Wuhan Virus, May 2020-

China’s propaganda pandemic in an expanding timeline, May 2020 – 

Click here for Part One of the timeline from November 2019 – April 2020

Latest update: July 7, 2020, 17:23 Washington DC time. 

This is Part 2 of the timeline, starting on May 1, 2020.  Part 1 covers November 2019 through April 2020.

All official Chinese government propaganda is the official voice of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By following the propaganda lines with regime actions in chronological order, we can trace how the Xi Jinping regime responded to the coronavirus outbreak and weaponized it to attack the United States and divide its leaders.

We can then push back against Chinese propaganda, break through the regime’s disinformation and censorship inside China and here at home, and devise ways to hold the Communist Party responsible for the pandemic.

This is Part 2 of the timeline by Dr J Michael Waller, our Senior Analyst for Strategy. Part 1 covers November 2019 through April 2020. The timeline is updated daily.

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Jump to: November 2019, December 2019, January 2020, February 2020, March 2020, April 2020

May 1

Global Times: US is covering up Pentagon role in creating virus and spreading it worldwide. The CCP’s lively Global Times accuses the United States military of building networks of biological dual-use labs worldwide and spreading the pandemic, and calls for an open and transparent international investigation of the US as the originator of the COVID-19 virus. Highlights:

• Too busy to scapegoat China to save American lives. “… some US politicians are busy scapegoating China rather than saving lives or reflecting on their own anti-virus efforts.”
• Americans are starting to suspect that the ‘US epidemic’ didn’t start in China. “Recently, reports from US mainstream media show that people are having an increasing number of questions about the US epidemic.”
• US government is opaque and irresponsible. “It is hoped that the US government can provide clear answers to the world in an open, transparent, and responsible manner. . . . How credible is the data previously released by the US government? Was the US government intentionally hiding something due to political considerations?”
• Virus came to US from Europe, New York governor says. “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently said that the coronavirus that hit New York State did not come from China but Europe. After the epidemic broke out in China, the US soon issued a travel ban on all people coming from China, yet the country did not close its doors to Europe until mid-March, giving the virus the opportunity to sneak into the US from Europe.”
• US exported infections worldwide. “Why didn’t the US government prevent this large number of infections from entering and spreading in the US? How many cases has the US spread to the world?”
• US Army’s Fort Detrick is suspicious source of virus. “… why did the US shut down the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick that studies deadly infectious materials? Reports show that the US’ main biological warfare lab had been ordered to stop all research into certain biological agents and toxins for security reasons in June 2019, but no detailed reasons have been offered. Coincidentally, shortly before the lab was shut down, a large number of people became ill with respiratory symptoms, ranging from a cough to pneumonia, in two nursing homes in a nearby county in Virginia…. On March 10, a petition was launched on the White House website, asking the US government to make public the real reason for the closure of Fort Detrick, and to clarify whether the laboratory is the research unit for the novel coronavirus as well as whether there was a virus leak. . . . Why has the US refused to provide further explanations concerning the lab? … Why were reports about the lab deleted? Was the US trying to cover something up?”
• US military bases overseas might be sources of pandemic. “Is there a risk of leakage from US biological bases overseas? The US military has many biological laboratories in Southeast Asia and countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. In Ukraine, it was reported that there are 16 biological laboratories set up by the US.”
  • Russians raise suspicions against US. “According to a spokesman from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US Department of Defense set up biological laboratories with a dual role in a third country on the pretext of combating biochemical terrorism. The possibility cannot be ruled out that it aims to overlap or reorganize various dangerous disease pathogens for military purposes and to strengthen its influence in the biochemical sector overseas.”
  • US is building dangerous biological facilities around China and Russia. “Why has the US built so many biological laboratories in other countries? What’s the purpose in locating these laboratories in countries surrounding China and Russia? Do these laboratories meet security standards? Are there hidden dangers of a leak? When can the US respond to the various suspicions concerning its overseas labs?”
• US must allow world scientists into its labs to investigate COVID-19 origin. “We need to respect facts, science and life. We call on the US government to clear these doubts in an open, transparent and responsible manner as soon as possible and invite scientists from all over the world to the US to investigate the origin of the novel coronavirus. The truth must be restored, which will help the US fix its reputation crippled by lies.”

Beijing military opposes US efforts to ‘stigmatize China.’ Xinhua uses the common buzzword to discourage people from associating the pandemic with China: “stigmatize.” The World Health Organization popularized the term internationally, and the word is widely used by now to prevent any word-association between the COVID-19 virus and the Chinese government. Highlights:

• Don’t stigmatize China. “China strongly opposes the attempts of some US politicians including officials from the defense departments to stigmatize China with continuous attacks since the COVID-19 outbreak,” Xinhua reports in People’s Daily, citing Chinese Ministry of National Defense spokesman Wu Qian.
• China is transparent and responsible. “The Chinese side has acted in an open, transparent, and responsible manner in the battle against the outbreak, shared the information with the global community and started international cooperation at the earliest opportunity,” Xinhua says, paraphrasing the defense ministry spokesman.
• US is ‘extremely selfish and irresponsible.’ “It is extremely selfish and irresponsible for some US politicians to shirk their responsibilities and shift the blame, said Wu, stressing that China will never take the blame from them. He added that only solidarity and cooperation can defeat the pandemic.”

Xinhua spins ODNI report on virus origin. “The top US intelligence agency said … the country’s intelligence community does not believe the coronavirus was manmade or genetically modified,” Xinhua reports on April 30. “The US intelligence community ‘concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,’ the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement.” Highlights:

• Run-on sentence checks the boxes in attempt to show ODNI suspicions are unfounded. “The ODNI said it was investigating whether the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, although the rumor has been repeatedly dismissed among scientists, who generally believe the virus jumped from animals to humans in some natural way involving farming, hunting or the transportation of wild animals.”
• Trump is politicizing intelligence. “Citing current and former US officials, the New York Times reported … that senior Trump administration officials pushed intelligence agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a lab in Wuhan was the origin of the outbreak as President Donald Trump escalated a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.”
• Intelligence and science don’t support the Wuhan lab theory. “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with HIV, Ebola, and SARS, according to the report.”
• Trump is deflecting again. “As COVID-19 deaths continue to increase in the United States, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have tried desperately to deflect criticisms about their blunders by blaming others.”

Chinese military calls US & Australian naval presence a threat to ‘peace and stability.’ The small American and Australian presence in international waters of the South China Sea is “detrimental to regaional peace and security,” the Chinese military says. Highlights:

• US is a ‘troublemaker’ who is responsible for regional militarization. “Reality has proven once again that the US is the biggest facilitator of the militarization of the South China Sea, and is a trouble-maker for the region’s peace and stability,” PLA spokesman Senior Colonel Wu Qian says.
• PLA will ensure ‘the peace and prosperity of the region.’ “The PLA will remain on high alert, and adamantly safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests, as well as the peace and prosperity of the region,” Wu says.
• PLA is a partner to fight the ‘common enemy to mankind.’ “The pandemic is a common enemy to mankind,” Wu says. “The PLA will continue to collaborate with foreign military authorities to jointly tackle the pandemic.”

Chinese journalist sentenced to 15 years for criticizing Communist Party. Former People’s Daily writer Chen Jieren is found guilty of publishing negative material about the Chinese Communist Party and is sentenced to 15 years in prison.

• CCP court issues statement. “The defendant published false information on blogs, WeChat public accounts, WeChat moments and other We-media to hype relevant cases under the guise of providing legal advice,” the court states.
• Crime: Defendant ‘attacked and vilified the Communist Party’ & called it ‘evil.’ “The court added that Chen ‘attacked and vilified the Communist Party and government,’ while also accusing him of being a part of an ‘evil force,’ along with his ex-wife and three others that illegally accumulated 7.3 million yuan (over $1 million) from their illegal activities.”

Canadian lawmakers want WHO official to testify before parliament. “Members of Parliament have issued a mandatory summons to Canadian World Health Organization expert Bruce Aylward, after he turned down repeated invitations to testify to a House of Commons committee,” the National Post reports. “Aylward is the renowned epidemiologist who led a team of WHO experts to China to study the COVID-19 outbreak in February. He and the WHO have come under criticism by some in Canada for his report on China’s ability to curb the spread of the viral disease, which has since become a worldwide pandemic.” Highlights:

• Parliamentary committee has ‘unanimous’ tasking. “‘This committee was tasked unanimously with studying Canada’s response to COVID-19,’ Conservative health critic Matt Jeneroux said of the Commons health committee’s mission.”
• WHO ‘played a key role’ in how Canada responded to pandemic. “‘The WHO has played a key role in that response. The government has been relying on data from the WHO and has been implementing measures here in Canada based on the WHO’s recommendations.’”
• WHO’s Aylward refused to testify by video… “The committee has invited Aylward to testify by video conference from Geneva, Switzerland, twice in the last month. He turned them down and the WHO instead offered to answer written questions.”
• … but Aylward gave interviews with journalists. “‘I would note for the record that Dr. Aylward has done interviews … with media outlets,’ Davies said…. ‘The WHO has been willing to make Dr. Aylward available to answer questions to the media, so I don’t see any principled reason why they would not make Dr. Aylward available to this committee to answer similar questions.”
• Lawmakers ‘unanimously’ issue mandatory summons to Aylward. “The committee voted unanimously Thursday to issue a mandatory summons, but it can only be enforced once he returns to Canadian soil.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff asks for evidence. “Trump asserts a high degree of confidence that the virus originated at a Wuhan lab,” says US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. “I haven’t seen the basis for this and have requested the Intel Community provide it, if it exists. The virus has cost the lives of scores [sic]. We must not overstate what we know and what we don’t.”

Chinese Embassy in Germany publishes 16-point pandemic rebuttal. “The Chinese embassy in Germany has posted to its website a 4,600-word rebuttal of 16 common criticisms of China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, depicting Beijing itself as a victim of disinformation,” Axios reports. Highlights:

• ‘Blends fact with propaganda’ to hold China ‘blameless.’ “Written in a ‘true or false’ fact-checking style, the German-language post seamlessly blends fact with propaganda in a sophisticated attempt to persuade German audiences that China’s response to the coronavirus was blameless,” Axios says.
• “The 16 statements — or as the post calls them, ‘myths’ — include a mix of conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins, racist stereotypes against Chinese people, and factual reporting that the Chinese government casts as flawed,” according to Axios.
• Three strategies. “The Chinese embassy’s message utilizes three strategies to blur the nature of truth,” Axios says:
  • “It intersperses obvious conspiracy theories with accurate factual reporting in the list of claims it seeks to debunk.”
  • “It cites both highly reputable sources, such as scientific journals and European research institutes, and highly disreputable sources, such as conspiracy websites.”
  • “It equates Chinese laws and policies with on-the-ground reality.”

Germany won’t agree to demand reparations from China. “German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not demanding that China pay damages for the coronavirus pandemic, opting not to follow President Trump’s lead. ‘Fighting the pandemic is the priority right now,’ a German official told the Washington Examiner. ‘The question of compensation does not arise.’”

• “We strongly support the WHO’s efforts in fighting the pandemic, and we do acknowledge China’s contributions,” the anonymous German official says.

Europe ratchets up pressure on China to cooperate with inquiry. “The European Union has urged China to cooperate with an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, increasing diplomatic pressure on Beijing for greater transparency,” the South China Morning Post reports. Highlights:

• EU confirms that China pressured it to censor its report on disinformation. “The call from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen came a day after her foreign policy aide Josep Borrell confirmed that China attempted to put pressure on the EU ahead of a report detailing the Chinese government’s disinformation campaigns.”
• Sweden wants EU to probe COVID-19’s origin. “Earlier this week, the Swedish government said it planned to ask the EU to launch an investigation into the origin of the new coronavirus, and into the World Health Organisation’s handling of the pandemic. The deadly virus so far has infected more than 1.3 million people in Europe – over a third of cases worldwide.”
• Beijing’s stubbornness fuels more pressure on regime. “Beijing has been sidestepping calls for international inquiries into the virus, calling for ‘depoliticisation’ – for politics to be taken out – of what it insists is a scientific matter. This unwillingness to commit to a joint investigation has resulted in more countries making the demand on China.”
• France and Germany remain weak links. “Other European leaders have also called for more transparency from China, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, though their exhortations fell short of von der Leyen’s stern message for China to cooperate.”
• Chinese pressure on EU inadvertently got Europeans to do what Trump could not. “A European diplomatic source said that China’s propaganda efforts in Europe directly led to the EU’s toughening stance. ‘If China had not tried to tell us it did better, or its authoritarian system worked better, Europe wouldn’t have needed to criticise China at this stage,’ he said.”

May 2

Loss of US intelligence networks in China has harmed understanding of regime. The US intelligence community is having a hard time establishing how the pandemic originated, thanks in large part to its severe loss of human agent networks inside China, Fox News reports. Highlights:

• Catastrophic US intelligence networks lost to China, 2010-2013. “Reports emerged in 2017 that China had dealt a huge blow to the CIA’s infrastructure within its borders. From 2010 through to around 2013, according to The New York Times, more than a dozen carefully curated assets in China were jailed or killed — with one even brazenly shot outside a government building as a perceived warning to others.”
• US intelligence losses harmed understanding of CCP intentions. “‘It was devastating. The setback probably delayed the U.S. national security community from fully comprehending Beijing’s move toward a more oppressive and assertive policy,’ Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific security chair for the Hudson Institute, told Fox News. ‘The gap in a sharper understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s true aims bought it more time to enact greater information suppression at home and more aggressive political warfare abroad.’”
• One of worst US intelligence defeats in history. “The moves were deemed one of the worst in the agency’s modern history. ‘We didn’t lose just a single spy. We lost entire networks,’ said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow and lead China expert at the Heritage Foundation. ‘That means that many of the various people who worked for us were all rolled up, which, in turn, would have devastated the credibility of our own agency and affected our ability to recruit new people.’”
• Beijing ran superb counterintelligence op to blind us. “‘This was a well-planned, multifaceted strategic operation. First, blind your adversary. In this case, collect intelligence by hacking or other means to identify operatives. Then, remove those human assets or sources by imprisonment or execution. This is far more subtle than blinding our satellites, which would be an overt act of war,’ explained one former U.S. Army intelligence leader. ‘The best intelligence is Human Intelligence, HUMINT, which comes from recruited assets or ‘agents.’ That is confirmed or denied by other collection such as IMINT (imagery) or SIGINT (signals collection).’”
• US suffers from huge intelligence gaps in China. “‘Our intelligence gaps in China are large enough to drive a truck through, especially when it involves the biggest challenge in intel collection: elite politics,’ noted Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society who is writing a book on Beijing’s influence in America. ‘What’s the relationship between Chairman Xi (Jinping) and the men who run the Central Military Commission, the body that oversees the Party’s military? How much control does Xi have over the Politburo Standing Committee, whose seven members, Xi included, run China? We know astonishingly little about the personalities and power politics at the top of the Party, and I assume that the intel community faces similar limitations.’”
• Very difficult for US to recruit Chinese assets now. “The years-long onslaught has subsequently made it ‘extremely challenging to recruit assets with access and placement, especially at the Wuhan Lab,’ one former defense intelligence analyst stressed.”
• Vicious circle haunts US intelligence capabilities. “‘In a situation like this, it takes a significant amount of time to first figure out what the source of exposure was, so you do not keep falling prey to the same vulnerability, and then begin the spy recruitment and onboarding cycle,” observed Greg Barbaccia, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and current expert in counterintelligence and insider threat.”
• China’s MSS services are an efficient, overwhelming machine. “‘China remains one of the largest focuses of United States intelligence collection efforts and is only ramping up,’ Barbaccia said. ‘The biggest challenge is that the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has a world-class counterintelligence and counterespionage operation. They have access to all the information that flows in, out, and through the country, as well as all possible information on their population. This makes for a supremely difficult environment to run a human source, or employ a technical collection capability.’”
• Trump is first president to dismantle China’s infiltration of US knowledge bases. “‘Over the last few years, the Trump administration has made it a priority to dismantle China’s penetration of our universities, research labs, corporations and Intelligence agencies,’ said one former Pentagon intelligence official. ‘It will take years to repair the damage and try to get ahead.’”

Most US intelligence services have ‘high’ confidence that pandemic began in Chinese lab. “Sources say not all 17 intelligence agencies agree that the lab was the source of the virus because there is not yet a definitive ‘smoking gun.’ But confidence is high among 70-75% of the agencies,” says John Roberts of Fox News. The “release is believed to be a mistake, and was not intentional.”

Five Eyes: China ‘deliberately’ concealed information, causing pandemic to spread. “China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an ‘assault on international transparency’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion,” Australia’s Saturday Telegraph reports. Highlights:

• Dossier lays basis for accusing China of ‘negligence.’ “The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.”
• Beijing ‘covered up,’ silenced or ‘disappeared’ doctors, and destroyed lab evidence. “It states that to the ‘endangerment of other countries’ the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or ‘disappearing’ doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.”
• Australia funded Chinese lab that modified bat-to-human coronaviruses with no cure. “It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is now the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.”
• Wuhan lab’s Shi Zhengli and team are major subjects of concern. “As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern.”
  • COVID-19-like synthesis. “It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated.”
• ‘Deadly denial of human-to-human transmission.’ “Its major themes include the ‘deadly denial of human-to-human transmission,’ the silencing or ‘disappearing’ of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and ‘bleaching of wildlife market stalls,’ along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.”
• Australia trained Wuhan virologists in Chinese Academy of Sciences partnership. “Key figures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology team, who feature in the government dossier, were either trained or employed in the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they conducted foundational research on deadly pathogens in live bats, including SARS, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
• Partnership remains. “This partnership continues to this day, according to the website of the Wuhan ­Institute of Virology, despite concerns the research is too risky.”
• Five Eyes are investigating. “Politicians in the Morrison government are speaking out about the national security and biosecurity concerns of this relationship as the controversial research into bat-related viruses now comes into sharp focus amid the investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK.”

Clever Chinese Lego video meme spreads party line. “Once Upon a Virus,” a clever video meme of two characters made of Legos, spreads the Chinese Communist Party line virally online. “In the animation posted online by China’s official Xinhua news agency, red curtains open to reveal a stage featuring Lego-like figures in the form of a terracotta warrior wearing a face mask and the Statue of Liberty,” Reuters reports. “As the [Chinese Lego] warrior issues warnings about the virus and counts off the grim milestones in China’s outbreak, the Statue of Liberty replies dismissively with echoes of Trump’s press conferences in which he played down the severity of the illness.” Xinhua posted the video to YouTube on April 29.

