The long arm of China’s police state reaches into Thailand

This, against the backdrop of the Chinese embassy sternly lecturing The Nation’s editorial staff on this newspaper’s right to uphold freedom of speech. 
At matters currently stand, the Politburo in Beijing is busy orchestrating police state offensives against, variously, the Uighur Muslim minority (oh the irony, Nigel!) as commented on by, among others, the Economist of June 5, 2018 (“China has turned Xinjiang into a police state like no other”). We might also consider the detention of 13 Canadian nationals whose only crimes are to be in the wrong place during the Huawei imbroglio, a situation in which the US has charged the company with fraud and stealing trade secrets. 
Nigel is also right to remind the readership of the PRC’s illegal annexation of sovereign Tibet; and, more recently, using the People’s Army to murder the people demanding democracy in Tiananmen Square. We don’t read too much about these atrocities nowadays, such is the cynical atomising of thought and memory in a one-party state. This, in the context of there being only on China, but presumably being relaxed with its equally Stalinist ally North Korea being entirely separate from its neighbour in the south. 
Now, it seems, the same People’s Army may be used to threaten more people in Taiwan, who have the absolute right to self-determination. Nigel is also quite correct to point out that Taiwan has the sovereign and moral high ground by virtue of being a verifiable political entity. But, given the crude fire and fury emanating from Beijing’s Ministry of Love on this matter, threats and venom are only to be expected in a country where representative democracy is anathema to the prevailing monolithic system of governance.
Dr Frank
Bangkok