(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The Chinese government says it has agreed to refund money to rural customers of the Bank of China after recent protests against mysteriously frozen bank accounts ended in state-sponsored violence.
In April, bank customers in the Henan province noticed that China’s COVID-19 health code system—introduced in 2020 to restrict travel during the pandemic—was being used to prevent access to the local bank, according to a report from the Guardian.
“I got the red code for about 10 days,” one woman said. “The government should help us to resume cash withdrawal service as early as possible, so that we can resume our normal life.”
Protests against the draconian actions were violently broken up on Sunday, July 10 by “unidentified security personnel” that included both police and local “gangsters,” the Guardian reported.
As Chinese police blamed “criminal gangs” for taking control of local banks and making illegal transfers, China experts suggested that a real-estate bubble could be the real problem.
“It seems that any long period of soaring real-estate prices and explosive growth in debt creates powerful incentives for excessive risk-taking and even fraud,” a professor of finance at Peking University told the Guardian.
In an indication that the protests might be part of global unrest in rural areas, one Chinese economist suggested that farmers with low incomes would be most affected by the government’s policies.
“The most impacted are farmers with low incomes who had deposited nearly all their life savings,” Betty Wang told CNN. “Inappropriate handling of the issue could result in social unease and threaten stability.”
China’s recent lockdowns, using COVID as their pretense, have rattled onlookers not just because of the communist regime’s shoddy record on human rights, but also because it appears to be a prototype for other leftist authoritarian governments to follow.
Many believe China’s social-credit system for affording rights and privileges based on a citizen’s compliance with state diktats may soon be a reality in China-compromised Western countries.
The US Biden administration and Candadian Trudeau administration are among those that have explored leveraging state control over traditional speech rights and private banking as ways to suppress dissent.
Among President Joe Biden’s closest economic and foreign-policy advisers in the White House are those aligned with the BlackRock investment firm, which maintains close business ties in China and has been outwardly sympathetic to its oppressive regime.
The firm has used its vast holdings to coerce other woke corporations into adhering to socially progressive policies that flout the will of both customers and stockholders in many cases.