May 3

Pompeo: Chinese regime purposely withheld information, leading to pandemic. The virus escaped from a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan, and the Chinese Communist Party is to blame for covering it up and unleashing the global pandemic, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo states. Here are the highlights of his interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz:

• Pompeo: ‘This is classic communist disinformation effort.’ “We can confirm that the Chinese Communist Party did all that it could to make sure that the world didn’t learn in a timely fashion about what was taking place. There’s lots of evidence of that. Some of it you can see in public, right? We’ve seen announcements. We’ve seen the fact that they kicked journalists out. We saw the fact that those who were trying to report on this – medical professionals inside of China – were silenced. They shut down reporting. All the kind of things that authoritarian regimes do. It’s the way the Communist Party has operated. This is classic communist disinformation effort.”
• Pompeo: US will hold Chinese regime responsible. “That created enormous risk, and now you can see hundreds of thousands of people around the world, tens of thousands in the United States, have been harmed.  President Trump is very clear:  We’re going to hold those responsible accountable and we’ll do so on a timeline that is our own.”
• ‘Enormous evidence’ that virus began in Wuhan lab. Raddatz asks, “Mr. Secretary, have you seen anything that gives you high confidence that it originated in that Wuhan lab?” Pompeo responds:
  • ‘Virus … originated in Wuhan, China.’ “Martha, there is enormous evidence that that’s where this began. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China.”
  • ‘China has a history of infecting the world.’ “We took a lot of grief for that from the outside, but I think the whole world can see now. Remember, China has a history of infecting the world and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab. And so while the Intelligence Community continues to do its work, they should continue to do that and verify so that we are certain, I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.
• Pompeo: Put everything in context. To clarify an apparent error, Raddatz asks, “So just to be clear, you do not think it was man-made or genetically modified?” Pompeo replies:
  • Chinese Communist Party could have prevented this calamity. “I’ve seen what the Intelligence Community has said.  I have no reason to believe that they’ve got it wrong. But you have to put this in context. Here’s what’s important, Martha. Here’s what’s important. The Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that has befallen the world, and here we find ourselves today – you and I were talking about we haven’t seen each other physically for a long time. That’s true of people all across the world.”
  • Chinese Communist Party created the crisis. “This is an enormous crisis created by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment, that authoritarian regimes do. Had those scientists been operating in America, they would have put this out, there would have been the exchange of ideas, and we would have quickly identified the kinds of things that needed to be done in response.”
  • China regime ‘employed World Health Organization as a tool’ of deception. “Instead, China behaved like authoritarian regimes do.  It attempted to conceal and hide and confuse. It employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same.”
  • Australians agree, Europeans begin to agree that it’s China’s fault. “These are the kind of things that have now presented this enormous crisis, an enormous loss of life, and tremendous economic cost all across the globe. The Australians agree with that. You hear the Europeans beginning to say the same thing.  I think the whole world is united in understanding that China brought this virus to the world.”
• Pompeo won’t say if China’s virus release was accidental or deliberate. Raddatz asks, “And just very quickly, if we can, Mr. Secretary – we’re running out of time – do you think they intentionally released that virus, or it was an accident in the lab?” Pompeo responds:
  • China is preventing any independent investigation. “I don’t have anything to say about that. I think there’s a lot to know. But I can say this: We’ve done our best to try and answer all of those questions. We tried to get a team in there. The World Health Organization tried to get a team in there. And they have failed. No one has been allowed to go to this lab or any of the other laboratories. There are many labs inside of China, Martha.”
  • ‘Chinese Communist Party continues to block access.’ “This risk remains. This is an ongoing challenge. We still need to get in there. We still don’t have the virus samples we need. This is an ongoing threat, an ongoing pandemic, and the Chinese Communist Party continues to block access to the Western world, the world’s best scientists, to figure out exactly what happened. So I can’t answer your question about that because the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.”

British intelligence warned of China’s coverup shortly after the outbreak. “Ministers were made ‘fully aware’ by intelligence agencies that China had covered up the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak, it was claimed on Sunday night, raising questions over Britain’s decision to delay the lockdown,” The Telegraph reports in London. Highlights:

• Early UK reports warned that Beijing’s claims were false. “The UK Government was told ‘not to believe Beijing’s claims’ from the outset and to treat information coming out of China with scepticism, The Telegraph A senior former MI6 official said the intelligence agencies knew what was ‘really happening’ in China and passed that information to ministers.”
• Focus is now on Wuhan Institute of Virology as pandemic source. “The spotlight is being turned on the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology amid claims that lax biosecurity may have allowed the disease, being examined in the lab, to somehow escape. A Chinese television news report dating from two years ago shows scientists in the institute’s ‘emerging viruses group’ wearing only lab coats and latex gloves but no other form of protective personal equipment.”
• China’s official figures severely understated the casualties. “The latest studies suggest the true number of people infected in China in the first wave, dating back to mid-February, was close to a quarter of a million – four times higher than the official figure. China has also since revised its death toll up by 50 per cent.”
• British government continued using China’s official figures until late April. “Downing Street continued to use China’s official figures in comparative graphs on the scale of the outbreak until just over a week ago, but then dropped the country from the charts over concerns about the accuracy of the data.”
• ‘The role of the intelligence community’ is to know the real figures and why they’re hidden. “A former senior intelligence officer at MI6 said on Sunday: ‘The intelligence community would have known what was really happening in China. The idea that the UK would have taken Chinese figures at face value is frankly ridiculous. If the Chinese are lying, the role of the intelligence community is to know what the real figures might be if they are being hidden.’”
• Call for parliamentary probe into what intelligence informed government. “Dominic Grieve, the former Attorney General and ex-chair of the Intelligence Select Committee (ISC), said there was a need for MPs to investigate what intelligence was collected on Covid-19 in China and what was passed back to senior ministers in the weeks before the pandemic gripped the UK.”
• ‘All the more evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’ was not secure. “Matthew Henderson, director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, the thinktank which uncovered the video from inside the Wuhan laboratory, said: ‘This video adds all the more evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology – which was handling lethal new coronavirus strains – was not observing basic biosecurity.’”
  • Wuhan lab had ‘lax biosecurity standards.’ “Given what we now know about lax biosecurity standards, it is at the very least plausible that human error at a virology lab contributed to the spread of the pandemic,” Henderson says.
  • Henderson: “Since Beijing refuses independent access to these sites, their records and their research, why should we think otherwise?”
• Chinese embassy states party line. “In a statement, the Chinese embassy in London said: ‘The head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology stressed in an interview that the institute is run on a set of strict management rules. High-level bioresearch safety labs have sophisticated protective facilities and strict measures to ensure the safety of laboratory staff and protect the environment from contamination.’”
  • Don’t ‘damage international solidarity’ by asking questions. “The embassy said there was ‘zero infection’ within the institute, adding: ‘There is no evidence showing the virus came from a lab. Rumour-mongering, as well as slander and smear, will only damage international solidarity.'”

Five Eyes report is fake news, CCP says. “Western media outlets, particularly those in Australia, have lost their self-proclaimed journalistic professionalism and independence, as they rushed to hype an unverified ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence report that clearly seeks to smear China’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic,” the CCP’s Global Times says, citing “a Chinese expert.” The article raises several themes:

• Calls for independent investigation could ‘exacerbate rising tensions’ with China. “The latest development out of Australia could also exacerbate rising tensions between China and Australia over the latter’s call for an investigation into China’s handling of COVID-19. . . .”
• Australian media are unprofessional and not objective. “Australian media, in hyping up such an unverifiable research dossier to smear China, has lost journalistic professionalism and objectivity. Some Australian media reports are always full of ideological bias against China and show their lack of confidence.”
• It’s all just a diversion from the West’s own failures. “Chinese officials have repeatedly criticized some western media and politicians for playing up the so-called ‘China concealing the epidemic’ theory, calling such efforts are [sic] attempt to cover up their own failures in containing the virus in their countries.”
  • “Australia and some other Western countries made a fatal mistake in their handling of the pandemic and now seek to blame the WHO and China for their failure to fight the outbreak.”
• China is the most open and always has been. “The Chinese Foreign Ministry has already provided specific timelines detailing the main facts about China’s timely release of information on the epidemic, sharing of experiences on prevention and control, and promoting international cooperation on the prevention and control of COVID-19 since the end of December.” [The article purports to elaborate on China’s forthrightness with WHO since the beginning.]
• Western governments that differ with WHO must be wrong. “Some Western accusations against China over the COVID-19 even run counter to the findings of the WHO and even public statements from their own officials.”
• China opposes ‘so-called international investigations’ with presumption of guilt. “What the Chinese side opposes is putting China in the dock without any evidence, presuming guilt in advance and then seeking evidence through so-called international investigations . . . it is well known that so-called ‘information’ from the US intelligence community has caused many disasters to the world.”
• Australia should follow China’s ‘profound friendship’ and not be a tool of USA. “Some Australian media and political elites have lost their independent judgment of the country’s overall interests and have adopted a US-led approach to smearing China over COVID-19. They are hurting the profound friendship between the two peoples and the common interests that have long coalesced.”

WHO still isn’t inviting Taiwan to share its success experience. The World Health Organization has not sent Taiwan an invitation to share the experience of its success in containing the Wuhan virus at its upcoming virtual assembly on May 18. Highlights from Reuters:

• Taiwan understates issue. Taiwan foreign ministry diplomatically says it has “not yet” received an invitation from WHO.
• Beijing: WHO must abide by ‘One China’ principle. “The Taiwan region is part of China. The Taiwan region’s participation in international bodies, including the activities of the WHO, must be handled in accordance with the ‘one China’ principle,” the Chinese mission in Geneva says.
• Beijing: US seeks to ‘politicize’ the Taiwan participation issue. “Beijing has repeatedly condemned Washington for seeking to ‘politicize’ the issue of Taiwan’s participation at the WHO, and both China and the WHO say Taiwan has been provided with the help and information it needs during the coronavirus pandemic,” Reuters says.
• WHO ‘ignored’ Taiwan after outbreak. “Taiwan says it has only received limited information and that the WHO ignored its initial enquiries about the outbreak,” Reuters reports.

People’s Daily lashes out against reparations proposal, blames US for pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party’s authoritative People’s Daily rails against American proposals for the regime to pay reparations for unleashing the pandemic, while disclaiming any responsibility and alleging that the COVID-19 virus originated in an US military laboratory. This article becomes a template for others. Highlights:

• Blaming Chinese regime is just a ‘political show’ to ‘politicize’ disease. “Some U.S. politicians are making the COVID-19 pandemic a political show, from repeatedly politicizing the disease and stigmatizing other countries, to the lousy cliché of claiming compensation. The political farce staged again and again by the U.S…”
• Blaming Chinese regime is a diversion that undermines cooperation. “However, trying to divert people’s attention, the U.S. politicians showed no conscience, and they shall never be tolerated for undermining international cooperation.”
• US politicians ‘blatantly violated’ WHO ‘rules’ and said ‘Chinese Virus’ & ‘Wuhan Virus.’ “According to the best practices for naming new human infectious diseases jointly made by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international organizations, disease names shall not include countries or regions. However, the U.S. politicians blatantly violated the rules and called the novel coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus.; While the international society is generally lauding China’s contribution made at huge sacrifice, they are forming cliques for blackmailing.”
• Suing Chinese regime is ‘affront to international law and justice.’ “What they have done is an affront to international law and justice. The terms about sovereign immunity in the international law stipulate that the practices and treasure of a country are not bound to the legislation, jurisdiction or administration of other countries. More importantly, the sudden outbreak of an epidemic is a global public health incidence, which is considered force majeure in legal context. … However, some U.S. politicians did not drop the idea at all to claim compensation, and they resorted to exceptions of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.”
• Chinese regime is always ‘open, transparent, timely and responsible.’ “It is globally recognized that China has always responded to the epidemic and shared relevant information in an open, transparent, timely and responsible manner, and the country was hailed by the WHO for its moves’ high speed and massive scale which are rarely seen in the world. China’s all-out efforts have established a strong line of defense.”
• US Army lab is suspect. “What on earth happened in the bioweapons lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland?”
• America’s Patient Zero had no China travel history. “When did the earliest COVID-19 infection happen in the U.S., since a COVID-19 patient without travel history to China died on Feb. 6?”
• American scientists are being silenced. “Why are American scientists silenced for publishing COVID-19 studies in the U.S. which always brags about its freedom of speech?”
• US won’t release genetic sequencing results like China and Europe have. “Chinese and European scientists have published multiple genetic sequencing results of the novel coronavirus, and why doesn’t the U.S. release its studies as the top power in biogenetic studies? The U.S. politicians must give answers.”
• US should be held responsible for 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ and more. “The 1918 flu pandemic originated in the U.S. and caused a huge humanitarian disaster, and who is to blame for that? The first AIDS infection emerged in the U.S. and later the virus spread to over 75 million people around the world and led to 35 million deaths, and who should compensate for the loss? The Wall Street Journal is the origin of the 2008 financial crisis, so when will the U.S. compensate the world for the losses over trillions of dollars?”

Max Boot becomes an echo chamber. Russian-born pundit Max Boot, who spread Russian disinformation conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s disproven “collusion” with the Kremlin, now reinforces Chinese propaganda themes in a Washington Post op-ed. Highlights from Boot’s essay:

• The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic ‘should be known as the American flu.’ The “Spanish Flu” was “spread around the world by U.S. soldiers initially infected at Camp Funston in Kansas. It should be known as the ‘American flu’ or ‘Kansas flu.’”
• China’s coverups and lies are just like America’s. “The influenza became a global pandemic in no small part because U.S. officials failed to warn their own citizens — or the world. Many, in fact, lied to avoid undermining the war effort.”
• By pro-reparations logic, America should have paid reparations to the world. “So should the nations of the world have punished the United States and demanded reparations for its role in spreading one of the most destructive diseases in history? That would seem to be the logic of the China hawks who demand that China be punished because the novel coronavirus originated there.”
• Extracting reparations from CCP will harm America’s economy. “The Post reports that ‘senior U.S. officials are beginning to explore proposals for punishing or demanding financial compensation from China for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.’ Some within the administration have even talked of canceling part of the U.S. debt obligation to China. Talk about a cure being worse than the disease: No step is more calculated to shake the faith of global financial markets.”
• Trump is scapegoating China. “Not even President Trump is likely to go that far, but he is eager to scapegoat China for a pandemic that has infected more than 1.1 million Americans, killed more than 68,000 and left more than 30 million jobless.”
• China covered up, but it’s still Trump’s fault. “It’s true that China initially tried to cover up the coronavirus outbreak. It didn’t lock down Wuhan until Jan.  23. One study found that if China had acted even two weeks earlier, it could have averted 86 percent of its coronavirus cases. But another study shows that if Trump had announced social distancing guidelines two weeks earlier — on March 2, rather than March 16 — he could have prevented 90 percent of U.S. coronavirus deaths.”
  • [Note how Boot avoids saying that the Chinese government could have prevented 95 percent of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide if it had not covered up, let alone 100 percent had it not run a lab containing the virus, and instead blames the President instead of Beijing for American casualties.]
• ‘China did a lot wrong,’ but it’s really Trump’s fault. “China did a lot wrong, but it’s not China’s fault that Trump didn’t listen to the warnings of the U.S. intelligence community starting in early January. Instead, Trump naively believed Beijing’s false assurances.”
• Trump should be thanking Xi Jinping. “Now, rather than thank Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump wants to pillory him.”
• Trump is probably making it all up. “He claims to have secret evidence that the virus originated at a Chinese research facility in Wuhan. But Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says he hasn’t ‘seen the basis for this.’”
• Wuhan lab leak is ‘unlikely,’ but even if it’s true, Trump is still a bungler. “Even in the unlikely event that the outbreak was the result of a lab accident, that still wouldn’t absolve Trump of bungling the United States’ response…”
• Authoritarian Singapore and Communist Vietnam are better than POTUS. “… while nations much closer to China, such as Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea, have done much better.”
• Don’t punish the poor Chinese regime. Cooperate instead. “Rather than seeking to punish China for a disease that has killed at least 4,633 of its citizens and cost it billions of dollars — isn’t that punishment enough? — the United States should cooperate with Beijing in developing a vaccine and cure.”
  • [Note how Boot uses official CCP figures of 4,633 Chinese deaths as evidence of China’s suffering, after saying that the US has lost 68,000 people to the pandemic and blaming it all on the president.]
• Can’t bring himself to call Chinese regime ‘evil.’ “The Chinese regime is no angel — it is a brutal dictatorship that censors information, jails dissidents, commits atrocities against the Uighurs and bullies its neighbors.”
• If US demands reparations from China, others might demand reparations for ‘American flu.’ “The United States would be better advised to focus on those genuine abuses rather than playing the pandemic blame game — lest other nations start demanding reparations for the 1918 flu.”

Xi Jinping is exploiting pandemic to build his ‘China Dream.’ The Chinese regime is exploiting the pandemic to accelerate implementation of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” a strategy to make China the world’s dominant superpower, Claudia Rosett writes in the Dallas Morning News. Highlights:

• “To that end, Xi has been exploiting the chaos, fear and ruin of the coronavirus pandemic to try to advance an agenda that would place China at the center of a new global order.”
• “Xi’s aim is a world in which his totalitarian Chinese Communist Party, bolstered by his aggressively modernizing military, sets the norms and calls the shots.”
• “Increasingly, under Xi, there is a no-holds-barred quality to the deceptions, propaganda and threats that Beijing is pumping into the international mainstream. A signal moment came in March, when Beijing, via China’s Xinhua state news agency, threatened to plunge America into ‘the might sea of coronavirus’ by withholding vital medicines and. Precursors that were once made in America, but are now manufactured in China.”
• “Instead of responding with contrition, transparency and reform, Xi’s regime has doubled down, framing the struggle against this microbe as a contest between Beijing and Washington. This is part of Xi’s larger showdown for supremacy, played out, in this case, in the arena of disease control.”
• “Naturally, China’s regime, with its massive apparatus of surveillance and coercion, does enjoy certain grotesque advantages in imposing lockdowns and enforcing quarantines.”
• “And then there’s China’s miraculously immune military. While US soldiers and sailors grapple with the highly infectious coronavirus, China has repeatedly assured the world that not a single member of the People’s Liberation Army has come down with it. . . .”
• “To further fortify China’s position as a world leader in disease control, China also tried to disown the coronavirus entirely.”

