding. The numbers tell the story. The League now counts 321 lawmakers across both houses — roughly 45% of Japan's 713-seat Diet — a historical high, swelled by about 30 new members in the past year alone. In a parliament where consensus is granular and glacial, this is a tectonic shift. Nearly half of Japan's elected representatives now formally stand with a self-governing democracy Beijing refuses to recognize as one. The timing is sharper still. Furuya is a close ally of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — the woman who, on November 7, 2025, became the first Japanese premier to publicly state that a Chinese military strike on Taiwan could constitute a "survival-threatening situation" triggering Japan's right of collective self-defense. Beijing's response — sanctions, démarches, and the freezing of Furuya's nonexistent China assets on March 30 — has not deterred a single lawmaker. It accelerated the migration. CCP coercion is now recruiting Tokyo into the very alignment Beijing tried to prevent. What the new name unlocks. By upgrading from 懇談会 (consultation council, the diplomatic minor leagues) to 議員連盟 (parliamentary league, Japan's standard format for ally-state caucuses), Tokyo has placed Taipei at structural parity with the UK, Australia, Germany, and the United States. According to Sankei, the League also signaled at the same meeting that Japan should correct textbooks still describing Taiwan as Chinese territory — a direct strike against Beijing's most cherished propaganda line. Beijing's reaction is the tell. As of June 12, the PRC Foreign Ministry had issued no on-record statement, deploying its propaganda outlets instead: Global Times dispatched its usual "Chinese expert," who labeled the rename a "deliberate provocation" certain to "draw a firm response." Translation: Beijing has no new lever. The standard playbook — fury, summon the ambassador, threaten retaliation — was burned through in November and March, and it failed. Takaichi did not retract. The League grew. Allies leaned in. When deterrence collapses into recycled threats from anonymous "experts," the loss is structural. The strategic read. This is the most consequential shift in Tokyo–Taipei ties since the 1972 break — executed without altering a single treaty, signed without lifting a single sanction, and impossible for Beijing to legally contest. Japan has just published the template for every democracy still hostage to Beijing's vocabulary: you do not need to abandon One-China to dismantle the One-China narrative. A pen and a parliamentary majority will do. Ottawa, Canberra, London, Berlin, Brussels, Seoul, Taipei — take notes. Beijing's red lines only hold when nobody crosses them. Tokyo just walked across, dropped 53 years of euphemism on the floor, and called the move "natural." That single word — "natural" — should haunt every chancellery still treating Taiwan as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be named. The page has turned. Aric Chen | Insights

RIP 🙏 You may not know his name, but you've definitely heard his story, and Hong Kong's. Lam Wing-kee founded Causeway Bay Books, the Hong Kong shop that sold titles banned in mainland China. In 2015 he vanished into mainland Chinese custody for eight months, one of five booksellers detained that year. He didn't stay quiet. In June 2016 he held a Hong Kong press conference and described being blindfolded at the border, interrogated for months, and pressured to hand over customer records. His account stunned Hong Kong and made headlines worldwide. In 2019, fearing extradition under Hong Kong's proposed fugitive bill, Lam fled to Taiwan. A year later he reopened Causeway Bay Books in Taipei, crowdfunded, with flowers from then President Tsai Ing-wen. Days before the opening, a man threw red paint on him. He rebuilt anyway. Lam never liked being called an exile. "I'm just someone who came to Taiwan to open a bookstore," he said. He died Thursday in Taipei at 70, cancer having spread to his heart. President Lai Ching-te said the courage he leaves behind "will not disappear." Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said Lam was long detained by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Causeway Bay Books affair, and chose to expose it rather than stay silent. His bookstore, reborn in Taipei, became what officials called a symbol of freedom.

🚨 The Spy Had a Résumé Canada Trusted. She now has a name and a face: Biwei Zhang, "Claire" on LinkedIn, "Catina" on Facebook — a 32-year-old systems engineer arrested at NATO's military headquarters in Belgium, accused of espionage and belonging to a criminal organization. Look at where Canada let her in first. Statistics Canada. The Canadian Space Agency. The European Space Agency. The World Trade Organization. Standards committees speaking for Canada abroad. A federal body once flagged her for applying under two names, yet the doors kept opening, all the way to SHAPE's IT department, inside the alliance's nerve center. Prosecutors won't name the "third country." They don't have to. The pattern names itself: the Chinese Communist Party, patiently threading its people through the institutions of open societies until one lands where the secrets live. She cleared every check. That's not reassurance. That's the warning. Please take a look at my previous analysis of this matter, along with the news reports I produced. ⬇️