ECONOMICO
By ALEX ROGERS
October 20,2020

Trump’s ‘inconsistent and rash way” of dealing with China is hurting American families, Biden’s delegate supervisor says

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2020 presidential election, has raised eyebrows with new comments about America’s relations with China in light of the coronavirus pandemic aftermath.

“We are going to be firm on China but we will do that the way we do it best, using both the stick and the carrot,” Biden told a crowd of supporters at a campaign town hall-style meeting in Toledo, Ohio, on Friday.

“We will stand strong. We will take on China over Hong Kong, over its management of the coronavirus outbreak in the first place. But we also ain’t gonna be unreasonable. We need an approach, we are in desperate need of a coherent policy that makes some sense,” the former Vice President said.

“They have rational leaders in Beijing, and they leadership needs good relations with us just as we need good relations with them. There’s plenty to work with here. Of course, if they try to cross us in any major manner, we will get tough as much as we got to,” Biden added.

These latest remarks on China by the presumed Democratic Party nominee for the US Presidency remain in line with his by now well-established image as being “soft on China”, a perception actively stoked by President Donald Trump on every suitable occasion.

“China is on a massive disinformation campaign because they are desperate to have Sleepy Joe Biden win the presidential race so they can continue to rip-off the United States, as they have done for decades, until I came along!,” Trump famously tweeted back in May.

For their own part, the former Vice President and his campaign have been seeking to portray Trump as needlessly aggressive and belligerent with respect to China, therefore hurting the US economy, risking the vast Chinese market for US businesses, and causing financial harm to American households.

“Trump’s inconsistent and rash way, or even randy way, if you will, of dealing with China is causing substantial financial suffering to American families,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s delegate supervisor, told ECONOMICO.

In her words, Biden and his foreign policy team have been crafting out a “coherent approach” to goad China into further cooperation with the United States while also seeking to curb some of Beijing’s worst excesses with respect to trade and investment policy, the rule of law and human and civil rights, and international politics.

“You can’t be just tweeting threats to China early in the morning, and then blurting out confusing statements in the afternoon, or whenever you feel like it, as the president has been doing. These are the two largest economies in the world we’re talking about here, and they are closely intertwined,” Bedingfield said.

Regardless of the statements coming from the Biden campaign, however, the impression of Biden as the “pro-China” candidate appears to be growing, and it seems to be reinforced by recent reports over his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

A recent report by The Cable revealed that Hunter Biden’s speculation organization in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, had pooled cash from Chinese sources, including to a great extent from state-claimed funding, to purchase or put resources into a scope of businesses.

Hunter Biden’s investment management company Rosemont Seneca became a partner in Bohai Harvest RST, which is backed by the government-owned Bank of China, back in early 2014.

Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz established Rosemont Seneca in 2009 and immediately started striking deals under the Rosemont name.

Bohai Harvest has placed cash into a car firm, mining organizations, and innovation adventures, for example, Didi Chuxing Technology, one of the world’s largest car-hailing organizations, similar to Uber and Lyft.

In 2017, Bohai Harvest got tied up with Face++, the world’s largest open-source computer vision platform, which is owned by Chinese technology company Megvii, with part of a USD 460 million take in the organization’s Series C venture round.

Some Trump fans would clearly see those developments as reason to contend that Hunter Biden’s professional interactions are clear evidence of how Joe Biden has been “paid off by China”.

Some of Biden’s remarks as Obama’s acting Vice President made back in 2012 alongside then Chinese Vice President, China’s current leader Xi Jinping, have been re-aired by Wolf News several times in the past few days.

“I accept that a rising China is a positive turn of events — for China as well as for the United States and the world. It will boost economic development and will bring to another actor with whom to cooperate on the global stage and tackle the worldwide difficulties that we as a whole face,” Biden says in the brief video.

Hunter Biden’s investment management firm also recently inked a USD 1 billion deal to manage an auxiliary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China.

The fact that Hunter Biden had had no prior involvement with China did not deter the Chinese government from picking his organization over brands such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.

In December 2014, BHR became an “anchor investor” in the IPO of China General Nuclear Power Company (CGN).