White House opposes canceling the US government’s $1.09 trillion debt to China. The Trump Administration is opposed to canceling the United States government’s $1.09 debt to China, the Epoch Times reports. The US says it will make Beijing pay for the pandemic in other ways, but the US must honor its debts to protect the value of the dollar. Highlights:

• ‘Protect the sanctity of the dollar.’ “You start playing those games, and that’s tough. We have the dollar to protect. We want to protect the sanctity of the dollar, the importance of the dollar. It’s the greatest currency in the history of the world,” Trump said.
• ‘We can do it other ways.’ “We can do it with tariffs. We can do it other ways, even beyond that, without having to play that game. That’s a rough game,” Trump said.
• Canceling the US debt would damage US credibility worldwide. “Economists believe canceling the debt would damage the credibility of the U.S. government. Such a move would drop the value of U.S. government bonds and increase the interest rates, causing a global financial turmoil,” according to the Epoch Times.
• Kudlow: ‘Full faith and credit of US debt is sacrosanct.’ “When asked about the possibility of canceling debt held by China, top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Politico: ‘Absolutely not. Full faith and credit of U.S. debt is sacrosanct. And so is dependable currency as the world’s reserve currency. Period. Full stop.'”

Someone sends message in name of Wuhan lab’s ‘Bat Woman,’ denying her defection. Top Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Shi Zhengli, who has not been seen for months, supposedly sends out a social media post denying that she defected to West. Chinese regime says she didn’t defect, but doesn’t show her in public, Press Trust of India reports.

American scientist who worked at Wuhan reinforces CCP view. University of California-Davis epidemiologist Jonna Mazet, who worked with and trained Wuhan lab workers, gets favored attention in CCP outlets to air her views which reinforce those of the regime. China Daily touts a May 2 Business Insider article featuring Mazet.

Other

• CCP assails US lawmakers for criticizing its ‘press controls;’ calls Wall Street Journal ‘racist’ and says US must reinstate CCP journalists (Global Times)
• Trump imposes tariffs on China as ‘distraction to deflect blame.’ (Global Times)

May 4

Senior White House official speaks in Mandarin to Chinese people about populism. In what is believed to be a historic first, a senior White House official makes a speech, in Mandarin, to the people of China. Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger makes the address at the University of Virginia with a specific and soft message to the Chinese people. Pottinger links the 101st anniversary of a historic pro-Western, modernizing movement in China with Chinese heroes in the Wuhan pandemic, and hints strongly at stoking Chinese populism against the Communist Party. Highlights in English (see video here):

• Historic anniversary. “When Professor Lin [of the University of Virginia] told me this event would land precisely on the 101st anniversary of the start of China’s historic May Fourth Movement, I knew I had a potent topic for discussing the China of then and now.”
  • 101st anniversary of Tiananmen protest. “On May the fourth, 1919, following the end of World War I, thousands of university students from across Beijing converged on Tiananmen Square to protest China’s unfair treatment at the Paris Peace Conference. Western nations chose to appease Imperial Japan by granting it control of Chinese territory that Germany had previously occupied, including the Shandong Peninsula.”
  • ‘Principled move that acknowledged popular anger.’ “The Chinese students who marched to Tiananmen that day shouted ‘give us back Shandong!’ and ‘don’t sign the Versailles Treaty!’ Police forced the students to disperse. But, as frequently happens when governments close down avenues for peaceful expression, some protesters resorted to violence. In a principled move that acknowledged popular anger, China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles later that year.”
  • US helped China regain its lost territory. “China would regain control of Shandong three years later with the help of the United States, which brokered an agreement at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922.”
  • Movement for ‘soul of modern China.’ “But the movement ignited by those students exactly 101 years ago was about much more than nationalist outrage at ‘unequal treaties.’ The movement galvanized a long-running struggle for the soul of modern China.”
  • American-educated movement leader brought literacy to China. “Hu Shih is naturally identified as one of the most influential leaders of the May Fourth era. He was already an influential thinker on modernizing China. … Hu Shih studied at Columbia University under the American educator John Dewey.”
    • Resisting the ruling elites. “Hu Shih would contribute one of the greatest gifts imaginable to the Chinese people: The gift of language. Up until then, China’s written language was ‘classical,’ featuring a grammar and vocabulary largely unchanged for centuries…. The inaccessibility of the written language presented a gulf between rulers and the ruled—and that was the point. The written word—literacy itself—was the domain primarily of a small ruling elite and of intellectuals, many of whom aspired to serve as officials. Literacy simply wasn’t for ‘the masses.'”
    • ‘Plain speech.’ “Hu Shih believed otherwise. He played a key role promoting a written language rooted in the vernacular, or baihua—literally ‘plain speech.’  Hu Shih’s promotion of baihua is an idea so obvious in hindsight that it is easy to miss how revolutionary it was at the time.  It was also highly controversial.”
  • Regime elitism, then and now. “Such elitist chauvinism was—and some would argue still remains—a headwind impeding the democratic ideals espoused by the May Fourth Movement. Hu Shih, wielding the language he had helped bring to life, skillfully dismantled arguments against broadening the social contract.”
• Taiwan proves that China and democracy are compatible. “The cliché that Chinese people can’t be trusted with democracy was, as both P.C. Chang and Hu Shih knew, the most unpatriotic idea of all. Taiwan today is a living repudiation of that threadbare mistruth.”
• Wuhan martyrs are heirs to May Fourth movement. “So who embodies the May Fourth spirit in China today? To my mind, the heirs of May Fourth are civic-minded citizens who commit small acts of bravery. And sometimes big acts of bravery.”
  • Persecuted Wuhan physician. “Dr. Li Wenliang was such a person. Dr. Li wasn’t a demagogue in search of a new ideology that might save China. He was an ophthalmologist and a young father who committed a small act of bravery and then a big act of bravery. His small act of bravery, in late December, was to pass along a warning via WeChat to his former medical school classmates that patients afflicted by a dangerous new virus were turning up in Wuhan hospitals. He urged his friends to protect their families.”
    • Dr Li spent his last days in fear. “When his warning circulated more widely than he intended, Dr. Li was upset and anxious—and with good reason. Supervisors at his hospital quickly admonished him for leaking word of the coronavirus cases. Dr. Li was then interrogated by the police, made to sign a ‘confession,’ and threatened with prosecution if he spoke out again.”
    • Xi Jinping’s central government persecuted him… “Anyone tempted to believe this was just a case of overzealous local police, take note: China’s central government aired a news story about Dr. Li’s ‘rumor-mongering.'”
    • … but Dr Li overcame his fear. “Then Dr. Li did a big brave thing. He went public with his experience of being silenced by the police. The whole world paid close attention. By this time, Dr. Li had contracted the disease he’d warned about. His death on February 7 felt like the loss of a relative for people around the world.”
    • Dr Li was using Hu Shih-style ‘plain speech.’ “Dr. Li’s comment to a reporter from his deathbed still rings in our ears: ‘I think there should be more than one voice in a healthy society, and I don’t approve of using public power for excessive interference.’ Dr. Li was using Hu Shih-style ‘plain speech’ to make a practical point.”
  • The courage of journalists and those who speak to them. “It takes courage to speak to a reporter—or to work as one—in today’s China. Even finding an investigative reporter in China, foreign or local, is getting hard. Citizen journalists who tried to shed light on the outbreak in Wuhan went missing, including Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua.”
    • Worse than the USSR. “More foreign reporters were expelled in recent months than the Soviet Union expelled over decades.”
    • The fate of Dr Ai Fen. “Dr. Ai Fen, a colleague of Dr. Li Wenliang who also raised the alarm about the outbreak in Wuhan, reportedly can no longer appear in public after she spoke to a reporter. When small acts of bravery are stamped out by governments, big acts of bravery follow.”
• China is full of courageous resisters. “We have seen big acts of moral and physical courage recently by people pursuing the ideals that Hu Shih and P.C. Chang championed a century ago.”
  • Political insiders, religious believers, and Hong Kong protesters. “Some are political insiders; some have devoted their lives to God. Others follow the long tradition of scholars serving as China’s conscience. Many are regular citizens. Xu Zhangrun, Ren Zhiqiang, Xu Zhiyong, Ilham Tohti, Fang Fang, 20 Catholic priests who have refused to subordinate God to the Communist Party, and the millions of Hong Kong citizens who peacefully demonstrated for the rule of law last year. The list goes on.”
  • CCP will brand the courageous as enemies. “Will the movement’s democratic aspirations remain unfulfilled for another century? Will its core ideas be deleted or distorted through official censorship and disinformation? Will its champions be slandered as ‘unpatriotic,’ ‘pro-American,’ ‘subversive’? We know the Communist Party will do its best to make it so.”
• How about ‘a little more populism.’ “One final thought, from a U.S. perspective: Hu Shih famously preferred solving concrete problems to wallowing in abstract political theory. But let me break his rule against discussing “isms” to ask whether China today would benefit from a little less nationalism and a little more populism.”
  • Consent of the governed: ‘Democratic populism’ is ‘top versus bottom.’ “Democratic populism is less about left versus right than top versus bottom. It’s about reminding a few that they need the consent of many to govern.”
  • The abusive, privileged few breed populism. “When a privileged few grow too remote and self-interested, populism is what pulls them back or pitches them overboard. It has a kinetic energy. It fueled the Brexit vote of 2015 and President Trump’s election in 2016. It moved the founder of your university to pen a declaration of independence in 1776. It is an admonition to the powerful of this country to remember who they’re supposed to work for: America first.”
  • May Fourth movement was populist. “Wasn’t a similar idea beating in the heart of the May Fourth Movement, too? Weren’t Hu Shih’s language reforms a declaration of war against aristocratic pretension?”
  • Goal: Citizen-centric, not regime-centric government. “Weren’t they a broadside against the Confucian power structure that enforced conformity over free thought? Wasn’t the goal to achieve citizen-centric government in China, and not replace one regime-centric model with another one? The world will wait for the Chinese people to furnish the answers.”

Department of Homeland Security says China concealed virus danger to hoard emergency supplies. “U.S. officials believe China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak — and how contagious the disease is — to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it, intelligence documents show,” the Associated Press reports. Highlights:

• Intentional concealment. “Chinese leaders ‘intentionally concealed the severity’ of the pandemic from the world in early January, according to a four-page Department of Homeland Security intelligence report dated May 1 and obtained by The Associated Press.”
• Regime must be held accountable. “The revelation comes as the Trump administration has intensified its criticism of China, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying Sunday that that country was responsible for the spread of disease and must be held accountable.”
• China increased imports & decreased exports while downplaying severity. “Not classified but marked ‘for official use only,’ the DHS analysis states that, while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, China increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies. It attempted to cover up doing so by ‘denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data,’ the analysis states.”
• China withheld informing WHO while hoarding international medical supplies. “The report also says China helEffd off informing the World Health Organization that the coronavirus ‘was a contagion’ for much of January so it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of face masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.”
• 95% probability. “Those conclusions are based on the 95% probability that China’s changes in imports and export behavior were not within normal range, according to the report.”

CCP outlet again makes the virus a US election issue. “As the U.S. presidential election campaigns are underway, the Trump administration has implemented a strategy designed to divert attention from the incompetence it has displayed in fighting the pandemic,” the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times says in an editorial.

Party line on the Wuhan lab origin. The Global Times lays out the party line on how to deal with American, Australian, British, and other allegations that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan lab:

• Trump is waging ‘propaganda warfare’ to ‘impede global efforts’ against the pandemic. “The Trump administration continues to engage in unprecedented propaganda warfare while trying to impede global efforts in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The most urgent tasks for international communities are to prevent the virus from spreading and to save lives while restarting the world economy. Ironically, Washington has put forth the weakest efforts in accomplishing the aforementioned tasks.”
• White House is blaming China to ‘divert attention’ from its failures. “As the US presidential election campaigns are underway, the Trump administration has implemented a strategy designed to divert attention from the incompetence it has displayed in fighting the pandemic. It is clear that their goal is to blame China for the pandemic by pinpointing the country as the source of COVID-19.”
• Origin of virus is ‘serious scientific matter’ but no scientist believes Wuhan lab origin. “The origin of the virus is of serious scientific concern. So far, not one world-renowned scientist has accused the Wuhan Institute of Virology of leaking the virus.”
• US has transformed a ‘scientific question’ into ‘a vicious attack.’ “US intelligence agencies, acting on orders from US President Donald Trump, have been involved with the investigation. Pompeo has recently declared that he has ‘enormous evidence’ about a so-called ‘lab leak.’ As a result, what was originally a scientific question, has been transformed into a vicious attack fueled by politics, intelligence, and diplomacy. Such filthy behavior defies the essence of science to mislead the general public.”
• US should reveal its intelligence to the public. “If Washington has solid evidence, then it should let research institutes and scientists examine and verify it. Another option would be to have intelligence agencies release a detailed report on the origin of the virus, which would help the White House keep its fabrications moving forward. Washington has chosen not to pursue either of those options and instead is utilizing a politician like Pompeo to bluff US society with so-called ‘enormous evidence.’”
• Western ‘rumors’ are to push ‘ideological bias against China.’ “Spreading such rumors is a byproduct of the US and other Western countries that promote an ideological bias against China, so their leaders can manipulate public opinion. The US is using its political influence to achieve this goal.”
• Pompeo is attacking ‘the Communist Party of China and China’s political system.’ “Pompeo’s recent actions were a direct assault on the Communist Party of China and China’s political system. He has also helped fuel anti-China hostility throughout the Western world by covering up his lies. Pompeo believes that he would never be held accountable even if it was discovered that he was not telling the truth.”
• It’s all about the November elections. “By sacrificing his credibility as a politician, Pompeo is doing whatever he can to secure a victory for Trump and the Republicans in November. Indeed, it has become a reckless pursuit. …”
• ‘A second outbreak could strike the US.’ “Trying to activate the economy under such difficult conditions is risky as a second outbreak could strike the US in winter. With the November election approaching, and amid increasing threats from the virus, it would be a herculean task for the Trump administration to win a second term without borrowing the anti-China mojo from voters.”
• US allegations of Chinese coverup have no credibility because US ignored warnings. “Previously, the US government had focused on accusing China of covering up the pandemic. The accusation has since lost any credibility as recently undisclosed documents revealed the US ignored warnings from other countries and organizations during the onset of the outbreak.”
• Suspicion of Wuhan lab is a diversion to cover up Trump’s ‘pandemic malfeasance.’ “The revelations have inspired the US government to launch an assault aimed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, claiming that the facility leaked the virus, so it can evade being charged with pandemic malfeasance.”
• US request for access to Wuhan lab is ‘meant to create further disputes.’ “Pompeo has asked China to grant the US access to the Wuhan laboratory. The move is meant to create further disputes, which would take more time to resolve and heighten US public dissatisfaction against China.”
• Pompeo is passing the buck for gross political ends and cares nothing of facts or morals. “As US Secretary of State, Pompeo is using a pass-the-buck strategy to misdirect public attention and create public opinions that serve White House and Congressional interests. For Pompeo, and others like him, facts and morals have no value.  The ultimate goal now is to win the election. If US public anger and dissatisfaction emerged due to Washington’s incompetence over how it handled the pandemic, then the Trump administration would lose in November.  Such an outcome would put an end to the games.”
• Pompeo is isolated, with no scientific or intelligence support or ‘moral compass.’ “Pompeo is indulging in a solo performance that has failed to adhere to the professional standards expected of a chief diplomat. His claims are not supported by scientists or reliable intelligence. It is foreseeable that this politician, who has lost his moral compass, will continue to surprise the world with his absurd theories and twisted facts.”

Purported internal MSS report warns that the world is turning against Beijing. Reuters reports from Beijing on a purported internal Ministry of State Security (MSS) product that warns of a US-led global isolation of China unseen since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. [Such things aren’t leaked unless the CPP wants them leaked.] Highights:

• ‘Global anti-China sentiment’ highest in 30+ years. “The report, presented early last month by the Ministry of State Security to top Beijing leaders including President Xi Jinping, concluded that global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the sources said.”
• US leads global ‘anti-China sentiment’ and Beijing must be prepared for war. “As a result, Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment led by the United States in the aftermath of the pandemic and needs to be prepared in a worst-case scenario for armed confrontation between the two global powers, according to people familiar with the report’s content, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the matter.”
• MSS ‘think tank’ is the source. “The report was drawn up by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, China’s top intelligence body.”

Regime’s internal & external propaganda become more nationalistic. “The newscast blares from a television set in a Beijing apartment, carrying through an open window and echoing across the compound. The refrain is the same every evening: praise for China’s handling of the coronavirus, dire scenes from foreign hospitals and condemnations of the United States,” the Los Angeles Times reports from Beijing. Highlights:

• Fake sympathy toward enemy Americans. “The tone is often withering. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo was declared ‘the public enemy of humanity.’ A few nights later, the anchor feigned sympathy for Americans, who she said were left to die while their government railed against China.”
• Hybrid of self-congratulation, denial of own missteps, horror at other countries. “Beijing has pushed this story line at home for months — a mixture of self-congratulation for defeating the virus, denial of central government missteps, and horror at other countries’ failures to contain the pandemic.”
• ‘Strident nationalist message’ provokes ‘backlash.’ “Now, facing escalating international criticism over its handling of the outbreak and growing demands for an investigation into its origins, China has taken its strident nationalist message abroad. The strategy is provoking a backlash and colliding with President Trump’s insistence that China covered up the danger of the pathogen.”
• Invective matches Xi Jinping’s swagger during huge internal crisis. “The undiplomatic invective matches the swagger of Xi Jinping’s China, which is richer and more influential than ever, and determined to shape the global narrative as it believes a superpower should — especially as the Chinese president confronts the biggest crisis of his tenure. Beijing sees itself as ascendant at a time that the United States’ stature as a world leader is ebbing.”
• CCP unleashes its ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats. “Rising to China’s defense is a generation of diplomats and pundits dubbed the “Wolf Warriors,” after a recent pair of blockbuster action films featuring a muscled, globe-trotting Chinese commando who vanquishes Asian drug lords, African pirates and mercenaries led by a villainous American named Big Daddy.”
• Chinese ambassadors assail foreign officials & push disinformation to ‘deflect blame.’ “Chinese ambassadors are attacking foreign officials on social media and peddling misinformation — amplified by the state-controlled press — to deflect blame for the virus that has killed a quarter of a million people and wrecked global economies.”
• Wolf warriors’ battlespace: Social media platforms that are banned in China. “The diplomats’ fields of battle are social media platforms — usually Twitter and Facebook, which are banned in China. Their weapons include outrage, sarcasm, an abiding suspicion of Western governments and the press, conspiracy theories and, it seems, the support of the Chinese leadership.”
• No punishment for being too extreme. “‘In this environment in China, there’s no punishment for people who are overzealous in defending China,’ said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. ‘You’re not going to lose your job if you overstep. Everyone is trying to demonstrate their loyalty.'”
• Expanding tactics against Taiwan & Hong Kong for global strategic effect. “Analysts say the pandemic has revealed China’s willingness to expand its use of disinformation campaigns — previously focused on undermining pro-democracy voices in Taiwan and Hong Kong — to the wider world. As early as 2015, scholars from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies predicted that the People’s Liberation Army would use Twitter to deliver propaganda to new audiences ‘to influence the global conversation about China.'”
  • “‘Beijing has been playing this game for a long time in Taiwan and Hong Kong,’ said Nadege Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Washington. ‘It has all the necessary architecture to deploy such tactics and has garnered a great deal of experience in previous disinformation campaigns.'”

