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Ava Chen: What Beijing's Fury Over a Soccer Joke Reveals About the Regime
China Watch moved to Thursday this week, and Ava Chen of the New Federal State of China opened with a short note on Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu remains prime minister after the latest vote. Chen congratulated Israel on a free election, with a condition: "As long as the voting has no interference from CCP, that's good." Her broader point was that world leaders can no longer treat the Chinese Communist Party as someone else's problem. Protecting a nation and its people, she argued, now means confronting the CCP directly. She traced the October 7th attack back through Hamas's funding, weapons and shared intelligence. "All roads lead back to Beijing," she said.
The Mbappé Affair
Chen's main story was the reaction in Beijing to a remark by Kylian Mbappé, the French star who plays for Real Madrid in Spain's La Liga. Asked on a podcast to name his favorite meme, Mbappé joked that it was one that superimposed his face on a portrait of Mao. That was the whole offense. Beijing lashed out, sponsors pulled their endorsements overnight, and state media and online accounts accused him of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. Chen said La Liga's broadcasts into China were threatened, and Mbappé and the league both apologized.
Chen said the speed and scale of the response were the real story. "He was joking. He's just a footballer," she said. "But how the CCP reacted tells a lot about what they fear." In her telling, what the regime fears most is the Chinese people learning the truth about Mao, whom she called the most brutal dictator in human history. She said 150 million Chinese people died under his rule, 80 million of them from deliberate starvation. Mao's portrait still hangs over the gate at Tiananmen Square. Kathleen Winn said Mbappé did nothing wrong and wished he had followed Charles Barkley's example of never apologizing. "They're the ones hurting the Chinese people," Winn said.
Chen also credited the House Select Committee on the CCP, which posted on X that Mbappé should not apologize for speaking the truth. She was disappointed by the response of Western leaders. She pointed to a statement circulating on social media that she attributed to Spain's prime minister, which said Spanish football should not suffer because of one individual's controversy. "He missed the opportunity to push back on the CCP," Chen said.
A Petition Beijing Erased
Chen said Radio Free Asia reported a more consequential development inside China. On October 26th, she said, university students circulated an online petition asking Xi Jinping to restore presidential term limits, which he eliminated in 2018. The request was mild. It did not call for ending the Party. Within days the petition was scrubbed from the Chinese internet, and even the Wayback Machine snapshot returned a 404. Chen said the Party then announced inspections of 31 elite universities. "A lot of people are going to be detained. A lot of people are going to be disappeared," she said. "This is the white terror."
Her takeaway was that Xi's reaction to a soccer joke and his reaction to a term-limits petition come from the same insecurity. Winn put it this way: a regime that panics over a joke is living in fear. Chen added that Beijing used the Mbappé episode as a test of how far its reach extends outside China.
Winn tied it back to home. Americans can say any ridiculous thing they like, she said, and that freedom disappears if communists come to run the country. "You'll be told what to think," she said.
Why the West Stays Quiet
Chen spent the rest of her time on a question she posed to the audience: why do Western elites say nothing? Her answer is financial entanglement. She said the CCP makes critics pay in their pockets, and that those with money in China stay silent to protect it. She credited dissident businessman Miles Guo with explaining how it works, and she described what he calls a "kleptocracy," a system in which a few CCP families loot China and move the proceeds abroad.
Chen laid out the mechanism as Guo described it. In the 1990s, under Premier Zhu Rongji and his protégé Wang Qishan, the Party began labeling good state assets "non-performing." An asset worth $80 million would be written down to $80,000 and sold at a steep discount to hand-picked Western distressed-debt funds. Those funds would manage the assets for a fee, then sell them back to the children and relatives of the CCP elite, now holding them through foreign entities. The result, she said, was a "state level of bribery" of Wall Street and the big law firms that handled every transaction.
Chen argued the law firms matter most because American institutions run on lawyers. "Lawyers are the most versatile career in America," she said, listing presidents, prosecutors and judges. She said Beijing uses international law firms in China as a pipeline into the American justice system. She also tied the pattern to the legal pressure on President Trump and urged listeners to watch Guo's documentary, Justice Weaponized. "The battle against the CCP is not in Beijing," she said, quoting Guo. "The battle against the CCP is in Washington."