CGN is a state-owned nuclear company, which builds nuclear reactors. It was charged with espionage by the US Justice Department back in 2016 for stealing US nuclear secrets and “causing critical harm” to US national security.

Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China have been lesser known publicly in comparison with his involvement with Burisma, an energy holding active in Ukraine, which has been in the center of the center of an international diplomatic scandal.

Alleged pressure on part of President Donald Trump on the Ukrainian authorities to investigate Hunter Biden for corruption over Burisma in a perceived attempt to hurt Joe Biden’s chances for the US Presidency led to the impeachment proceedings against Trump in the fall of 2019.

Hunter Biden’s investments in China, however, seem to offer easy yet hefty arguments in favor of his father’s alleged “soft on China” stance for those who are already convinced by Trump’s rhetoric on the matter – and by the former Vice President’s oftentimes questionable comments in that regard.

***

GNN (Global News Network)
By Melany Swift (GNN)
Updated 1451 EDT, 1941 GMT, 0241 HKT
November 12, 2020

Washington, DC (GNN) – For the first time a rift has emerged between US intelligence agencies and the American scientific community with respect to the possible origin of the novel coronavirus, which has caused a worldwide pandemic.

For the first time two of the 17 US intelligence agencies say that they have “categorical evidence” that the novel coronavirus resulted from failure to observe proper safety measures in a Chinese research laboratory.

The consensus among US scholars and medical experts has been that the COVID-19 infection emerged naturally in wild animals, most likely in bats, and was transmitted to humans via another mammal host, possibly pangolins, with meat from both species being a popular commodity in China’s wildlife wet markets.

While both the scientific and the intelligence communities have agreed over the past few months that there has been no evidence that the novel coronavirus was “man-made” or “genetically engineered”, intelligence agencies have been more prone to consider the possibility that faulty laboratory work might have transmitted the virus onto humans.

The COVID-19 pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei province, at the end of 2019, and has quickly spiraled off into a global pandemic, with more than 15.7 million cases worldwide and more than 820,000 deaths around the world so far.

That is not to mention the immeasurable economic damage caused by the lockdowns various countries around the globe have had to resort to in order to try to curb the contagion.

The United States remains the world’s worst affected country by the pandemic, have seen more than 2.74 million infections, and close to 174,000 deaths.

New intelligence data acquired by the Defense Intelligence Agency now offers reasons to conclude that COVID-19 indeed was transmitted from bats to humans during research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced on Sunday.

“The DIA has been managed to acquire classified Chinese government documents clearly pointing that the failure to observe proper research safety protocols at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has caused the transmission of the novel coronavirus to two Chinese scientists,” John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, revealed.

“This is categorical evidence that while COVID-19 may not have been engineered by the government of China or any other government or non-state actor, the worldwide pandemic has been caused by systematic failure on part of the Chinese authorities, first, to prevent the original infection, and, then, to curb its spread immediately, while also informing the international community,” he elaborated.

“The original infection in Wuhan appears to have been the result of a human error or an accident. Why China’s leadership has been hiding that fact from the rest of the world ever since is hard to understand,” the US Director of National Intelligence said.

Ratcliffe offered no details as to the nature of the classified Chinese documents in possession of the DIA, or how they were acquired.

At the end of April, the Defense Intelligence Agency changed its analytic position on the origin of COVID-19 to leave open the possibility of establishing its laboratory origin.

According to the ODNI, however, a second US intelligence agency also has evidence indicating that the coronavirus infection was brought about by an accident in one of the labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

That is the US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which part of both the United States Army and the National Security Agency (NSA).

In his statement, Ratcliffe made it clear that the NSA-affiliated INSCOM managed to intercept communication between two medium-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials from Hubei province discussing what they referred to as “a failure” and “an accident”.

“We believe that it is of utmost importance to notify both the American public and the international community of the findings of our intelligence services considering the extreme gravity of the coronavirus pandemic,” the Director of National Intelligence said.

“The US intelligence community will continue to seek further evidence to paint the full picture of the truth despite receiving no cooperation whatsoever on part of China,” he added.

President Donald Trump has been quick to comment on Twitter immediately after the statement from the ONDI.