Congressional Republicans announce panel to probe Chinese infiltration of US universities. Without a single Democrat in the US House of Representatives issuing any significant criticism of the Chinese regime, House Republicans announce a panel to investigate Chinese Communist infiltration of American colleagues and universities. Highlights from the lawmakers’ statement and accompanying letter:

• Focus on Chinese ‘strategic and propaganda goals’ at US universities. The congressmen wrote a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “asking for information about the Chinese Communist Party’s investment in American colleges and universities to further its strategic and propaganda goals.”
• Penetration of American schools for technology theft & espionage. “China has strategically invested in U.S. academia to attempt to steal confidential information and technology from U.S. companies, and even the U.S. government.”
• China manipulates science to match ‘CCP propaganda.’ “Besides China peddling money for influence in U.S. institutions of higher education (IHE), China is restricting any research regarding the origins of COVID-19 that does not comport with CCP propaganda. To nations battling peak pandemic outbreaks, the CCP’s machinations undoubtably hamper the global response to the pandemic.”
• Turning ‘American college campuses into indoctrination platforms.’ “For some time, we have been concerned about the potential for the Chinese government to use its strategic investments to turn American college campuses into indoctrination platforms for American students. For example, a 2018 Hoover Institution report notes the presence of some 110 ‘Confucius Institutes’ on college campuses as well as over 500 “Confucius Classrooms” in secondary schools. While the stated mission of such institutes and classrooms is to teach Chinese language and culture, the report notes, ‘faculty and other watchdogs have warned that they may present risks to intellectual freedom by using American universities as vehicles through which to advance Chinese Communist Party propaganda.’”
• Consideration to restrict federal funds to schools associated with Communist China. “These actions all bring into question whether U.S. IHEs receiving federal taxpayer dollars should be allowed to accept funds from China, the CCP, or other affiliated organizations. The interests of the two nations appear to have diverged.”
• Signed by top Republican lawmakers. House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan was  joined on the letter by the following top House Committee Republicans:
  • Virginia Foxx, ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Labor
  • Mac Thornberry, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee
  • Mike Rogers, ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security
  • Frank Lucas, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
  • Devin Nunes, ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
  • Michael McCaul, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

Trump appoints officials to pull US pension funds from China. In a move that the Center for Security Policy has been pushing for more than a decade, the President of the United States takes over an independent federal board from those who had invested the pension funds of American federal employees and military personnel in Communist Chinese companies. Reuters reports that President Trump replaces three members of the five-person Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) which runs the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) retirement fund for federal civilian and military personnel and retirees. Reuters highlight:

• Obama appointees’ pro-China decisions to be reversed. “With its own appointees now forming a majority, the White House could potentially win a reversal of the board’s 2017 decision to allow the TSP’s $50 billion international fund to track an index that includes some China-based stocks of companies accused of human rights abuses, violating sanctions, and aiding the Chinese military.”

Republican establishment voice tells CCP that Americans are wrong to blame Beijing. A major voice in the Republican foreign policy establishment tells a Chinese Communist Party outlet that it’s wrong for his countrymen to blame the Beijing regime for the pandemic. In what appears to be a pre-written interview, David J. Firestein, CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation, tells the Global Times a series of points that reinforce and even repeat certain familiar themes:

• US figures put blame ‘squarely’ on CCP shoulders. “As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US has grown, a growing number of US political figures and journalists have sought to place the blame for the pandemic squarely on the shoulders of China and, more specifically, the Communist Party of China. In both the political world and the press and social media, pronouncements of China’s presumed ‘guilt’ with respect to COVID-19 are now a daily, almost hourly, affair.”
  • [Note: This is a Republican establishment way of trying to center oneself by blaming both sides. Few if any national-level Democrats have sought to place the blame for the pandemic squarely on the Communist Party of China.]
• Bush CEO laments ‘unprecedented’ negative US views toward China. “Both Republicans and Democrats – and conservatives and liberals more generally – are now framing the matter this way, with Republicans generally considerably more negative on China than Democrats. The sheer volume of negative commentary regarding China in the US at this time is arguably unprecedented – perhaps even surpassing the post-1989 period, when the last paradigm shift (and enduring negative shift) in US views toward China occurred.”
• ‘Growing perception fueled by relentless “blame China” messaging.’ “…there is a growing perception, fueled by the relentless ‘blame China’ messaging noted above, that Chinese actions (or inactions) actually hurt the US in a direct and major way and even resulted in American loss of life.”
• US messaging is diverting or shifting blame for campaign purposes. “Given its evident effectiveness in terms of shifting American public opinion – and taking the heat off of US political leaders of both parties and in both the executive and legislative branches of the government – I think the current negativity we see toward China and the ‘blame China’ messaging we now see proliferating across the US will continue indefinitely and certainly through the general election in early November.”
• US leaders are trying to ‘rationalize’ their own failures. “It’s not that US political leaders aren’t talking about how to cope with COVID-19; it’s just easier for them, against the backdrop of steadily rising numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths, to rationalize why they initially failed than to make the case that they’ve succeeded.”
• China is an ‘easy’ and ‘convenient’ scapegoat, and one lone Chinese official reciprocated. “For many US politicians, China is the easy, convenient and expedient scapegoat. Presumably, a comparable mindset is why at least one Chinese official, as well as some other voices in the Chinese social media, have similarly sought to lay the blame for the pandemic on the United States. The blame game is being played on both sides.”
• We mustn’t hold Chinese regime accountable. After all, US did bad things, too. “This ‘sue China’ campaign we now see emerging in the US is good political theater but bad and ineffectual policy. If a US state can sue China for something like this, then what would prevent a Chinese entity from suing the US for, say, bombing China’s Belgrade embassy in 1999 or sparking the global financial crisis of 2007-08, among other instances in which US actions generated negative consequences for people outside the borders of the United States?”
• Don’t strip China of sovereign immunity. “The slope gets very slippery; the ‘Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act’ – the 1976 US law which holds foreign governments immune from being sued in US courts – exists for good reason.”
• If we call for reparations from China, we will be liable for slavery reparations. “For that matter, how many of those who are calling for ‘reparations’ from China for what they regard as China’s role in the emergence of this pandemic take the same principled stand when it comes to, say, reparations for slavery in the US? Not many, I think.”
• ‘Holding China accountable’ is just an election ploy. “One increasingly hears references made by US politicians to the idea of ‘holding China accountable’; interestingly, the references are often made these days as part of campaign fundraising appeals: ‘Donate to my campaign so I can hold China accountable!’ That fact, I think, speaks pretty clearly to the motivation behind this type of framing.”
• Let’s do what Xi Jinping says and not point fingers but work together. “In my view, all of us – Americans and Chinese alike – need to focus at this moment less on assigning blame and more on solving problems. People are dying and economies are reeling. That’s what we need to focus on right now.”
• Luckily, the George H.W. Bush Foundation and CCP are still calling for cooperation (as they always have). “There are still voices in both the US and China – including our Foundation’s – calling for US-China collaboration on COVID-19 and a host of other global and international challenges. My colleagues and I at the George H. W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations continue to believe that no major global challenge can be solved in the absence of robust cooperation between the US and China.”
• Moral equivalence is good. Let’s share the blame. “In my view, both China and the US made significant mistakes in the early stages of responding to the COVID-19 crisis; neither country has handled the pandemic flawlessly. Perhaps most obviously and fundamentally, neither side fully communicated to the general public the seriousness of the situation as accurately, openly or quickly as each could and should have.”
• It really doesn’t matter who’s to blame. “Still, I am of the view that what matters most at present is not who is to blame for the current state of affairs, but rather, what we can do, together, to curb the spread of this virus and mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic on the physical and economic health of the world’s population. To my mind, that is where our two countries’ focus ought to be.”
• It’s all about the money. “I have always viewed with some skepticism the notion that it is feasible for the US and China to ‘decouple’ from each other, relative to the current level of bilateral engagement, to any truly significant degree.”
• Supply-chain concerns reject the theory of comparative advantage. “There is now a growing feeling in the US that reliance on overseas supply chains generally and China-based supply chains specifically is problematic and risky for the US; and further, that reliance on China for key pharmaceutical products and precursors (as well as other vital resources) is also imprudent. Though this thinking essentially rejects the validity of the economic construct of comparative advantage, it is on the ascendancy in this country, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic continues its deadly and economically devastating march.”
• Pandemic is ‘perfect gift’ to Americans who see CCP as dangerous. “For those in the US who regard the People’s Republic of China as America’s enemy, COVID-19 is the perfect ‘gift’: the opportunity to showcase how dangerous China ostensibly is relative to US interests and how harmful both engagement with, and especially dependence on China is for America. And this message has started to resonate with the general public to a degree that it wasn’t resonating before the onset of this pandemic.”
• Chinese regime doesn’t want to be a superpower, so everything’s OK. “I certainly don’t think this pandemic will end the US’ tenure as the world’s sole superpower, nor will it elevate China to superpower status – a status China doesn’t want, in any case (at least as such status is defined by the US).”
• Parting thought: Let’s not pin blame on anyone. “Desisting from hurling accusations at each other and instead working together to bring the pandemic under control as quickly as possible will go a long way toward reversing the damage that has been done.”

US ‘turbocharging’ efforts to break dependence on China supply chains. “[E]conomic destruction and the U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move US production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead,” Reuters reports, citing current and former senior US officials.

• Effort underway for years. “We’ve been working on (reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China) over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the State Department told Reuters.
• New actions to be announced soon. “‘I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,’ Krach said, adding that the matter was key to US security and one the government could announce new action on soon.”
• Interagency effort. “The US Commerce Department, State and other agencies are looking for ways to push companies to move both sourcing and manufacturing out of China. Tax incentives and potential re-shoring subsidies are among measures being considered to spur changes, the current and former officials told Reuters.”
• Whole-of-government approach to determine what’s ‘essential.’ “‘There is a whole of government push on this,’ said one. Agencies are probing which manufacturing should be deemed ‘essential’ and how to produce these goods outside of China.”

Other

• CCP keeps pushing for Westerners to wear masks in their own countries. [Why?] (China Daily)
• British warn that Chinese-made ventilators can kill. (NBC News)
• CCP: Pompeo is lying about Wuhan Virus origins ‘to fool US voters’ (Global Times)

May 5

Communist Party appears to set up narrative for scientific ‘backlash’ against US. The CCP’s narrative continues to build in a way that intervenes in the 2020 American presidential election. In an editorial titled “US messes up manipulation of virus origin,” Global Times again attacks the Trump Administration, and especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for cynically holding China accountable out of pure partisan political calculation. Excerpts:

• US is pushing baseless ‘lies’ about China’s responsibility. “The US President Donald Trump’s administration, including Pompeo, keep spreading lies and misleading domestic and international audiences without any evidence to prove their suspicion.”
• US is spreading un-scientific lies while the rest of the world fights to recover. “For most countries, the top priority and the biggest challenge are to contain the outbreak and thereby secure an economic recovery. The US government clamor to promote a rumor of the virus origin, an issue that is supposed to be solved by scientists, completely unmasked its political purpose.”
• Trump administration stoops to ‘new lows’ for ‘more votes.’ “It’s not due to US government boldness, but its strategy of stooping to new lows for earning more votes. It makes Pompeo and the White House very embarrassed after their suspicion was widely rejected. But they don’t care. The White House has ramped up efforts to agitate US public antagonism to China because they believe if a higher level of antagonism is reached, the lower chance there will be that voters will hold them accountable for mishandling the epidemic.”
• Un-statesmanlike Pompeo is just a politician and a rumor monger. “This is a political show run by some politicians such as Pompeo for the US public and especially Republican supporters who tend to blindly believe what the Trump administration says amid divided US politics. This makes politicians such as Pompeo believe that rumors can work.”
• ‘Scientists and intellectuals’ will ‘fully expose’ Pompeo the politician. “But politicians like Pompeo are likely to mess up this time, as the political purpose of the US government’s manipulation of the epidemic origin investigation has been fully exposed, especially to scientists and intellectuals.”
• Scientists will expose the politicians’ lies. “Once the Trump administration loses the support of scientists, its distorted narrative of the epidemic will face increasing political risks. Their deception will eventually come to light, and, worse, make them pay an enormous price.”
• Trump team will face backlash for defaming and slandering China. “We don’t know if this is enough to make the Trump team realize that there is not infinite scope for them to defame and slander China as there will be a backlash in the end. “
• ‘Virus origin issue’ is phony; ‘China-bashing campaign’ is an election tool. “It is absurd to use the virus origin issue in the evaluation for worldwide governments’ performance against the pandemic. A China-bashing campaign as a tool to feed its political purpose in an election is bound to fail as the Trump team grows more extreme.”
• Even Trump agreed that China does its best, so Republicans wage ‘crooked’ campaign. “China has done its best in dealing with the epidemic, just as Trump praised China’s efforts to control the outbreak in January after Wuhan’s lockdown and applauded China’s efficiency and transparency. He held that tone for a long time, until the US became a new epicenter of the outbreak that made the White House anxious about being held accountable for the rising death toll. The Republican Party has a crooked way of using China in its electoral strategy.”

CCP outlet hints that new, powerful counternarrative is in the works. A new and improved official Chinese Communist Party narrative of the Wuhan Virus origins appears to be in the works. Global Times makes a hint of it at the end of its above editorial, which changes from a political attack on the US to make this hint:

• “However, global scientists have never been US government puppets. The gene sequence of the novel coronavirus tells, just like more upcoming evidence, how Washington will pay for its lies.”

Bringing Taiwan into WHO is a desperate diversionary move, CCP outlet says. “Trying desperately to distract public attention from its botched coronavirus response, Washington is excessively provoking China on the Taiwan question by helping the island’s separatist authority to attend the World Health Assembly (WHA). But analysts said the attempt could backfire and Washington’s tricks to pick a diplomatic fight could irresponsibly paralyze WHO in the pandemic,” the Global Times says.

Foreign Policy journal: ‘China has a playbook for managing coronavirus crisis.’ The Chinese regime has a comprehensive “playbook” to manage the pandemic, and America’s risks losses if it mirror-images the rest of the world, Diana Fu writes in Foreign Policy. China could win broad international appeal with its authoritarian model of order against the US model of chaotic democracy, she says. There is a major propaganda aspect to the playbook, which plays on cultural preferences for predictability and fear of chaos.  Highlights:

• Playbook is drawn from Mao’s ‘people’s war’ to immerse entire populations. “This playbook is not new. It involves above all mobilizing the public to take part in fighting a ‘people’s war.’”
  • “It assumes that chaos is the common enemy of state and society alike.”
  • “Well before Chinese President Xi Jinping took power, the Chinese Communist Party developed a set of tried and trusted tactics for controlling the chaos.”
  • “Although Mao Zedong relished political chaos, calling it an ‘excellent’ situation, Chinese political leaders thereafter learned to fear”
  • “Since the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989, Beijing’s No. 1 political priority has been to maintain internal social stability by maximizing order and minimizing social chaos.”
• Three spheres of chaos. “Chaos can be unleashed in three spheres: mental, cultural, and societal. On the mental level, Chinese rulers have defined chaos as any way of thinking that diverges from that of the Chinese Communist Party. It uses what’s known as ‘thought work’ to tackle any divergence. When Chinese university students belonging to Marxist groups and other activists cross the line, the government makes them rectify their thinking through confessions.”
• Fear of chaos can mobilize Chinese population behind its predictable oppressors. “Because of this deep-seated fear of chaos in multiple realms, citizens can be mobilized into action at every rung of society when the government declares chaos at hand.”
• Predictability requires censorship and repression. “But that playbook comes with its own risks. Step one is to cover up the problem—trusting that most threats can be dampened early and pushed aside.”
• If cover-up fails, ‘blame chaos on outsiders.’ “If that fails and the issue blows up, it’s time for step two: Restore order internally and blame chaos on outsiders.”
  • How this happened at Wuhan. “The first step requires treating disorder like a wildfire: Douse water on it quickly and build barriers lest it spread to the rest of society. The Hubei local government’s initial silencing of whistleblowers in the coronavirus outbreak is taken straight from this playbook—a cover-up tactic used by local officials across the country to silence dissidents. Local officials, fearful of being sanctioned by their superiors for not maintaining local stability, routinely pay off or intimidate would-be critics. Troublemakers are regularly taken out to tea with the state security, and some are even forced to go on vacationto keep them away from politics.”
• Most repressive tactics are successful. “That Hubei officials hushed up netizens for circulating supposedly false news was nothing unusual or new. In 2013, Xi launched an anti-rumor campaign meant to sanction online critics such as the Chinese American businessman Charles Xue. Most of the time these tactics are successful. The government’s campaigns to silence human rights lawyers, labor activists, and ideological dissenters alike have left civil society embattled, though not demobilized. The Wuhan-based doctor Li Wenliangwas just one among many individuals whose voices the government silenced. Except this time, it caused a blowup that literally went viral.”
• Social stability is crucial to Communist Party legitimacy. “But if the cover-up can no longer be suppressed, the next step is to restore domestic order at all cost. The No. 1 political priority has always been to maintain social stability, a key pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy.”
• CCP treated outbreak as domestic security threat. “From day one, the Chinese government tackled the coronavirus outbreak as a domestic security threat, not just as a public health emergency. It mobilized every unit of control, from state to society. Once they received Beijing’s signal to clamp down at all cost, local governments organized quickly. Citizens were told to monitor their neighbors.  Chinese tech companies supplied the police with datafrom health apps that determined whether citizens should be quarantined. The normal movements of an estimated 60 million people in Hubei Province were sacrificed for the greater good of social stability.”
• Deflection: Blame foreigners for the problem. “Just as China’s domestic infections were getting under control, official propaganda shifted into another familiar mode: Blaming the cause and poor handling of the crisis on foreigners.”
  • Blaming the West is ‘an old tactic.’ “The tall tale that the Chinese foreign ministry spunabout the U.S. origins of the virus is an old tactic, going back to the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement. Then-leader Jiang Zemin accused Western scholars who assembled the Tiananmen Papers of trying to “hype up the event to create internal chaos for us.”
  • Blame the West for social protests. “Since then, the Chinese government has blamed many internal social movements on the West, including Charter 08 and the Jasmine Revolution.”
  • Blame the West for Hong Kong protests. “When Hong Kongers took to the streets in the months before the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese government also blamed protests on the ‘black hand’ of Western powers.”
• Pandemic could cause many to prefer the hand of a strong regime. “China’s model of national emergency response was born out of controlling chaos. … The pandemic’s legacy for many may be that living in a Chinese-style dictatorship is far superior to living in the West’s free societies that cannot harness disorder quickly.”

