As the press whines that President Trump is a threat to freedom of the press, and then pulls stunts like coordinated editorials, over in China, the real thing is being demonstrated.

The red Chinese blasted the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club (a place I've spent time at during my Asia years) for allowing a Hong Kong independence activist simply to speak for them.

According to Reuters, China's foreign ministry issued an ugly warning to the group, stating that "the reporters' group was not outside the law."

The club should be very clear that freedom of the press cannot be abused, the office said in a statement on its website.

They consider just the act of allowing someone (who doesn't have a snowball's chance in Yunnan of getting his ideas put into practice) to speak, as they put it, "abuse" of "freedom" the press?  As if communists would know what freedom of the press is in the first place?  As if the communists would know what just plain freedom is?  File under "unclear on the concept."  This one goes right up there with the passage in P.J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell, quoting a Sandinista commissar complaining about La Prensa, which had reported that the Sandinistas censored the press: "This was a lie and we could not let them publish it." 

It's thuggery.

It gets worse.  Look at this:

Voice of America's Mandarin Service correspondent and a multimedia journalist working for VOA were detained Monday evening by Chinese police while attempting to interview a retired Chinese professor who was taken away by authorities during a live television interview with VOA nearly two weeks ago.

Correspondent Yibing Feng and VOA contractor Allen Ai were taken into custody in Jinan, Shandong province after talking to professor Sun Wenguang, 84, through a closed door of his apartment.

The Chicoms came at them like goons and hauled the reporters, who had been working fearlessly, and in difficult conditions, doing the sort of stories even the larger, better funded mainstream press won't take on as too risky, because from Google on down, nobody wants to cross the Chinese government and get out of its good graces. 

Read the passage of how the arrest went down, and consider how chilling that is:

When the VOA journalists first arrived at Sun's apartment, they encountered a few security people outside the door.

After they identified themselves as journalists, correspondent Feng told security: "Please don't interrupt our work."

A security officer asked them to go downstairs where they were later detained.  The two VOA journalists were then taken away separately in police cars.

"Where are you taking me?" Feng asked police in a conversation that was overhead on a cell phone call to VOA editors in Washington.

"You will know," an officer responded.

"I need to talk to your leader," Yibing told the officer.

The police then apparently asked Yibing to turn over his equipment.

"This is (US) government property, you cannot take it," Yibing told them, referring to VOA's status as a U.S. government broadcasting entity.  Before the cell phone line went dead, the sound of footsteps could be heard.

I know people who've worked in the VOA's China office, and one of the great unpublished stories those sources have noted is that the VOA Mandarin service is loaded with Chicom spies whom the Obama administration refused to do anything about.  It's likely those spies targeted these real VOA journalists from the inside before the Chicom thugs made their move to haul them off.

There's more: a recent item in Medium described how New York Times columnist Sarah Jeong failed to protect her Chinese source during her days of writing for the Vice news site, here, the point being that it's dangerous to talk to the press in China.  It should not surprise anyone a bit that Jeong had no respect for her source's safety in a communist hellhole.  Meanwhile, renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei just had his studio trashed in what he said was an anti-freedom of the press attack (again, a real one).

Now we come back to the Washington swamp press with all its whinings about Trump being the real threat to freedom of the press.  Look at some of these headlines:

Trump is attacking the First Amendment again –Washington Post

Federal judge says Trump violates First Amendment by blocking critics on Twitter –Associated Press

Trump's Assault on the First Amendment –Bloomberg

President Trump's cultural assault on the First Amendment –Washington Post

Will freedom of the press endure regular Trump attacks? –Salon

This isn't even scratching the surface of the kind of blather out there.  Thomas Lifson wrote a terrific piece on the shenanigans of the press as it boils in its own juices of Trump-hate.  What's obvious is that whatever Trump's complaints about the press coverage he is getting and whatever the press response to it as a result, none of it holds a candle to the kind of hideous threats and real attacks against the press going on in China.

That's the same China Trump is challenging on the foreign policy front, upending the Chinese view of themselves as born to rule all Asia and free to persecute the press.  Trump right now is the only thing standing between China's repression of the press and its surge for regional dominance.  Google is glad to kowtow to China, despite China's press activities, and we all know that Google is as progressive as the press.  But Trump doesn't.  Against this China juggernaut, the swamp press's constant carping about Trump and the press is starting to sound pretty candy-assed.