No word that we know of was uttered on human rights and religious liberty. Meanwhile, Beijing continues its propaganda and infiltration in Italy.
by Marco Respinti
Politics is cynical almost by definition. However, that the highest institutional level of a free country that strongly believes in democracy can bow to a bloody totalitarian regime defies belief. I refer to the regime that harasses its own citizens in the most horrible way under the name of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet, it just happened again.
“Where Does Italy Stand on Chinese Crimes Against Humanity?”
Sergio Mattarella, the President of the Republic of Italy, officially visited the PRC on November 6‒12, 2014. He met with all sort of top politicians, President Xi Jinping included on November 8. The Beijing regime immediately exploited the occasion for propaganda. As far as we know, President Mattarella found no time to mention the bewildering situation in which millions live within the boundaries of the Asian giant.
All the world knows that in the PRC the unlawful imprisonment and internment in slave labor and re-education camps of innocent people is a daily business. All the world knows that the citizens of the PRC suffer and endure extrajudicial killings, unexplained murders in custody, an annual toll of death sentences that make any other rogue state pale in comparison, the forcible depredation of organs of prisoners of conscience, the rape and sterilization of women and the forced abortions to which they are compelled by the State for ideological reasons, torture, psychological brutality, a vilifying capillary surveillance, the denial of the most basic rights, a systematic police repression in the streets, the militarization of cities and villages, and the constant threat of falling in the hands of the PRC emissaries even for those who escaped abroad. All the world knows, and for sure President Mattarella does too, yet the head of the Italian state remained publicly silent.
The above list of crimes by the neo-post-national-communist regime of the PRC, within and beyond its boundaries, is literally the same, and on purpose, that I offered in my open letter to the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, soon after her visit to the PRC in May 2024. On that occasion, she met President Xi Jinping like President Mattarella did. Again like President Mattarella, she didn’t utter a single public word on those crimes. In my open letter, I dared wonder “Where Does Italy Stand on Chinese Crimes Against Humanity?” No answer came. Of course, no one expected a direct answer by the Italian prime minister to an obscure journalist as your servant. Yet, a practical answer through political acts was in order. It lately came, and it is President Mattarella’s unashamed tour, accompanied by the minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Tajani, as the representative of the Italian government.
A Brave “BRIexit”—Followed by Trade Surrender
The usually smiling and avuncular President Mattarella has been quite embarrassing in China. The embarrassment hit the apex when Mattarella spoke of the “bilateral relations of friendship and collaboration between China and Italy.”
Let us briefly recall the context. Italy, under the brave leadership of Meloni, pulled out of the shameful “Memorandum of Understanding” that a previous Italian government ill-advisedly signed. Italy became the first country in the world to have exited the suffocating and threatening so-called “Belt and Road Initiative,” just like it had been the first major country in the West to enter it. I call it “BRIexit.” When Meloni accomplished it, she anticipated that, instead of a blank check in the hands of the CCP, a much more reasonable one-to-one relationship between the two countries should be inaugurated.
But no one ever thought that the new course should be yet another form of servility as that displayed by the surrendering trade policy of Italy to the arrogant power of the PRC. An emblematic example is the huge amount of tomatoes that were imported for the Italian food industry coming from the slave-labor PRC to the rich-of-tomatoes region of Salerno in southern Italy. In fact, Salerno has become a hub of the PRC’s penetration into Italy.
Can the manager of a soccer team act as referee in a game his team plays?
Similarly, no one ever thought that the announced new course should give the PRC a key role in “solving” the war of aggression that the Russian Federation is waging against Ukraine. President Mattarella implied just this on the November 11 “lectio magistralis” he delivered to the University of Beijing (Beida). He said: “I would like to express the expectation that [the PRC] will make use of its great authority on the international stage to reiterate its traditional position in support of the international community’s norms of coexistence by working to end Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity.”
Given the alliance between the PRC and the Russian Federation, the support that the first constantly supplies to the latter, and the recent presence of soldiers fighting alongside Russian troops from the PRC-sponsored North-Korea, it is difficult to take President Mattarella’s wish seriously. It would be like selecting the manager of one of the soccer teams playing against each other in a key game to serve as referee.
What I find even ridiculous is the reference to the “traditional position in support of the international community’s norms of coexistence” of the PRC. There is no such a thing. The PRC directly threatens its neighbors and indirectly a vast area of the world, if not the entire globe itself. It claims territories that it does not own. It arbitrarily changes international borders on maps. It perpetrates a shameful colonization of several countries. Finally, it systematically violates international rules in commerce, market, fair-play, humanity, and justice.
On November 11, President Mattarella visited the Buddhist Temple of Lingyin in Hangzhou. Perhaps he did not know it is managed by a façade Buddhist association that the regime uses to counterfeit a non-existent and constantly-infringed right to religious liberty (as Bitter Winter signaled), as part of its classic plan to infiltrate and control religious groups. In that temple, President Mattarella forgot to mention the persecution of religions as he did when visiting the cemetery of Catholic missionaries to the country. He deserves credit for having paid an important homage to men who died in the past, but he remained totally silent on today’s suffering of the living, just while Beijing was renewing, and even extending, an agreement with the Vatican that hasn’t yet helped anyone.
Like Yalta
Italy has been a high place for the settlement of numerous PRC police stations, a resounding case that seems to have been recently covered up. At least in public, President Mattarella, as Prime Minister Meloni before him, had nothing to say on this unbelievable presence.
Italy is a country whose lists of asylum seekers from the harshly persecuted Church of Almighty God were scandalously published by a site likely connected with the PRC intelligence services. At least publicly, President Mattarella didn’t find a minute in Beijing to ask authorities where the website did get them. So far, it looks like Prime Minister Meloni can’t find a minute in Rome to inquiry on such a shameful breach of sensible data either.
Yet, President Mattarella found time to celebrate the grand opening of the first Chair ever in Italian Culture at the University of Beijing on November 9. This is sponsored and financed with 2.5 million euros by Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, a research institute in social science based in Turin, Italy, and created by the world-famous Italian automotive industry, Fiat. Fiat is today part of the Dutch multinational holding Stellantis, quite controversial for its continuous requests of subsidies from the Italian government in face of a poor management that is deeply penalizing the Italian automotive sector.
While Stellantis seems to have inherited from Fiat the double-standard policy of privatizing gains and socializing losses (i.e. burdening the Italian state and taxpayers with them), it is recently also responsible for importing those PRC automobiles that are killing European production. Now, the first holder of the Agnelli Chair of Italian Culture at the University of Beijing, hinged in that position by Fondazione Agnelli and Stellantis President John Elkann, is Romano Prodi, economist, business manager, former president of the European Commission (EC), former Prime Minister of Italy and always an enthusiastic admirer of the PRC. As EC President, Prodi welcomed the PRC in the World Trade Organization, like it was done the previous year by then-US President Bill Clinton. it was the green light for the PRC to enter the world market and sabotage it in manners that every nation is now lamenting. A surrealistic collaboration between “enemies.”
But why a voice inside my head keeps on bothering me, suggesting that the picture of Mattarella, Elkann and Prodi sitting at the inauguration of the Agnelli Chair resembles, all proportions kept, that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stalin and Winston Churchill sitting at Yalta, with an analogous succession of smiles and frowns?