Washington Post runs essay by Chinese ambassador. The Washington Post runs an op-ed under the name of Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai, arguing that the US is making things worse by holding the Chinese Communist Party responsible for the pandemic. Highlights show the scripted CCP themes developed over the previous months:

• Headline – Blaming China will make the pandemic worse: “Chinese ambassador: Ignoring the facts to blame China will only make things worse.”
• China ‘spared no expense to save lives.’ “Since January, China has fought a tough battle against the novel coronavirus and made remarkable progress. In this unprecedented fight, China spared no expense to save lives.”
• Blaming Chinese regime undercuts international solidarity to fight virus. “However, an unnecessary burden has been distracting our focus and undercutting international efforts to curb the virus: the absurd mind-set of ‘always blame China.’ Simply put, for some people, China has to be wrong, regardless of the facts.”
• Beijing is unfairly attacked for being decisive and transparent. “When China took the decisive step to lock down Wuhan, critics dismissed the move as a medieval practice that violated human rights, something typical of an “authoritarian” China. When China provided updates about the outbreak, they labeled objective facts as disinformation and propaganda. The nature of China’s political system dominates the content of their attacks, and the Communist Party is the ultimate target of their barrage.”
• American politicians blamed China for their own failures. “As China’s situation improved, the number of confirmed cases and fatalities skyrocketed elsewhere. Promptly, a few American politicians switched to their default setting of blaming others, ignoring that China has done its best in responding to a new virus. They persistently accuse China of delays and coverups, and some even demand a reckoning with China.”
• Criticism of China is all conspiracy theories. “China was blamed for providing second-rate supplies with quality-control problems. When measures were taken to ensure the products’ quality, China was criticized for hoarding supplies and holding up exports. Conspiracy theories abound — and all point to China’s ‘geopolitical strategies.’”
• Criticism of WHO is all conspiracy theories. “The World Health Organization has spoken highly of China’s epidemic response, which led the conspiracy theorists to charge that China has either bought the WHO or exerted political pressure on the agency. Naturally, the WHO has been lambasted for taking sides and being incompetent.”
• The ‘facts’ about whether China is to blame. “Is China really to blame? Here are some facts:
  • China ‘made huge sacrifices’ and ‘brought precious time for the world.’ “First, China has taken strict measures and made huge sacrifices to keep the virus in check, which not only saved lives at home but also bought precious time for the world.”
  • China has been open and transparent. “Second, China has done its best to share information about the virus. On Dec. 27, a doctor in Hubei province reported three suspicious cases. In the following four days, local and central governments conducted investigations on the ground. On Jan. 3 — within a week — China began briefing the WHO, the United States and other countries about the outbreak. On Jan. 12, China released the whole genome sequence of the coronavirus, which has proved critical for diagnosis and treatment of the disease globally.”
  • China shared data with US as early as it could. “Third, we shared information with the United States at the earliest possible time and have been supporting its fight against the disease. The two countries’ centers for disease control and prevention and government agencies have been in close communication since Jan. 4, the day after China briefed the WHO. In their phone calls, President Xi Jinping gave detailed accounts of China’s measures to President Trump.”
  • China was generous with its mask diplomacy. “By April 29, China had provided, according to our customs figures, more than 4 billion masks to the United States, or roughly 14 for every American on average.”
• Wuhan is the victim, not the source of the pandemic. “There is no denying that the first known case of covid-19 was reported in Wuhan. But this means only that Wuhan was the first victim of the virus.”
• Why demand reparations from a victim? “To ask a victim for compensation is simply ridiculous.”
• Demanding reparations now will lead to demands for past disasters. “If that made sense, then who was to compensate for the fatalities of the H1N1 flu and HIV/AIDS? Who was to pay for the huge losses caused by the 2008 financial crisis?”
• People who blame China play ‘dirty politics’ for their own ‘political gain.’ “Behind the mind-set of ‘always blame China’ is a kind of dirty politics, championed by a few people who shift the spotlight for political gain. In their manipulation, China has to be wrong.”
• [Pompeo] needs to be exposed for blaming China. “It is this blame-shifting that needs transparency.”
• Blaming CCP will hurt the world’s ‘prospects for a better future.’ “Blaming China will not end this pandemic. On the contrary, the mind-set risks decoupling China and the United States and hurting our efforts to fight the disease, our coordination to reignite the global economy, our ability to conquer other challenges and our prospects of a better future.”
• Trump’s policies will make US the loser. “The United States would not emerge as a winner from this scenario.”
• Let’s be Abe Lincoln’s ‘better angels’ and not blame the Chinese Communist Party. “It is time to end the blame game. It is time to focus on the disease and rebuild trust between our two countries. As President Abraham Lincoln called for ‘the better angels’ in his inauguration speech, I hope that the wisdom of preceding generations will guide us to choose the right side of history and work for our shared future together.”

CCP: Christian believers in America, driven by hate, are a threat to peace. Religious Americans, especially observant Jews and Christians, are United States’ biggest problem preventing a proper understanding of China, the Global Times says. Excerpts:

• ‘Hatred’ lurks an America ‘deeply influenced by Christianity.’ “US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been groundlessly attacking China. His point of view reflects many US politicians’ hatred toward China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) [CCP]. The US is a country deeply influenced by Christianity. Behind such hatred, there is an extreme religious nationalism, or fundamentalism.”
• The vile Pompeo ‘is a devout evangelical Christian.’ “Take Pompeo as an example. He is a devout evangelical Christian. In the 1940s, some fundamentalists who were relatively moderate started to call themselves ‘evangelicals’ and maintained the same theology. Evangelicalism has had a close connection with American politics – many US evangelical Christians, for example, voted for Donald Trump and believed that God has chosen Trump to be US president.”
• America, America, God shed his grace on thee. “Many evangelical Christians tend to believe that America is a land chosen by God. Jonathan Edwards, an evangelist and one of the dominant figures in the 18th century, once said that ‘The latter-day glory is probably to begin in America.'”
• Therefore, US leaders with ‘deep-rooted religious beliefs’ will never accept CCP-led China. “Under such circumstances, it is almost impossible for US politicians like Pompeo to believe the CPC-led China [sic]. They regard China as a completely different kind, or a rival of the US. In fact, since Trump took office, US policies toward China have been kidnapped by their deep-rooted religious beliefs.”
• Pompeo & friends believe in primacy of Western civilization. “What’s more, Pompeo and his like firmly believe that the Western civilization dominates global civilization. This being the case, the rise of China, a so-called different civilization, has been regarded as a challenge to Western civilization.”
• Inevitability of the rise of Chinese Communism shakes their religious beliefs. “This also explains different countries’ different ways of coping with COVID-19, and why some US politicians such as Pompeo have been trying everything they can to blacken China…. Many US politicians regard the different Chinese and US COVID-19 fights as a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the two countries. Seeing China’s achievements, they worry that China is gaining the upper hand in this contest. And facing China’s rise, they do not want to admit that their deep-rooted beliefs have been shaken.”
• And so they ‘fabricate’ attacks on ‘unstoppable rise’ of China. “Thus, Pompeo and some US politicians did not hesitate to fabricate lies to attack China. They have been bragging about how ‘enormous evidence’ shows the COVID-19 outbreak first began in Wuhan’s laboratory, and how the Chinese government has been hiding information. These are all just lame tricks, showing how they are not willing to face reality. These politicians must face up to China’s unstoppable rise.”
• Religious Christians are ‘biggest threat to world peace.’ “Such deep-rooted fundamentalism, which regards different civilizations as adversaries, is the biggest threat to world peace and development.”

RAND survey shows Chinese pandemic propaganda masking aggression. “Straight from its well-versed playbook, China has gone on a ‘charm offensive’ to try to make the world forget Beijing’s culpability in the coronavirus crisis. This time, the charm offensive comes in the form of masks and ventilators,” the RAND Corporation’s Jeffrey W. Hornung writes. The present charm offensive is an extension of China’s earlier propaganda to mask its strategic expansion. Highlights:

• ‘Peaceful rise’ was a ruse to to distract ‘from Beijing’s true intentions.’ “A decade ago, it was common to hear China advocate for its peaceful rise. Regional countries had nothing to worry about, or so the narrative went. That charm offensive turned out to be a ruse. By the mid-2010s, China had embarked on an aggressive maritime campaign against its neighbors. Whether it was employing military and paramilitary assets against Japan in the East China Sea or pursuing large-scale artificial island building in the South China Sea, the peaceful rise narrative proved to be a distraction from Beijing’s true intentions.”
• Mask diplomacy is a pandemic-time diversion from more aggression. “To divert the world’s attention, China has provided coronavirus-related aid to hundreds of countries that include tens of millions of masks, millions of testing kits, and ventilators, including 1,000 for New York. This makes for good news but belies China’s actions against neighbors struggling with the pandemic. In the few short months since COVID-19 began spreading beyond China’s borders, China has continued—and in some cases escalated—provocations against its neighbors, both in the air and maritime domains, to challenge sovereignty claims as these states struggle with the weight of the pandemic.”
• Military consolidation on South China See reefs and islands. “The U.S. State Department has criticized China for several actions in the South China Sea that include announcing new ‘research stations’ on military bases it built on Fiery Cross Reef and Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands; landing military aircraft on Fiery Cross Reef; and continuing to deploy maritime militia around the islands.”
• World record amount of natural gas extracted. “From mid-February to mid-March, China also successfully extracted a world record amount of natural gas from the South China Sea.”
• Attack on Vietnamese vessel. “And in early April, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing trawler in the South China Sea.”
• Aggressiveness toward Taiwan. “Farther north, China has been similarly contentious against its neighbors. The country has conducted an aggressive disinformation campaign against Taiwan, and China’s military has been engaging in overtly provocative behavior against the island—making airspace incursions, holding nighttime exercises, and sailing naval ships nearby, including an aircraft carrier.”
• Aggressiveness toward Japan. “China has also been relentless against Japan around the Senkaku Islands, a set of small islands in the East China Sea controlled by Japan but claimed by China. Data show that Chinese vessels entered waters in Japan’s contiguous zone around the Senkaku Islands for most of January, February, and March. Chinese ships also went into the islands’ territorial waters several times between January and March. These trends are continuing.”
• Other countries put conflicts on hold during pandemic, but not China. “Other countries have hit pause on conflicts to battle their common biological enemy.”
  • Saudi Arabia/UAE/Yemen. “In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates—at war with Yemen’s Houthi rebels—unilaterally declared a cease-fire to help prevent COVID-19 spread in Yemen.”
  • Libya. “Similarly in Libya, both sides in an ongoing conflict agreed to a cease-fire so the country can focus on battling the outbreak.
  • Colombia. “Likewise, in Latin America, the National Liberation Army, a revolutionary left-wing armed group in Colombia, unilaterally declared a cease-fire as a humanitarian gesture to the Colombian people.”
  • Cameroon. “And in Africa, the Southern Cameroons Defense Forces militia announced it would implement a cease-fire because of the outbreak.”
  • Philippines. “Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte unilaterally declared a cease-fire with communist rebels as the government tries to contain the outbreak.”
  • Thailand. “The Barisan Revolusi Nasional rebels fighting the Thai government also unilaterally declared that they would halt their activities due to the virus, their first cease-fire in the long-running Thai conflict.”

Other

• ‘WHO-bashing campaign’ – CCP slams Canada for parliament for asking questions (Global Times)
• In case you haven’t noticed, Trump is ‘shifting blame’ by calling out China (Global Times)
• George H. W. Bush Foundation tells CCP that US mustn’t disengage from China (Global Times)
• Trump’s opponents try to use pandemic as excuse to halt judicial nominations (Daily Signal)
• ‘US must find a balance between countering China’s antisatellite (ASAT) weapons’ & cooperating with it in space (Defense One/Brookings Institution)

May 6

Secretary Pompeo gives a press briefing to provide a chronology of Chinese regime actions to repress word of, and action against, the COVID-19 virus. Main highlights, and lengthy quotes due to the importance of the statement:

• Heroic Chinese doctors remembered. “It’s been 128 days since Chinese doctor Ai Fen – the director of the Wuhan Central Hospital’s emergency unit – shared information on the internet about a patient with a SARS-like virus.  Her colleague, Dr. Li Wenliang, shared Dr. Ai’s report online with medical colleagues.”
• Persecution of Dr. Li and others for ‘spreading false statements.’ “The next day, December 31st, regional health officials in Wuhan indicated they were treating dozens of patients with an unknown viral pneumonia.  And within days, Chinese officials detained Dr. Li and seven others for ‘spreading false statements on the internet.’”
• China knew. “China saw then that it had an emerging public health crisis on its hands.  They knew.  China could have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.  China could have spared the world a descent into global economic malaise.  They had a choice.”
• Regime covered up Wuhan outbreak. “But instead, instead China covered up the outbreak in Wuhan.  Its National Health Commission ordered virus samples destroyed on January 3rd.  China ‘disappeared’ brave Chinese citizens who raised alarms.  It deployed its propaganda organs to denounce those who politely called for simple transparency.”
• China is still refusing to share information. “And that brings us to today, 120 days on.  China is still refusing to share the information we need to keep people safe, such as viral isolates, clinical specimens, and details about the many COVID-19 patients in December 2019, not to mention ‘patient zero.’”
• ‘It’s not about blame.’ It’s about saving lives. “Our truth-telling and calls for transparency aren’t about politics.  It’s not about bullying.  It’s not about blame.  It’s about the ongoing need to save American lives.  This is an ongoing threat today.  Ask medical professionals in New York City.  I think they’ll agree with that.”
• ‘We need reliable partners.’ “We need countries to share reliable data in a timely way – now, and the next time that a calamity like this hits.  We need reliable partners.”
• World is understanding the risks of dealing with China. “As a result of China’s choices, countries are starting to understand the risk of doing business with the Chinese Communist Party and taking action to protect their people.  A few examples.  In recent weeks, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and France have demarched the Chinese Communist Party ambassadors for a whole host of lies and misdeeds.”
• Faulty test kids & PPEs, calls for independent reviews, and reassessment of ties. “Spain has returned defective test kits made in China.  That country, the Czech Republic, other nations have received shoddy PPE, as well.  The Australians and the Swedes have called for an independent review into the outbreak.  And my friend Dominic Raab has said that the United Kingdom can’t go back to, quote, ‘business as usual,’ end of quote, with Beijing.  Even the EU’s foreign affairs chief admitted that Brussels has been, quote, ‘a little naive,’ end of quote, about China.”
• World is getting realistic about China. “I’m heartened by this newfound realism.  The free nations of the world are starting to understand that China doesn’t share those democratic values that we hold dear, or their economic interests, and that this matters to the entire world.”
• ‘No true “win-win” with a communist regime.’ “There’s no true ‘win-win’ with a communist regime, unless you get to the fair terms that President Trump has talked about and the reciprocity that President Trump did in the phase one trade deal.  Now countries have a chance to further insist on what’s right for their people.”
• US calls for Taiwan entry into UN health venues. “Today I want to call upon all nations, including those in Europe, to support Taiwan’s participation as an observer at the World Health Assembly and in other relevant United Nations venues.  I also call upon WHO Director-General Tedros to invite Taiwan to observe this month’s WHA, as he has the power to do, and as his predecessors have done on multiple occasions.”
• Announcement of new US health & refugee aid. “Turning to the subject of those who are trying to do good around the world.  Today, the United States is committing an additional $130 million in global health and refugee assistance, bringing our total devoted to fighting COVID-19 to more than $900 million in more than 120 countries.  Congress has provided $2.4 billion in total.”
• Lots more US aid announced. “This new tranche of funding provides more than more than $40 million in additional funds for countries in the Indo-Pacific, prioritizing places like India and Bangladesh and Indonesia. We’ll also provide more than $20 million in global health assistance to Africa, with major investments in South Africa as well as in South Sudan. We have allocated $11 million in contributions to the IAEA to support 83 member states in their fight…. [plus] $225 million in additional emergency aid to the people of Yemen, separate from the COVID-19 assistance….”
• US is the leader in providing pandemic aid. “If you look at the response around the world, who it is that’s actually leading the response to this global pandemic, it is not close.  It is the United States of America, and it will continue to be so.”
• Reassessment underway of Hong Kong policy. “Right now we are delaying our report to Congress that will assess Hong Kong’s autonomy, to allow us to account for any additional actions that Beijing may be contemplating in the run-up to the National People’s Congress that would further undermine the people of Hong Kong’s autonomy as promised by China when they entered the agreement with the people of Hong Kong.”
• On differing assessments within US government – and China’s continued opacity. “So I saw General Milley’s statements.  Entirely consistent with what I think everyone in the administration has said, including President Trump.  The Intelligence Community is still figuring out precisely where this virus began.”
  • “Here’s how this could get solved really quickly:  The Chinese Community Party could do what they’re committed to do under their obligations to the World Health Organization, to be transparent, to be open, to do the simple things that nations all around the world do to make sure that pandemics like this don’t get out of control, and in fact, importantly, stay out of control.  I mentioned the number of days.  This is an ongoing challenge.  We still don’t have the samples that we need.  We still don’t have the access.  We collectively, the world, don’t have the samples.  It’s not even just that in the moment they couldn’t do the right thing; they continue to be opaque and they continue to deny access for this important information that our researchers, our epidemiologists need.”
• US isn’t ‘bullying’ China, but ‘demanding’ answers to defeat the virus. “And importantly, this could happen again…. This is why – this is why when I see people say, well, America is bullying the Chinese – we’re demanding of them only what we demand of every nation, right. Be transparent. Be open. Be a reliable partner. The very things they say – the Chinese say they want to cooperate. Great. Cooperation is about action.  It’s about opening up.  It’s about sharing this information.
  • ‘Only the Chinese Communist Party’ can answer the “So the details of where patient zero, where this began, are things that are knowledge that’s in the possession of only the Chinese Communist Party.  They’re the ones that can help unlock that.”
  • US will provide technical assistance, if China will accept it. “If they need technical assistance, we’re happy to provide that assistance to them. We do need – the world needs answers to these questions for not only the current moment but so that we can make sure that we reduce the risk that something like this could ever happen again with thousands and thousands of lives lost and enormous economic cost to the entire world.”
• US ‘timeline’ shows ‘the Chinese Communist Party misled the world.’ “As for the details, I think we’ve – the administration has laid out a timeline of what we’ve seen.  It is pretty clear that at the front end of this the Chinese Communist Party misled the world.”
  • CCP and WHO failed. “That is, they knew more and they didn’t share that, and they had an obligation to do so under the International Health Regulations that they are required to adhere to under World Health obligation– World Health Organization’s rules set. They didn’t do that. The World Health Organization also failed to do that. And it’s not only that they didn’t enforce, but the World Health Organization needs to still demand that there be an investigation. Dr. Tedros needs to be just as concerned as the United States and Australia and other countries are that we still don’t have access to the answers we need.”
• CDC has made ‘repeated’ requests for Wuhan lab access.
  • Journalist: “And have you made a formal request? Have you asked the CDC to make a formal request for data access to the Wuhan lab?”
  • Pompeo: “Yeah, there have been many – there have been – that’s a great question. There have been many formal requests, and we will continue to make formal requests for this information.”
  • Journalist: “Did you get a formal response from Beijing?”
  • Pompeo: “You should ask Ambassador Cui, who had a great op-ed this morning, and I can’t wait for my daily column in the China Daily News.”

