‘The China Nexus’: New Book Chronicles CCP’s ’Human Rights Horrors’

Benedict Rogers speaks at a book launch event for his new book “China Nexus” in Toronto on Nov. 25, 2022. Omid Ghoreishi/The Epoch Times

Benedict Rogers had an idea late one night—to write a book that chronicles all of the “human rights horrors” committed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that he observed during his three decades of experience as a journalist and human rights campaigner in and around China.

“I realised that although there are many books on China, there are actually very few, indeed, really if any—that put together all of the litany of human rights horrors, together in one volume,” said Rogers, an expert in Asian policy and geopolitics, at a book launch event at the Albany Club in Toronto on Nov. 25.

The book, titled “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny,” documents and exposes the regime’s “lack of human rights efficacy, genocide, and despicable and barbaric organ harvesting programs.”

“[This is a] book that tells the story of the crackdown on dissidents, lawyers, bloggers, and civil society across China, together with the story of the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy, the genocide of the Uyghurs, the atrocities in Tibet, the persecution of Christians and Falun Gong, forced organ harvesting, the threats to Taiwan,” the British author said.

Why ‘Canadians Should Care’

Optimum Publishing International, which published “The China Nexus,” says the book “also assesses the Chinese Communist Party regime’s complicity with atrocities worldwide and its threat to our own freedoms.”

“We can no longer ignore China’s intensified repression of its own people or the threat posed by the Chinese government to human rights, democracy, and trade worldwide,” Dean Baxendale, president and publisher of the company, said in a press release on Oct. 24.

During the event, Baxendale said that “Canadians should care” about the book, particularly now that the CCP has laid out a plan “to be the dominant, predominant global hegemony in the world by 2049.”

Publisher Dean Baxendale speaks at a book launch event for “China Nexus” in Toronto on Nov. 25, 2022. Omid Ghoreishi/The Epoch Times

“That is military, that is technology, that is food, health sciences, everything,” he told The Epoch Times.

Rogers said Western democracies need to end what foreign policy establishment calls “strategic ambiguity” and introduce “strategic clarity.”

“That clarity is the answer to the question of what the free world should do: stand clear, and tell Beijing that there is a red line,” he said. “In the book, I set out what we, the free world, together should do to confront this challenge.”

30-Year Relationship

Rogers first went to China in 1992—three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre—to teach English for six months in Qingdao, a city in the country’s eastern Shandong Province. He was 18 at the time.

The visit opened the door to a 30-year relationship with China in which he progressed from teaching English in schools and hospitals, to working as a journalist in Hong Kong from 1997 to 2002, to travelling to China’s border with Myanmar and North Korea to “document the plight of refugees escaping from Beijing-backed satellite dictatorships.”

In recent years, the author has been at the heart of advocacy for human rights in China, including pioneering international inquiries into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.

In 2017, Rogers was denied entry to Hong Kong on the orders of Beijing, he said. Almost a year later, he was verbally assaulted by a reporter from a CCP-owned media, calling him a “liar” and accusing him of being “anti-China” and “trying to destroy China” when he was giving a closing remark at the UK Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, said an excerpt from his book, published in the National Post on Nov. 28.

‘No Middle Way’

“I believe it is so important that we are clear about the difference between the Chinese Communist Party regime, and China and its people,” Roger said at the event. “I am not anti-China … I’m very pro-China as a country with its rich culture and civilization. It is the CCP that I oppose.”

He shared an extract from a leader in the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, whom he interviewed.

“She told me: ‘U.S. Congressman Chris Smith said on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre that in between the tank and the tank man, you have to choose one side. There is no middle way. There is no in-between.’”