Winn said Guo has been right on every point and is sitting in a New York prison, silenced. "We have to be his arms, his feet, his voice out here," she said.
Strength Works
Both women pointed to the recent exchange at the United Nations in which U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz told a Cuban representative who was shouting over him to sit down. "Back away. This isn't Havana," Chen quoted him as saying. She said the CCP has pursued an alliance with the world's communist and poor nations since the 1950s, and that the UN's New York home gives them a stage in America's own backyard. "You have to show communists the strength," she said. "They don't understand diplomacy." Winn said it is the kind of leadership America needs.
Chen asked listeners to make one habit of speech a priority: always separate the CCP from China and from the Chinese people. "That's their deepest fear," she said.
John Carruth: Prop 423 and the Case for Vail's Override
Superintendent John Carruth of the Vail Unified School District made the case for Proposition 423, the district's maintenance and operation override. Carruth is a native Tucsonan who has lived, worked and worshiped in Vail for 32 years, and both of his adult children went through its schools. Kathleen Winn, whose daughter and two grandchildren live in the district, noted that the measure continues an existing override and does not add a new tax.
Carruth confirmed it. Voters in every Tucson-area district have the chance to add to the secondary property tax for their schools, and Vail has been operating at a 12.5% override. The state maximum is 15%. By his account, Vail's request is the lowest among local districts, and it must be renewed every five years, so it is not a tax in perpetuity. "It requires school districts to say, are we doing what we've told you we're going to do?" he said.
For homeowners, Carruth said the rate is $1.55 per $100 of assessed valuation and will not go up if the measure is reauthorized. The money pays for specialty teachers in art, music, PE and STEM, advanced courses, wraparound student services and additional counseling. "It does not go to any administrative cost," he said. He described watching an art teacher bring symmetry and design vocabulary to a second-grade class in a hands-on lesson, which is the kind of instruction the override pays for.
Carruth described Vail as a largely conservative community whose schools reflect it. The district has 23 schools, making it the second-largest in Pima County and the 13th-largest in Arizona. He noted that the State Board of Education had just released school labels, and he said Vail was the top-rated district in the state among large districts and charter systems with ten or more schools. Winn urged Vail voters with a ballot on the counter to walk it in right away. "If you want quality schools, this is not going to administration," she said.
Andy Biggs: The Closing Argument
With less than a week to go, Congressman Andy Biggs, the Republican nominee for governor, joined the show from the campaign trail. Winn opened with a campaign poll showing Biggs at 47.2% to Governor Katie Hobbs's 44.1%, with undecided voters breaking his way two to one in the last week. Biggs said the momentum is real. He argued that Arizona has become the fulcrum of the national electoral process, and that Democrats have spent $40 to $45 million, much of it in the past week or so. "If we don't turn red in '26," he said, "Arizona goes blue and looks a heck of a lot like Colorado, but with more electoral votes in 2028."
Affordability
Biggs said Arizona has gone from one of the most affordable states to one of the least affordable. He said the average home price has risen about 8% nationally over the last several years but almost 25% in Arizona, and he blamed Hobbs's policies, including moratoriums on building in fast-growing areas and the denial of water certifications for subdivisions that had proof of water. "She's increased the price of homes by increasing the scarcity of homes," he said. He said fewer people are working in Arizona than at any time in the last ten years, which pushes college-educated young people into jobs below their training or out of the state. His plan starts with lowering the income tax and streamlining permitting, which he said adds almost 40% to the cost of a home in some cases.
Fentanyl, Border and Schools
Biggs said Arizona has the highest fentanyl overdose spike in the country and blamed the governor's failure to prioritize the border, including defunding the Border Security Strike Force. He promised to fund it again and to encourage local law enforcement to work with federal agencies. On education, he said Arizona ranks 51st in the nation, counting D.C., and that Hobbs is "bound and determined to end school choice." Winn added that she hates ESAs and said felons had been collecting signatures for a measure to attack them.
Ethics and Transparency
Winn argued the Hobbs administration has no accountability. She said Doug Ducey left a rainy-day fund of up to a billion dollars and that $700 to $800 million of it is unaccounted for. She also said Attorney General Kris Mayes declined to answer for what Winn called a pay-to-play scheme.