Obama’s ambassador to China praises Beijing, compares Trump to Joe McCarthy and Hitler. “The administration’s rhetoric is so strong against China, it’s over the top. We’re entering an era which is similar to Joe McCarthy back when he was red-baiting in the State Department and attacking communism, and a little bit like Hitler in the ’30s,” former US ambassador to China Max Baucus says on CNN International. Highlights:

• Baucus: Trump created a 1930s-in-Germany climate for pro-CCP Americans. “Now in the United States, if anybody says anything reasonable about China, he or she feels intimidated, worried his head is going to be chopped off. Back in the ’30s in Germany, it was very similar,” Baucus says.
• Baucus is on CCP Alibaba Group board. “Baucus held the ambassadorship from 2014 to 2017 and, after Trump’s election, he established business ties to China. He sits on the board of advisers for the Alibaba Group, one of China’s largest technology firms, and is also on the board of directors of Ingram Micro, which was purchased by a Chinese company in 2016,” CNN reports.
• Baucus is part of 2020 presidential election campaign. “Baucus was a Montana senator from 1978 to 2014 before becoming the ambassador to China. He has endorsed Joe Biden for president,” CNN says.
• Baucus: US is acting like Nazi Germany by ‘blaming China.’ “Baucus warned Wednesday that the United States would ‘pay a price’ if it continued in the direction of pre-war Nazi Germany by blaming China,” according to CNN.
• Baucus the Alibaba board member: ‘This China-bashing is irresponsible.’ “‘I think we’re moving in that direction. I’m not saying we’re there yet,’ Baucus said. ‘But there are a lot of very responsible people in America who know that this China-bashing is irresponsible and we’re going to pay a price the more it continues,’” CNN reports.
• Baucus: ‘I take my hat off to China.’ “‘I think that the big lesson here [is] that when you take charge and when you tell the entire country, Wuhan, other provinces what to do, they get in gear and get the job done,’ Baucus said at the time. ‘I take my hat off to China for doing so,’” CNN reports.
• CNN adds perspective. “The Chinese government downplayed the extent of the initial outbreak, cracked down on doctors who tried to sound the alarm, and has waged a propaganda campaign to deflect blame for the pandemic.”

May 8

Der Spiegel: Xi Jinping asked WHO director to suppress information. Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping pressured WHO Director General Tedros in January to cover up the seriousness of the virus outbreak, Der Spiegel reports. Germany’s BND intelligence service said that Beijing “urged” the WHO leadership to “delay a global warning” about the emerging epidemic on January 21. The report said that the BND indicated that Xi and Tedros spoke personally on the phone on that date. Highlights:

• Xi asked Tedros to “hold back information about a human-to-human transmission and to delay a pandemic warning.”
• BND estimated that the Chinese government’s coverup cost the world four to six weeks’ worth of time in preparing to fight the pandemic.

FBI arrests University of Arkansas professor as part of Chinese ring. The FBI arrests University of Arkansas Professor Simon Ang, who received $5 million in grants from NASA and other federal agencies, for failing to report secret income he received from China. Ang, who is director of the High Density Electronics Center at the University of Arkansas department of electrical engineering, appears to be part of a Chinese technology theft spy ring. Ang said in an email that he was a member of China’s Thousand Talent Scholars program.

CCP outlet calls for massive nuclear weapons buildup. “China needs to expand the number of its nuclear warheads to 1,000 in a relatively short time. It needs to have at least 100 Dongfeng-41 strategic missiles. We are a peace-loving nation and have committed to never being the first to use nuclear weapons, but we need a larger nuclear arsenal to curb US strategic ambitions and impulses toward China. Maybe we have to deal with challenges with stronger determination in the near future, which requires the support of the Dongfeng and Julang missiles,” the CCP’s Global Times says.

• Nuclear weapons as propaganda and psychological weapons. “Don’t be naïve. Don’t assume that nuclear warheads are useless. In fact, they are being used every day as a deterrent to shape the attitudes of US elites toward China. Some Chinese experts say we don’t need more nuclear weapons, I think they are as naïve as children.”

Same CCP outlet issues a second call for bigger nuclear weapons arsenal. “Facing rising strategic threats from the US, China needs to increase its number of nuclear warheads and complete a technologically advanced nuclear triad by developing the H-20 strategic stealth bomber and JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missiles to deter potential impulsive military action by US warmongers,” the Global Times says, citing “experts.”

• Toward ‘a more stable and peaceful world order.’ “Having a nuclear arsenal appropriate to China’s position will help establish a more stable and peaceful world order, which will be beneficial for the whole world, they said.
• To keep US out of Chinese imperial zone. “This year, the US has been applying amplified military pressure on China, sending all manner of warships and warplanes at an increasing frequency to areas including the South China Sea, East China Sea and Taiwan Straits.”

Party propaganda outlets recycle Chinese ambassador’s Washington Post article. “Dirty politics and political gamesmanship are fueling the US mindset of ‘always blame China,’ Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai wrote in an op-ed article published on the Washington Post on Tuesday,” the CCP’s Global Times says.

• Don’t blame China. “Cui wrote that China has fought a tough battle against COVID-19 since January and spared no expense to save lives. Despite this fact, the absurd mindset of ‘always blame China’ continues to hinder efforts to fight the virus.”
• Blamers of China don’t care about facts. “‘Simply put, for some people, China has to be wrong, regardless of the facts,’ Cui wrote.”

China working with Russia to spread pandemic disinformation, US says. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center says that the Chinese and Russian regimes are coordinating to spread disinformation on social media and battle efforts to hold Beijing accountable for the pandemic. Highlights from a briefing by Global Engagement Center (GEC) chief Lea Gabrielle:

• “We’re seeing the Chinese Communist Party adopt Russian-style tactics” in a “disturbing convergence of narratives.”
• GEC has identified “a new network of inauthentic accounts” on Twitter to deflect blame from China.
• “One of the things we have to consider right now is what’s essentially a one-way megaphone from the Chinese Communist Party into free, open and democratic societies. General populations just aren’t aware enough of this.”
• Beijing is running bots to run a huge number of fake Twitter accounts to reinforce official Chinese regime and embassy posts on American social media.
• Nearly 250,000 Twitter accounts are suspected of being CCP-controlled.

Other

• China buys gold fields in Canada’s Nunavut far north. (Nunatsiaq News)

May 9

17 state attorneys general ask Congress to investigate China’s role in pandemic. Attorneys general of 17 states write a letter “to ask for Congressional Hearings into the communist Chinese Government and its role in the COVID-19 pandemic.” Highlights:

• Willing and knowing concealment of information & stockpiling of PPEs. “Recent reports suggest that the communist Chinese government willfully and knowingly concealed information about the severity of the virus while simultaneously stockpiling personal protective equipment.”
• ‘Classic communist disinformation effort’ with WHO against the world. “In what Secretary of State Pompeo has described as a ‘classic communist disinformation effort,’ the Chinese government, aided by the World Health Organization, appears to have intentionally misled the world over the last 6 months.”
• Censorship, coverup, propaganda. “These layers of deceit began last year with the censoring of Chinese health officials and the muzzling of Taiwanese complaints. The cover-up continued with the expulsion of media outlets and the proliferation of Chinese propaganda targeting the Western world.”
• ‘Suspicious gifts of drones’ to US state, local & federal authorities. “This propaganda campaign has spread disinformation about the United States and has included the suspicious gifts of drones to state, local and federal authorities as well as ‘educational’ grants to American universities connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
• ‘We must all hold China accountable for the devastation and destruction.’ “During this same period, COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on our states and the Nation. We must all hold China accountable for the devastation and destruction caused by COVID-19. Tens of thousands have died from the virus and millions have lost their jobs. Countless businesses, both big and small, will perish and our states will grapple with tough economic decisions for years to come.”
• Reparations move has begun. “One of our colleagues has already filed suit against China and many of us are considering similar legal actions.”
• Congressional hearings must reveal virus origins & CCP disinformation. “Congressional hearings are critical to our Nation’s understanding of the origins of COVID-19 and efforts by the communist Chinese government to deceive the international community.”

WHO makes selective denial of coverup with Xi Jinping. “The World Health Organization denied a report that said Chinese President Xi Jinping pressured WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to conceal the truth about the coronavirus outbreak in a January phone call, the Washington Examiner reports. But WHO’s denial of a Der Speigel report was selective. Main points:

• WHO says the Der Spiegel report is ‘unfounded and untrue’: “Der Spiegel reports of a January 21, 2020, telephone conversation between Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and President Xi Jingping of China are unfounded and untrue.”
• WHO denies that Tedros and Xi spoke that day: “Dr Tedros and President Xi did not speak on Jan. 21 and they have never spoken by phone. Such inaccurate reports distract and detract from WHO’s and the world’s efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic.”
• Journalist notes narrowness of denial and non-responsiveness to question. Examiner reporter Jerry Dunleavy tweets, “Note the narrow denial: about no calls between Xi & Tedros. They didn’t respond to @DCExaminer‘s question on if China ‘ever’ pressured ‘any’ WHO officials. Little doubt WHO has covered for China at length.”

May 11

Former Emory professor part of Chinese medical espionage network. A former Emory University professor is sentenced after a conviction for being a paid agent of a Communist Chinese espionage network to steal American medical research and technology. Xiao-Liang Li admits to having been a secret member of China’s Thousand Talents Program. Li had served with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is not formally charged with espionage-related crimes because of the obsolescence of US espionage laws, and is convicted of tax violations. Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

• Stealing US research. “Li’s sentence comes amid concern from NIH, the FBI and other federal agencies regarding foreign governments, especially China, attempting to steal U.S. research. In recent years, concerns have grown about whether foreign governments are involving themselves in U.S. scientific processes, AJC.com previously reported.”

Trump orders federal pension funds not to invest in China regime-related equities. The Trump Administration orders pension funds for federal civilian employees, military personnel, and retirees to liquidate all Chinese assets. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and National Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow send a letter to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia “stating that the White House does not want the Thrift Savings Plan, which is a federal employee retirement fund, to have money invested in Chinese equities that numbers about $4 billion in assets,” Fox News reports.

People’s Daily calls for cooordination of world media messaging; pushes ‘Belt and Road News Network.’ The Chinese Communist Party’s authoritative People’s Daily calls for a unified global messaging and content coordination system to control the pandemic narrative, and praises the World Health Organization and Belt and Road News Network as examples of good work. It cites Western voices to help make its case. Key takeaway: Don’t hold Chinese government accountable. Excerpts:

• WHO can fight disinformation about pandemic. “It’s difficult to distinguish between fiction and facts in an information-overloaded world. Based on lessons learned from history, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized the importance of offering accurate information to the people around the world since the onset of the outbreak, pointing out that it’s crucial to fight epidemic-related rumors and false information.”
• WHO already has an ‘infodemic management team.’ “The WHO suggested stopping the spread of false information about COVID-19 by tracking misinformation in multiple languages. The organization’s infodemic management team is working hand in glove with its communications department to deliver information to a broader public audience. The UN health body is also engaging with search engines and social media companies, asking them to filter out false information and promote truth.”
• CCP tells how the truth should be reported. “The media should faithfully record history and respect facts in news reporting. Truth is basic for news. At this crucial moment, media practitioners must work in a down-to-earth way, learn the real situations, and report the truth in the most accurate, objective and comprehensive manner.”
• To criticize CCP is to undermine international cooperation. “Unfortunately, some irresponsible Western media outlets spread and even fabricated rumors, which undermined international cooperation to fight the virus.”
• China has made an ‘incredible sacrifice’ to help the world… “China’s incredible sacrifice in fighting COVID-19 has made huge contribution to the world, winning high recognition from the international community.”
• … therefore the media should report good things about China. “It’s of great significance to provide objective and accurate coverage of Chinese anti-epidemic achievements when rumors abound. The media should be aware that when they share China’s successful anti-epidemic experiences with the world, they are injecting positive energy into protecting the lives and health of the people across the world.”
• UN chief checks CCP list: Don’t stigmatize [by blaming China], etc. “The media should uphold the common values of mankind and see to it that the limits of civilization shall never be tested in news reporting. ‘In this situation sometimes, it’s easy to move into perspectives in which there tends to be discrimination; there tends to be violation of human rights; there tends to be stigma on innocent people just because of their ethnicity or whatever. I think it’s very important to avoid this,’ said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.”
• Voices in West ‘deliberately spread racially discriminatory messages. “Since the outbreak of COVID-19, some Western politicians and media have deliberately spread racially discriminatory messages, which is one of the main reasons for the language and physical violence against Asians.” [Note: The ‘stigmatization’ and ‘discriminatory’ themes resonate well in the US, where politicians pick them up quickly.]
• Holding Chinese regime accountable is ‘stigmatization,’ ‘racist,’ and a ‘hate crime.’ “COVID-19-related stigmatization is a racist act against a country and all its people, and it is a hate crime, said Mushahid Hussain Syed, the chairman of the Pakistani Senate’s standing committee on foreign affairs, adding that such behaviors are also uncivilized, and go against diplomatic norms and international law.”
• ‘All responsible media in the world’ should not hold China accountable. “All responsible media in the world should conscientiously resist stigmatization and stand by justice. Under the current circumstances, the media plays a vital role in reassuring the people, Bieito Rubido Ramonde, director of Spanish newspaper ABC, emphasized in his letter to the People’s Daily.”
• Let’s ‘inject positive energy’ to build a ‘shared future for mankind’ by not holding China accountable. “Besides, the media should also fully reflect the general trend of the world’s future becoming increasingly interconnected, and inject positive energy into the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.”
• Belt and Road News Network shows how it should be done. “The Belt and Road News Network (BRNN) issued an open letter to its alliance members of 205 media outlets from 98 countries around the world, calling on them to give the message of unity and support to the public, tell stories of how countries fight together by looking over for and helping each other, and give the warm message of unity and strength. The letter demonstrated the common aspiration of all media practitioners who stand by justice.”
• Let’s ‘conquer the virus’ by not holding China accountable. “When people are united and determined, they can achieve anything. To conquer the virus, the world must reach the consensus of building a community with a shared future, gather the common will from all human beings, and formulate a strong power for joint actions.”

May 12

Changing the narrative: NY Governor Cuomo calls it the ‘European Virus.’ New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says that COVID-19 is not the “China Virus” but the “European Virus,” because it came to New York from Europe. Cuomo makes his comments at Rochester Regional Health as the first major American figure to call the virus the “European Virus.” Excerpts from the video posted May 12:

• ‘The virus … attacked us from Europe.’ “We had the virus that attacked us from Europe. . . . The experts now say . . . the virus came from Europe in January and February. And you know what? No one knew. No one knew.
• ‘Everybody’s looking at China, and the virus is coming from Europe.’ “Nobody knew the virus was coming from Europe. Everybody’s looking at China, and the virus is coming from Europe. Why? Because by the time we moved, the virus had traveled form China to Europe. And then people are getting on flights from Europe coming to New York. Two million travelers, two million travelers came from Europe. We had no idea. So New York, the East Coast, people were landing at JFK, people were landing at Newark Airport, and that’s where the virus came from. January, February, March. Nobody knew.”
• ‘The virus came from Europe.’ “The virus came from Europe, who ever would have figured that? Somebody should have.”
• ‘We had this European Virus attack us.’ “Yes we had this European Virus attack us and nobody expected it. . . .”

CCP outlet calls Pompeo an ‘enemy to world peace.’ Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is an “enemy to world peace” because of his criticism of China, according to the CCP’s Global Times. Highlights of the latest CCP attack:

• Pompeo launched ‘string of violent attacks on China.’ “US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in recent days has launched a string of violent attacks on China. He accused China of causing enormous losses to the US and the world by ‘not sharing the information they had’ again in an interview with Fox News on April 23, saying the Chinese government will ‘pay a price for what they did.’ One day earlier, he blasted China for taking advantage of a pandemic to ‘bully’ neighbors and called on other nations to hold China to account.”
• He’s the ‘most active’ senior US official attacking the Communist Party. “Pompeo targeted the Communist Party of China (CPC) [CCP] in his remarks. He is the senior US official who’s the most active in attacking the CPC, which reflects extreme hostility against socialist China and reveals his malicious goal to push the US and China into strategic rivalry.”
• It’s all an election ploy to shift blame to China and distract the public. “The White House and the Republican Party have formulated a strategy to win the November presidential election by shifting the blame to China to divert domestic US attention. Pompeo is adding fuel to the blame game by attacking the ruling party of China.”
• Pompeo is turning the State Department into a CIA. “The former top intelligence official is steering the US Department of State into becoming the Central Intelligence Agency.”
• He’s ‘playing with fire’ and ‘has become the enemy of world peace.’ “He is playing with fire, making the 21st century an era of major power confrontation and undermining the foundations for peace. Despite being the chief diplomat of the US, he totally betrayed the basic responsibility with which he is entrusted to promote international understanding. He has become the enemy of world peace.”
• US ‘has special responsibility for world peace’ and ‘sinister’ Pompeo is ruining it. “The US, as the world’s superpower, has special responsibility for world peace. It’s a pity that at a time when the world is facing turbulence and great uncertainties from the novel coronavirus, the position of secretary of state has been occupied by a person of a sinister nature.”
• Pompeo is ‘poisoning’ US diplomacy out of personal hatred of Communism. “Pompeo is poisoning US diplomacy with his personal hatred of the Chinese political system, which will worsen the global situation.”
• Pompeo is eroding ‘world peace and stability.’ “It’s well-known that China-US relations will have a profound influence on the nature of international relations in the 21st century. Deteriorating China-US relations will erode foundations for world peace and stability. What Pompeo is doing now is undermining such a foundation.”
• Pompeo can’t handle diversity so he’s starting a new Cold War. “Geopolitics cannot dominate the world anymore. Pompeo and his like are desperately pulling the world backwards. They are unable to handle a diverse and complicated new century and so they attempt to resume the Cold War. They can only ‘realize their ambition’ in polarized confrontation.”
• ‘Delusional’ to drive wedge between CCP and ‘the Chinese people.’ “We want to tell Pompeo that any attempt to drive a wedge between the CPC and the Chinese people is delusional. It’s foolish for him to do so at this time.”
• CCP is great and decisively controlled the epidemic while the Americans can’t. “Under the leadership of the CPC, China quickly controlled the epidemic after the outbreak, while the Chinese people witnessed the US medical system collapsed with a climbing death toll that meant a much higher cost in lives than China. Chinese society and politics come in an era full of unprecedented confidence and the Washington elites have completely failed at their attempts to fool the Chinese.”
• ‘Politicians like Pompeo’ are just hacks who are in it for the money. “Most of the public around the world are very aware of the political tricks of politicians like Pompeo. How many people in the world experiencing waves of outbreaks can believe that worsening outbreaks around them are not because of domestic reasons but entirely from China? Some Western politicians and media who follow Washington’s appeal to hype China bashing are primarily profit-driven, and how many of them can truly believe their own hyperbole?”
• Pompeo is a liar who won’t make America great again. “Lies may fulfill Pompeo’s personal ambition, but they will never accomplish the US dreams to be ‘great again.'”
• Pompeo is harmful to world peace and is the worst secretary of state ever. “Pompeo is not only a figure harmful to world peace, but also should be listed as the worst US secretary of state in its history.”