Biggs said his campaign put out an ethics and transparency platform almost as soon as he began running, on his website. He pointed to the Sunshine Residential affair, in which he said Hobbs received more than half a million dollars into a couple of her accounts and Sunshine then received an increase of $4 million a year in state payouts. He then described a story that broke within the last ten days. He said Hobbs and Mayes each received six-figure contributions from an online gambling company that was under a cease-and-desist order, and that the administration looked the other way and let it keep operating for two years. "Surprise, surprise. Pay to play," Winn said.
"We want to be the best state we can possibly be," Biggs said. "We want our kids to get the best education they can possibly get. We want people to be able to get the jobs and get into homes and live the American dream."
His closing message was turnout. "We have so many more registered Republicans. They just need to get to the polls. They get to the polls, we win."
Winn's Take After the Interview
After Biggs left, Winn reminded listeners that the governor matters more to everyday quality of life than anyone on the ballot in a midterm, and made the case for Proposition 425, which would lift the Pima County spending cap. "You can't afford 630 million," she said, and she said the county discovered $18 million at the end of its fiscal year and responded by giving out pay raises rather than saving it. She argued that Arizona is the prize for communists and socialists, and that the voters who skip this election are the ones who hand it to them. "This is your opportunity to stand up, use your voice, use your ballot, use your vote," she said.
Joel Strabala: Final Days to Vote in Pima County
Joel Strabala, a member of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission and chair of LD17, closed the show with a practical guide to the last days of voting.
Early in-person voting ends Friday. After that, Strabala said, all 17 Pima County voting sites will be open Saturday and Monday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. for emergency voting. Voters may be asked to sign a statement that they need emergency voting, but they do not have to say why. Election Day is Tuesday. Anyone still holding a mail-in ballot should not mail it. "We are past the date where you should mail your ballot back," Winn said. A ballot can be dropped at an early voting center, a drop box, or a polling place before 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Voters Should Bring ID
Winn said voters who bring a completed early ballot to a voting center are entitled to have their ID checked and the affidavit envelope stamped "ID verified," which means the ballot skips signature verification. Strabala confirmed it. State law gives the voter that option at an early voting site or an Election Day site. He said the recorder's procedure puts ID-verified ballots and ordinary drop-offs in the same box, which staff then separate by hand at the signature verification site. "It would be easier if they just kept them separated from the beginning," he said. He still urged voters to bring ID, since it saves time at the back end.
Tabulation and Turnout
Strabala said he was at the tabulation center Tuesday, where roughly 161,000 ballots had been tabulated and about 30,000 more were expected that afternoon, bringing the total to just under 200,000. With roughly 660,000 registered voters in Pima County, that is about 30%. He reported that the printer at the Oro Valley voting center, which had been down since Monday, was fixed about 5 p.m. Tuesday and that the site now has three on-demand ballot printers. Winn noted that Marana had only a mobile voting center and that 11 sites were eliminated in Green Valley, both Republican strongholds. She asked anyone who voted at the Marana mobile center to call 520-790-2040.
If You See a Problem
For incidents, Strabala said to speak politely to the site supervisor first, since many of the workers are volunteers. If the problem is not resolved, voters can call the Pima County Republican Party hotline at 520-321-1492 or the Arizona GOP hotline at 520-900-0419, email hq@pimagop.org, or file a report at ArizonaProtectTheVote.com. Lawyers will be deployed for anything needing legal resolution. Strabala also said some Republican voters on the active early voting list did not receive their ballots, and that the party is working on it with the Postal Service.
LD17's Final Push
The party is working a list of 8,400 LD17 voters who typically return their ballots by now, with texts, calls and door knocking. LD17 has crossed 52% turnout, with 27,562 ballots returned as of that morning. Strabala urged Republicans not to be discouraged by what they hear out there and to remember that Republicans often vote on Election Day and tend to win it. "This is ours to lose," he said, "and we certainly don't need to lose our legislative advantage." He pointed voters to the chart at PimaGOP.org for judges and propositions. "There's so much money in this ballot," he said. "It's like going to a fancy restaurant and it's 10 times more than you thought it was going to be."