National Association of Black Journalists cancels event on disinformation after Huawei connection. China’s Huawei electronic espionage company is the corporate sponsor of the National Association of Black Journalists’ webinar on disinformation about the pandemic. Participants pull out when this is exposed, and the NABJ cancels the event. Highlights:

• NABJ announces cancellation webinar, citing ‘distraction’ from priorities. “NABJ has canceled a webinar scheduled for tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET, entitled ‘The Rise of Misinformation’ because it has become a distraction from other priorities.”
• NABJ distances self from Huawei. “It [the webinar] had come under attack because controversial technology giant Huawei was planning to sponsor the webinar though it had no editorial control. NABJ always retains editorial control over all such content along with final say over moderators and panelists. Huawei knew all of this in advance.  Additionally, Huawei officials were not part of the scheduled webinar.”
• Big-name celebrity panel was to have participated. “Seasoned journalist and CNN’s Van Jones was a panelist and NABJ’s Roland Martin was the moderator for the webinar. They were to be joined by panelists will.i.am, musician, entrepreneur and philanthropist, and Dr. Ebony Hilton, a noted medical professional at the University of Virginia. They were all poised to talk about the purveyance of information regarding COVID-19.”
• No contract and no money from Huawei. “There is no signed contract and NABJ has not accepted funding from Huawei. NABJ will continue its COVID-19 dialogue with the greater community-at-large.”
• Huawei deletes tweet. Huawei pulls down its tweet that promoted the conference: https://twitter.com/HuaweiUSA/status/1259904239356305409.
• Van Jones of CNN says he didn’t know of Huawei sponsorship & is glad event is canceled. “I accepted invite to participate in NABJ webinar, warning black community about #COVID misinformation,” CNN’s Van Jones says on Twitter. “I said ‘yes’ without knowing sponsor. Glad NABJ canceled; I wouldn’t have participated. I’ll keep raising alarm about pandemic’s impact on vulnerable people.”

Senate initiative to break US dependence on China for rare earth minerals. A bill “to end US reliance on China for rare earth elements used in the manufacturing of products including consumer electronics, electric vehicles and fighter planes” is to be introduced in the US Senate, Bloomberg reports. Highlights:

• Protect US supply chains. “The bill is part of a push in Congress to shift supply chains, particularly in industries critical for national defense, away from China and back toward the US,” according to Bloomberg.
• Response to CCP threats. “Much like the Chinese Communist Party has threatened to cut off the US from life-saving medicines made in China, the Chinese Communist Party could also cut off our access to these materials, significantly threatening U.S. national security,” says the legislation’s sponsor, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

May 13

96 year-old former Senator Dole registers as agent for Chinese company. “Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole has registered as a lobbyist on behalf of Wanhua Chemical (America) Co., Ltd., a Texas-based chemical company that is a subsidiary to its Chinese parent company Wanhua Chemical Group Co. Ltd.,” American Military News reports. Highlights:

• $150,000 to influence US trade policy. “Dole’s role in the lobbying was disclosed in a disclosure form filed by the law-firm Alston & Bird. The firm has reported it is being paid $150,000 to lobby on behalf of the Chinese company in the first quarter of 2020, on ‘Issues related to U.S. Trade Investment Policy.’”
• Parent company would benefit. “The form further disclosures, ‘To the extent that Wanhua Chemical (America) Co., Ltd. realizes any benefit from legislative or executive action, so, too, would its parent company, Wanhua Chemical Group Co. Ltd.’”
• Chinese regime is largest shareholder. “Yantai Guofeng Investment Holdings Co., Ltd., a wholly Chinese state-owned entity, acts as the Wanhua Chemical Group’s largest shareholder, holding 21.59% of its shares, according to a translated Chinese government asset disclosure document. Yantai Guofeng Investment Holdings Co., Ltd. appears to be a business entity of the Yantain municipal government in the Chinese province of Shandong.”
• Democrat and former Trump aide are on the CCP tab. Other registered agents of the Communist Chinese firm: “Bob Siggins, the chief of staff for former North Dakota Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy; and Jane Lucas, who previously served as special assistant to President Donald Trump for legislative affairs, among others.”

College students show that anti-Communism and anti-racism are compatible. “The bipartisan consensus on China may have fallen apart in Washington, but it’s still going strong on American campuses,” Axios reports. Highlights:

• “What’s happening: Dozens of leading members of both the College Republican National Committee and the College Democrats of America, representing universities in more than 45 states, have released a joint letter today that calls for the permanent closure of Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes on all U.S. campuses, protections for students and campus groups that are vulnerable to Chinese government coercion, and condemnation of anti-Asian racism.”
• “What they’re saying: ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s actions pose an immense threat to academic freedom and to human dignity. It is imperative that we distinguish this totalitarian regime from the Chinese people, whom we must steadfastly defend from abhorrent acts of xenophobia, racism, and hatred.’”
• “Why it matters: Young people are showing Congress it’s possible to denounce both China’s authoritarianism and anti-Chinese racism in America at the same time.”

May 14

People’s Daily approvingly quotes Ambassador Baucus. The CCP’s authoritative People’s Daily makes quick use of Ambassador Baucus’ comments on CNN to counterattack the US government’s criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party. Highlights:

• ‘Specter of McCarthyism’ is resurging. “Is the specter of McCarthyism rapidly resurging in the US? A few former US diplomats and US scholars are raising concerns and alarms that it is.”
• ‘Fear’ – Baucus compares Trump to Joe McCarthy and ‘red-baiting the State Department.’ “In a CNN interview on May 6, former US ambassador to China Max Baucus warned that he feared the Trump government’s rhetoric against China was so strong that the US was heading into an era, ‘which is similar to Joe McCarthy back when he was red-baiting the State Department, attacking communism.’”
  • [Comment: It is noteworthy that People’s Daily does not quote Baucus’ comparison of Trump’s actions to Hitler.]
• ‘Lies and innuendos to scare Americans into submission.’ “Columbia University professor Jeffrey D. Sachs said, ‘Trump is our present-day Senator Joseph McCarthy who uses lies and innuendos to scare Americans into submission.’”
  • [Comment: Sachs made a name for himself pushing economic policies in Russia that helped build the Putin gangster-state; he later went to work in China and speaks accordingly.]
• CCP: Baucus and Sachs are ‘rational’ and ‘objective.’ “Their remarks are rational, objective and convey a very serious warning that the current US political atmosphere toward China, the actions of the Trump administration in particular, is leading the US to an era in which the McCarthyism ghost is resurrecting.”
• CCP: Trump is to blame for Wuhan Virus ‘lies.’ “China-US relations are at their worst point over the past 40 years because of this. The Trump administration is largely to blame. Be it the lies that the novel coronavirus originated from a Wuhan lab, or groundless claims that China should be held accountable for the losses the epidemic caused to the US, these phenomena illustrate that some US politicians and the Trump administration are trying to revive McCarthyism in the US, for the sake of their own political interests and reelection.”
• Baucus: Americans feel ‘intimidated’ for speaking positively about CCP regime. “‘A lot of people knew what was going on was wrong, they knew it was wrong, but they didn’t stand up and say anything about it, they felt intimidated,’ Baucus said. As problems in China-US relations have increasingly been exaggerated over the clashes of ideologies and political systems, many Americans worry that they might become targets of criticism if they make relatively rational, objective remarks, or if they say something positive about China.”
• People’s Daily: Trump created McCarthyistic ‘climate of fear’ in America. “In this climate of fear, they have chosen to remain silent because they worry about being labeled as ‘pro-China’ or ‘pro-Communist.’ They fear having their careers and futures undermined. This reveals the distorted and irrational side of the US politics. If such a situation continues, it will only drag China-US relations into a dangerous abyss.”

Senator calls for colleagues not to meet with Chinese companies. “Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn called on her fellow lawmakers to refuse meetings with representatives from Chinese companies, including video sharing app TikTok and telecom company Huawei,” Axios reports.

• “Why it matters: Companies with ties to China have been the target of ire and suspicion from lawmakers from both parties concerned about privacy and security.”
• “Driving the news: Blackburn told colleagues that denying access to Senate offices sends a ‘warning shot’ to Beijing in the misinformation [sic] war over the origins of the coronavirus.”

Other

• Tearing down Great Firewall of China could have saved thousands (Daily Caller)
• College Republicans and College Democrats jointly call for closure of Confucius Institutes (National Review)
• Australian university fires professor who criticized its ties with CCP (Foreign Policy)
• ‘The People’s Republic of Queensland’ (Wall Street Journal)

May 15

FBI arrests former Cleveland Clinic employee apparently as part of Chinese spy ring. The Department of Justice and FBI announce the arrest of another Chinese spy within the American medical research community. DoJ and FBI “announced a former Cleveland Clinic employee was arrested yesterday [May 14] without incident by law enforcement and had his initial court appearance today,” the Justice Department says in a statement. Highlights:

• “Dr. Qing Wang, a former Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) employee, is charged with false claims and wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that Dr. Wang and his research group received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”
• “According to the criminal complaint, Dr. Wang knowingly failed to disclose to NIH that he had an affiliation with and held the position of Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) and received grant funds from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (CNSF) for some of the same scientific research funded by the NIH grant.”
• “It is also alleged that Dr. Wang participated in the Thousand Talents Program….”

CCP readies to ‘counterattack’ US over semiconductors. “China is ready to take a series of countermeasures against a US plan to block shipments of semiconductors to Chinese telecom firm Huawei, including putting US companies on an ‘unreliable entity list,’ launching investigations and imposing restrictions on US companies such as Apple, and halting purchase of Boeing airplanes, a source close to the Chinese government told the Global Times,” the Party outlet says.

Other

• Wealthiest New Yorkers flee city, leaving the un-wealthy behind. (New York Times)

May 17

YouTube ‘automatically deletes’ terms critical of CCP. “YouTube automatically deletes comments that mention some Chinese phrases commonly used to criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chinese netizens have discovered,” the Epoch Times reports. Highlights:

• Likely ‘the work of an algorithm.’ “Comments that contain such phrases are deleted within seconds, which suggests that it’s the work of an algorithm.”
• ‘Gongfei’ is banned. “One apparently banned phrase is ‘gongfei’ (共匪), which can be translated as ‘communist bandit.’ It seems to date back to the Chinese civil war era.”
• ‘Wumao,’ a term for CCP trolls, is banned. “Another phrase that has been deleted is ‘wumao’ (五毛), which literally means ‘fifty cents’ and is commonly used to describe the army of internet trolls the CCP uses to spread its propaganda online. It’s rumored the trolls used to be paid around 50 cents per post.”
• Reporter tested both phrases repeatedly. “The Epoch Times tested both phrases repeatedly under different YouTube accounts and different videos, always obtaining the same result—the comments were deleted in roughly 20 seconds.”
• Google asked for evidence. “A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, asked for evidence of the deletions, in response to a request for comment emailed by The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times provided extensive evidence, including links to YouTube videos where such comments were deleted, links to individual comments that have been deleted, and videos that capture the comment deletion in real-time.”
• Google cooperates on AI with Chinese research institute tied to PLA. “Since 2018, the company has been cooperating with a leading artificial intelligence (AI) research body at Tsinghua University, a prestigious Chinese academic institution that also conducts AI research for the Chinese military.”
• Google made CCP censorship app. “Google secretly developed censorship app for CCP. “Google also faced criticism after it was revealed in 2018 that it was secretly developing a censored search app for the Chinese market, as part of a project dubbed ‘Dragonfly.’”

May 19

Prog lawmakers want US to slash military spending due to pandemic. “Twenty-nine of the House’s most liberal Democratic members called … for a cut in military spending in the yearly national defense authorization bill — a declaration, they said, that is meant to focus federal resources on the coronavirus pandemic,” the Washington Post reports. Highlights:

• 29 lawmakers will complicate passage of the National Defense Authorization Act. “The demand, however, stands to greatly complicate the Democratic-controlled House’s ability to advance the National Defense Authorization Act, one of the most consequential must-pass measures that Congress assembles each year. It is likely to generate objections from Republicans and more moderate Democrats alike — and create headaches for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her leadership team.”
• Pandemic makes defense cuts ‘imperative.’ “The signers are almost all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including lead sponsors Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.), who have long called for lower levels of Pentagon spending to free more resources for domestic spending. But the pandemic, they argue, presents a new imperative for defense cuts.” Excuses given:
  • “Right now, the coronavirus is our greatest adversary.”
  • “We must remain focused on combating the coronavirus and not on increasing military spending that already outpaces the next 10 closest nations combined….”
  • “At some point, spending more than every other nation on earth must be enough.”
• Implicit ultimatum. “With 29 signatures, the letter carries an implicit ultimatum: Should Democratic leaders move forward with an outsize defense bill, they will need to do so with Republican votes. The signers could together block the bill from passage if the GOP unites against Democrats, as it did last year.
• The signatories. “Among the signers are the four members of the House’s hard-left ‘squad’ — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). They also include senior House members such as Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (Mass.), Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter A. DeFazio (Ore.), Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia M. Velázquez (N.Y.) and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.). One, Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), is a member of the Armed Services Committee.”

Other

• Top Disney official quits to become CEO of CCP’s TikTok (China Daily)

May 20

US senators introduce resolution to condemn the terms ‘Chinese virus’ & ‘Wuhan virus.’ Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) led a group of senators to introduce a resolution to condemn use of the terms “Chinese Virus” and “Wuhan Virus.” The resolution, S. Res. 580, “calls on all public officials to condemn and denounce anti-Asian sentiment in any form” and “condemns all manifestations or expressions of racism, xenophobia, discrimination, anti-Asian sentiment, scapegoating, and ethnic or religious intolerance.” Highlights:

• ‘Wuhan Virus’ term is racist, promoting ‘anti-Asian stigma.’ “Whereas the use of anti-Asian terminology and rhetoric related to COVID-19, such as the ‘Chinese Virus’, ‘Wuhan Virus’, and ‘Kung-flu’, have perpetuated anti-Asian stigma…”
• Let’s follow WHO guidelines. “Whereas the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognize that naming COVID-19 by its geographic location or linking COVID-19 to a specific ethnicity perpetuates stigma…”

Other

• Former Xinhua editor reveals how regime ordered him to cover up polio outbreak to avoid spoiling Xi Jinping trip (Daily Mail)

May 21

Beijing to impose broad ‘national security’ law to control Hong Kong. “China’s Communist Party will impose a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong by fiat during the annual meeting of its top political body … criminalizing ‘foreign interference’ along with secessionist activities and subversion of state power,” the New York Times reports. “The move is the boldest yet from Beijing to undercut Hong Kong’s autonomy and bring the global financial hub under its full control, as it works to rewrite the ‘one country, two systems’ framework that has allowed the territory to enjoy a level of autonomy for the past 23 years.”

Other countries’ failures helped Xi consolidate power, but he’s vulnerable. “‘At first people were angry with the government for its handling of the epidemic,’ says Deng Yuwen, a former editor at the Central Party School’s influential Study Times newspaper. ‘Then the virus spread across the world and death tolls were much higher elsewhere. People changed their minds partly because of what Xi did right, but more because of other countries’ failures,'” the Financial Times reports. More:

• Pandemic ‘appears to have strengthened Xi’s grasp.’ “Jessica Chen Weiss, a China expert at Cornell University, agrees that ‘coronavirus appears to have strengthened Xi’s grasp on power, despite the shockwave that the outbreak initially sent through the system.'”
• Democratic countries undermined their images. “‘The struggles of other countries,’ [Weiss] adds, ‘have made it harder for liberals to argue democratisation is the solution to China’s ills.'”
• Xi can’t afford to take any blame. “However, Mr Xi still faces demands from overseas — and from a few voices at home — for a credible investigation into the chain of events that began in central China late last year and triggered the world’s biggest economic catastrophe since the Depression in the 1930s. Politicians as far apart as Australia, India, Europe and Brazil have pinned the blame for this on Mr Xi’s administration.”
• Xi’s international standing is damaged. “When international travel resumes, it is hard to think of a western or even significant developing nation that would be willing to be the first to host a state visit by China’s president.”
• Xi tells WHO he will back a WHO investigation – later, and not only of China. “In a video address to the World Health Organization’s annual assembly on Monday, Mr Xi said China would back an ‘objective and impartial’ WHO review, but only after the crisis passes. He will also insist that any official WHO examination does not focus solely on China.”
• Any independent probe of CCP is ‘impossible.’ ‘”It’s impossible to conduct an independent investigation under China’s political system,’ says one veteran Chinese investigative journalist, who asked not to be named. ‘There is no way independent experts can access information from the government.'”

What did Xi know and when did he know it?  “The issue of what Mr Xi knew and when did he know it — especially with regards to human-to-human transmission of coronavirus — is a critical one for the ruling party,” the Financial Times reports. Highlights:

• The question of what Xi new and when can undermine the entire CCP narrative. “The question has the potential to undermine Beijing’s official narrative that Mr Xi masterminded a successful campaign to contain the outbreak within China, buying the rest of the world precious time that most countries, most notably the US, then squandered.”
• CCP will defend its ‘version of history’ at all costs. “‘They’ve got their version of history out there now and they will defend that against all comers,’ says Christopher Johnson, a former CIA China analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The evidence so far about Mr Xi’s role is inconclusive but leaves some difficult gaps for the party to explain.”
• Xi’s six-day lag. “According to party documents obtained by the Associated Press last month, national health officials warned on January 14 in an internal meeting that China faced a ‘severe and complex public health event,’ adding that ‘the risk of transmission and spread is high.’ But Beijing did not make a public announcement until January 20.”
• Xi knew by January 7. “In mid-February the journal Qiu Shi, or Seeking Truth, which is published by the party’s central committee, revealed Mr Xi had issued instructions on containing the outbreak during a January 7 meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee. At the time, says Prof Pei, ‘Xi wanted to show that he was always in charge — this was primarily for domestic consumption.’ But a few months on, the revelation only begs questions about whether Mr Xi and other top party leaders knew on January 7, if not earlier, that the virus was highly contagious.”
• Xi had been in hiding for three weeks. “The [CCP Central Committee’s Qiu Shi] article was published shortly after a three-week period in which Mr Xi, whose appearances and utterances normally receive blanket propaganda coverage, had been relatively invisible in state media. He made his first appearance on the front lines of the virus fight on February 10.”
• ‘Wuhan’s official case numbers … were implausibly low.’ “The officials had been alarmed by Thailand’s discovery a day earlier of the first reported coronavirus infection outside of China, involving a Wuhan resident who had travelled to Bangkok. Over the following weeks, the first Wuhan-linked cases began appearing overseas, in locations including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Washington state and Boston. This suggested that Wuhan’s official case numbers, which remained in the double digits for most of January, were implausibly low.”
• An independent investigation would humiliate Xi. “Aside from potentially shedding embarrassing light on Mr Xi’s own handling of the crisis, an investigation could also raise some awkward questions about whether China’s official virus count — currently at 82,965 cases and 4,634 deaths according to the National Health Commission — has been grossly underestimated.”
• CCP’s rigidity is hailed for mobilizing against virus – but it really helped cover up the danger. “But even if the Chinese party-state ultimately led a successful containment effort, many critics counter that the system’s rigidity cost it an opportunity to ringfence the outbreak in Wuhan in early January.”
• CCP censored critic of rigidity and control. “In an online post this month that was quickly censored, Zhang Xuezhong, a Shanghai-based constitutional law expert and longtime party critic, lamented the consequences of Mr Xi’s authoritarian rule. ‘The government’s tight controls have almost completely destroyed the ability of Chinese society to help itself,’ he wrote.”
• Freedom of speech would have stopped the pandemic early. “Mr Zhang’s comments echoed a similar critique written in late February by Ren Zhiqiang, a former property executive and party member who has been highly critical of Mr Xi’s crackdowns on civil freedoms.
  • Truth-teller ‘detained by party’s discipline inspection commission.’ “‘No matter how many shortcomings exist in China’s administrative system, if there was freedom of speech citizens could have taken measures to protect themselves,’ wrote Mr Ren, who has since been detained by the party’s discipline inspection commission. ‘Simply trusting the people with freedom of speech could have achieved a great victory in preventing and managing this epidemic, and there wouldn’t have been such a huge price to pay.'”

Biden Center at University of Pennsylvania won’t reveal CCP funding. The Biden Center at one of the most prestigious universities refuses to reveal its foreign funding, even as the host university received tens of millions of dollars from Communist China, the Free Beacon reports. Highlights:

• National Security Council-in-Waiting for Biden 2020. “Many of Biden’s nonprofit entities have served as landing spots for his former—and potentially future—White House aides. The Penn Biden Center, which had a “soft opening” in March 2017 and officially opened its doors in February 2018, has served as a national security council-in-waiting for Biden, employing his top White House foreign policy advisers Colin Kahl, Michael Carpenter, and Jeffrey Prescott.”
• Foreign funding at Penn rose 300%, with China as largest donor. “While the Penn Biden Center has not released information on its donors, foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania has risen more than threefold since its soft opening, spiking to over $100 million last year from $31 million in 2016, according to Department of Education records. China has been the largest contributor during that time, even as the U.S. federal government and prosecutors have ramped up scrutiny into the Chinese government’s influence-buying and espionage operations on American campuses.”
• $61 million from Communist China. “Between March 2017 and the end of 2019, the University of Pennsylvania received a total of $61 million in gifts and contracts from China, according to Department of Education records. In the preceding four years, the university received just $19 million from China.”
• Biden Center punts to University of Pennsylvania, which won’t respond. “Asked about its funding, a spokesman for the Biden Center told the Washington Free Beacon that it is ‘a question for my colleagues at main university.’ Penn spokesman Stephen MacCarthy did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Biden campaign declined to comment. The Biden Cancer Initiative, which had $2.1 million in total assets in 2018 before suspending its operations last year, according to its tax records, declined to provide a list of donors.”
• Biden Institute at U-Delaware won’t reveal funding. “The Biden Institute at the University of Delaware has also declined to reveal its funders.”

Suit filed to force Biden Center to reveal Chinese donations. A public advocacy group announces a lawsuit against the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit is to compel the Biden Center to comply with federal law to reveal its donors of $250,000 or more. Highlights:

• University received $70 million from China since Biden Center opened in 2017. “Since 2017 alone, when the Biden Center opened and after Joe Biden announced he was running for President in April 2018, the university received over $70 million from China, of which $22 million were listed as ‘Anonymous.’ Federal law requires the disclosure of the source of all donations over $250,000. The complaint also requests referral to the Department of Justice to file an enforcement action seeking compliance and to recoup all the costs of the investigation,” according to the litigator, the National Legal and Policy Center.
• Chinese consul opened ‘research symposium’ as pandemic broke. “The complaint notes that the Biden Center co-sponsored the 2020 Penn China Research Symposium on January 31, 2020, that included opening remarks by Ambassador Huang Ping, Consul-General of the People’s Republic of China in New York, amid the coverup by China of the pandemic of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China.”
• ‘Biden Center is beholden to China.’ “‘It is apparent that the Biden Center is beholden to China for its operations,’ said Peter Flaherty, Chair of NLPC. ‘This has an insidious effect on shaping the programs it produces.’ ‘These multi-million dollar donations from China are bad enough,’ said Paul Kamenar, counsel for NLPC, ‘but the flagrant reporting violations over the years are simply outrageous.’”

May 25

Beijing uses pandemic to add more monitoring to citizens’ social credit scores. “China created a smartphone tool to trace and track the movement of potential coronavirus patients. Now, plans to make that kind of health tracking permanent are stirring concerns in a country where personal privacy was once said to be an afterthought,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Highlights:

• ‘Permanent version’ planned. “Anger spread across Chinese social media sites over the weekend following an announcement that officials in the eastern city of Hangzhou could create a permanent version of a smartphone-based health-rating system developed to fight Covid-19. The news led some internet users to accuse the city of exploiting the pandemic to expand state monitoring of residents.”
• App to monitor people’s personal movements. “Chinese authorities have aggressively touted the deployment of digital surveillance in helping to contain the spread of Covid-19. In addition to tracking potential patients with temperature-detecting cameras and smartphone location data, officials have also used QR code-based health-rating apps to manage the movement of residents depending on their risk of exposure.”
• Developed with Alibaba. “Hangzhou, a tech hub located south of Shanghai, was among the first cities to roll out a health-rating app. Developed by authorities with help from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which is based in Hangzhou, the app tracks a person’s travel history and health conditions in order to single out those at a higher risk of carrying the coronavirus.”
• Red and green bar codes restrict or grant freedom of movement. “Residents who had recently traveled to virus hot spots would be given a red bar code and asked to quarantine themselves for 14 days. Those without such a travel history and who were feeling healthy were given a green bar code, and allowed to move freely around the city.”
• Permanent version will aggregate personal data. “On Friday, the city’s health commission said it was considering a new, permanent version of the tool that would assign each person a colored health badge based on a collation of their medical records, physical examination results and lifestyle habits, such as smoking and alcohol consumption.”
• ‘Health score’ added to rank people from 0 to 100. “In addition to the colored badge, each resident would be assigned a health score ranging from 0 to 100, which a city would use to compile health rankings, Hangzhou health commission chief Sun Yongrong said, according to the commission’s website.”
• Signs of resistance. “The plan generated a wave of criticism on Weibo, China’s analog of Twitter. ‘Once power is unleashed, it’s difficult to retract. Once we give up our rights under special circumstances, it’s hard to get them back,’ one user wrote in a widely circulated post Monday.”

YouTube routinely deletes posts critical of CCP trolls. “YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about the Wumao (五毛), an internet propaganda division of the Chinese Communist Party,” online activist Palmer Luckey writes. “Who at Google decided to censor American comments on American videos hosted in America by an American platform that is already banned in China?” More:

• ‘New global policy on YouTube.’  “This appears to be a new global policy on YouTube, not directed at me specifically. Try saying anything negative about the 五毛, or even mentioning them at all. Your comment will last about 30 seconds and get deleted without warning or notice, CCP-censor style. To what end?”
• YouTube deletes ‘entire’ chat if anyone posts anti-CCP phrases. “YouTube will also delete the ENTIRE chat replay from a livestream if a single person types the phrase 共匪, 五毛, or any of the other blacklisted terms critical of the CCP,” a Chinese online activist reports.

YouTube confirms it deletes ‘phrases that insult China’s Communist Party.’ Google’s YouTube division confirms that it uses “automated filters” that delete certain praises that the CCP finds insulting, but says it’s only an “accident.” Highlights, as reported by The Verge:

• ‘YouTube is automatically deleting comments’ critical of CCP. “YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.”
• YouTube did not elaborate on its ‘error.’ “‘Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,’ said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.”
• The ‘error’ persisted for six months. “But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it’s one that’s gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube’s official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem.”
• ‘Communist bandit’ and troll phrase were ‘automatically deleted.’ “Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words ‘共匪’ (‘communist bandit’) or ‘五毛’ (‘50-cent party’) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.”
• One term dates to pre-Mao era, the other insults CCP trolls. “The term ‘共匪’ is an insult that dates back to China’s Nationalist government, while ‘五毛,’ (or ‘wu mao’) is a derogatory slang term for internet users paid to direct online discussion away from criticism of the CCP. The name comes from claims that such commenters are paid 50 Chinese cents per post.”
• ‘Accidentally added to YouTube’s comment filters.’ “These phrases seem to have been accidentally added to YouTube’s comment filters, which automatically remove spam and offensive text.”

May 26

Other

• British university votes down pro-Hong Kong resolution after Chinese student pushback (Axios)

May 27

US: ‘Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China.’ Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces that he “reported to Congress that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, given facts on the ground. The United States stands with the people of Hong Kong.” Higlights of Pompeo’s statement:

• “Beijing’s disastrous decision is only the latest in a series of actions that fundamentally undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms and China’s own promises to the Hong Kong people under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a U.N.-filed international treaty.”
• “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.”

May 29

‘Emboldened Xi Jinping pushes the boundaries.’ “Less than four months ago, Xi Jinping faced the biggest crisis of his leadership, as it was bruised by China’s initial, bungled response to the coronavirus,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Highlights about Xi’s pandemic victory:

• ‘Extraordinary turnaround … Xi has seized the moment.’ “He has since pulled off an extraordinary turnaround, buoyed by Beijing’s reported success in curbing the virus while the U.S. and many other democracies wrestle with it. Mr. Xi has seized the moment to gain ground in areas central to his ‘China Dream’ of a strong unified nation, on par with—if not surpassing—the U.S., while brushing aside government shortcomings.”
• Xi uses pandemic as distraction to expand China’s regional power.  “With Washington and its allies distracted by the pandemic and its economic fallout, Mr. Xi is taking bold steps on issues where he’s often faced international pushback, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea and a disputed border with India.”
• Imperial expansion is core to Xi’s agenda, but it could backfire. “Mr. Xi has made establishing control of territory China claims an integral part of his agenda…. His moves seem to be paying off for the moment, they say, but risk galvanizing international antipathy toward China, which has sharpened during the pandemic and could translate into concerted action once the crisis subsides.”
• Increase in military spending. “In an indication of China’s determination to close the gap with the U.S. militarily, last Friday it announced a 6.6% rise in defense spending. That’s lower than its increase of 7.5% for 2019 but still a substantial amount given this year’s projected 0.2% drop in total government expenditure.”
• West’s weak response & disorganization aided Xi. “‘For Xi Jinping, the pandemic was initially a disaster,’ said Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor at the Study Times, a newspaper published by the Central Party School, which trains China’s political elite. ‘But reversals in the contagion situations between the East and West have now strengthened his authority.'”
• Xi can now blame all his failures on the pandemic. “Although [economic damage to China is] a blow to Mr. Xi’s ambitions, it gives him cover for earlier failings that can now be blamed on the pandemic—such as the slow pace of economic reforms, excessive local government debt and stalled progress on his global Belt and Road infrastructure plan.”

Unrestricted Warfare co-author hopes Beijing doesn’t act ‘stupid.’ Qiao Lang, co-author of the People’s Liberation Army’s 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, warns that Beijing shouldn’t do anything “stupid” over Taiwan. “It is … still a mistake to do the right thing at the wrong time,” Qiao says. “We shouldn’t do a stupid thing that make us lose everything.”

UK opens citizenship path to 300,000 Hong Kongers. “The UK government has opened a path to citizenship for more than 300,000 Hong Kong residents in a bold riposte to China’s security crackdown on its former colony,” the Financial Times reports. “Dominic Raab, foreign secretary, has pledged to extend visa rights for British National (Overseas) passport holders and facilitate their path to British citizenship unless Beijing rows back from plans to impose national security laws on Hong Kong.”

UK organizes ‘5G club of democracies’ against Huawei. “Britain is seeking to forge an alliance of ten democracies to create alternative suppliers of 5G equipment and other technologies to avoid relying on China,” The Times of London reports. “New concerns about Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, have increased the urgency of the plan after security officials began a review into its involvement in the mobile network upgrade. The government has approached Washington about a ‘D10’ club of democratic partners, based on the G7 plus Australia, South Korea and India.”

Biden speech rediscovered; called for China to integrate into US. A 2011 speech at Sichuan University shows then-vice president Joseph Biden calling for Communist China to integrate into American institutions at all levels. Biden’s speech, posted by The National Pulse, while mildly critical of certain aspects of China, includes the following statements:

• A ‘rising China’ benefits America. “Let me be clear — let me be clear:  I believed in 1979 and said so and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development, not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole.”
• Obama administration made tight ties with China ‘a top priority.’ “A rising China will fuel economic growth and prosperity and it will bring to the fore a new partner with whom we can meet global challenges together.  When President Obama and I took office in January of 2009, we made our relationship with China a top priority.”
• China and US ‘face many of the same threats.’ “The fact is China and the United States face many of the same threats and share many of the same objectives and responsibilities.”
• Unilateral: US visa process is too strict. “United States should undertake to make it easier for Chinese business people to obtain visas to travel to the United States.  It takes much too long for that to happen.”
• One way: US will export ‘tens of thousands’ of sensitive technologies to China. “And while we are in the midst — also it’s the reason why the President once he took office ordered for the first time in decades, ordered — we’re in the midst of a total reform of our export control system.  Already, we have made thousands of new items available for export to China for exclusive civilian use that were not available before, some of which require a license, while others don’t.  And tens of thousands of more items will become available very soon.”
• ‘Rejection of those voices in America’ not to sell high-tech to China. “That’s a significant change in our export policy and a rejection of those voices in America that say we should not export that kind of technology to — for civilian use in China. We disagree, and we’re changing.”
• Integrate from classrooms to boardrooms. “In order to cement this robust partnership, we have to go beyond close ties between Washington and Beijing, which we’re working on every day, go beyond it to include all levels of government, go beyond it to include classrooms and laboratories, athletic fields and boardrooms.”

Other

• Chinese foreign ministry baits Pompeo on Twitter to “stand with the angry people of Minneapolis, just like you did with people of Hong Kong.” (Twitter)
• US readies to expel Chinese students with ties to PLA. (New York Times)

May 30

Chinese foreign ministry taunts US: ‘I can’t breathe.’ Beijing taunts the US over its racial protests and rioting. In a response to State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus’ tweet to “hold to account the Chinese Communist Party, which has flagrantly broken its promises to the people of Hong Kong,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying tweets, “I can’t breathe.”

Beijing re-transmits Russian propaganda. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying retweets a Russian RT video about American race riots headlined, “Thugs & Heroes Hypocrisy.”

Rubio: China joins Russia & Iran in ‘stoking’ racial violence in US. Acting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Marco Rubio tweets, “Tonight seeing VERY heavy social media activity on protests & counter reactions from social media accounts linked to at least 3 foreign adversaries. They didn’t create these divisions. But they are actively stoking & promoting violence & confrontation from multiple angles.”

Other

• Beijing allowed its currency to slide to make it exports to US cheaper. (Fox News)

May 31

White House agrees that Chinese regime is actively promoting violence in US. Beijing is exploiting American racial violence, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien tells ABC News. Highlights:

• ‘Spot on.’ Asked about Senator Rubio’s comment, O’Brien says the observation was “spot on.”
• Chinese stoking is ‘coming straight from the government.’ “Asked whether Russia — which tried to stoke racial unrest and other divisions during the 2016 election — is also involved now, O’Brien said there may be Russian activists playing a role. But he said that’s different from China, where ‘it’s coming straight from the government,’” Politico reports.

Pompeo: China is bent on ‘destruction’ of the West. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Chinese Communist Party is committed to the “destruction” of the West. Highlights of Pompeo’s remarks:

• Different CCP. “So it’s a different Chinese Communist Party today than it was 10 years ago.”
• CCP seeks ‘destruction’ of Western ideas, democracies, and values. “And I think the remarks that President Trump gave on Friday of this past week reflect that this is a Chinese Communist Party that has come to view itself as intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values. It puts Americans at risk.”
• US will treat CCP-controlled Hong Kong as part of Communist China. “We treated Hong Kong more favorably than we did China for all of those years because of that treaty. The Chinese Communist Party has now broken its promise and the United States will respond. As a practical matter, the president laid out a couple of things that we will do. He’s asked us to review every preferential treatment that Hong Kong had and work to eliminate. It no longer makes sense if the Chinese are going to treat Hong Kong the same way that they treat mainland China, there’s no basis for the United States to treat it differently as well.”
• European allies are coming around. “I think the populations in those countries are now seeing most clearly the risk the Chinese Communist Party presents…. This is what authoritarian regimes do. They steal information. They deny freedom of expression. They oppress their peoples and they present risk to people all across the world. Democracies behave completely differently. And I think the people of Europe will come to see that along with the United States, we can work together to build our economies, to protect our people and to keep the entire world in a place where the Chinese Communist Party does not dominate the next century.”
• Strong bipartisan unity in legislation against CCP. “Many of these are bipartisan bills. This is something that I think people all across the political spectrum understand is a real risk,”

June 1

Victims of Communism memorial in Washington vandalized. Rioters in the Antifa/Black Lives Matter protest vandalize a bronze statue of the Tiananmen Square “Goddess of Democracy” in Washington DC. Antifa has targeted the statue, devoted to Victims of Communism around the world, in the past.

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