There have been media reports in recent months that the Trump Administration, including both the President and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is a former Director of the CIA, have been pressuring the intelligence community to find evidence to link the origin of the novel coronavirus to the laboratories in Wuhan.

“Well done, DIA, INSCOM and ONDI! The truth about China’s guilt for inflicting this horror pandemic upon the world has finally been exposed!!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“We now know that the Chinese messed up big time and hid it from the world. The world now knows! China will have to pay. They will pay for this big time!” the President added in another tweet.

No official reaction had come from China’s government or the Chinese Embassy in DC within the first two hours after the release of the ONDI.

Reactions from the scientific community in the US have been cautious, with academics saying it would be hard to comment on the ONDI without more details of the newly acquired intelligence information.

“What the Director of National Intelligence has announced is neither impossible, nor inconceivable. It is not impossible for human error to cause an infection,” Prof. Jason Yamaseki from the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Minnesota told GNN.

“Yet, Chinese researchers are highly trained and typically up to the best of the global safety standards. So an awful lot must have gone wrong, first, for the researchers to get infected, and, second, for them to take the contagion out of the lab,” he added.

“It is possible, and if the intelligence community says they have categorical evidence, they probably could be trusted. It should also be considered that COVID-19 can be asymptomatic for a long period, or entirely, or that domestic political cover-ups could have facilitated the outbreak. But it is hard to judge given that we don’t know what the intelligence data is,” Yamaseki elaborated.

The molecular virologist, however, cautioned that despite the ONDI statement it was going to take a lot of hard evidence to convince the scientific community of the laboratory error origin of the coronavirus.

“They are going to have to release that classified information and also gather even more evidence if they want to convince everybody, the scholars, the American and the global public that this is indeed the truth. For the time being, the academics deem the natural origin of COVID-19 in bats as the most plausible theory,” Yamaseki concluded.

***

Chinese Scientist Claims to Have Answers for Origin of COVID-19 Pandemic

Whitebard News
By Mayran Johnson
December 24, 2020
Washington, DC

A senior Chinese scientist who has just defected to the US claims to be able to offer answers about the origin of the novel coronavirus, which has caused a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people around the globe.

The Chinese scholar in question was an employee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the research facility in the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province where COVID-19 seems to have originated.

The man with initials G. H. managed to defect to the US a week ago and is presently held at an undisclosed location for interrogation by US intelligence agencies, sources from the intelligence community and the Department of Justice told Whitebard.

In recent weeks, a total of three of the 17 US intelligence agencies – the Defense Intelligence Agency, INSCOM (the US Army Intelligence and Security Command) which is part of the NSA, and the CIA – have made it clear that they had acquired evidence that the original outbreak of the coronavirus started through animal-to-human transmission at a WIV lab because of failure to observe strict safety standards.

Subsequently, a local epidemic and then a global pandemic resulted from the desire on part of the Chinese authorities to cover up the entire case.

Information offered to the US government by G.H., however, cited by our sources, paints a notably different picture of the origin of the novel coronavirus.

While the defecting scientist corroborates the version that COVID-19 escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology through animal-to-human contact resulting for a “systemic” failure to adhere to safety protocols at the facility, he claims the virus itself did not originate “naturally” in wild animals such as bats.

Instead, he claims that the novel coronavirus was explicitly and deliberately developed by the Chinese government as a biological weapon.

His allegation contradicts completely the dominant consensus among both the scientific and the intelligence communities in the US has been that the virus is not “man-made” or genetically modified.

The defecting Chinese scientist, however, says the theory for the “natural origin” of the coronavirus is merely a cover-up spread largely through Beijing’s propaganda.

1. H. also alleged to the US intelligence officers and government officials interrogating him that the virus that has become known around the world as COVID-19 was still in its early to middle phase of development as a bioweapon at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, another indication that the December 2019 outbreak in Wuhan did not result from the virus having been released on purpose.

According to the defecting scholar, China’s government has been experimenting with thousands of different coronaviruses for decades in search of new and highly efficient biological weapons.

1. H. further revealed that a vaccine against the novel coronavirus was in advanced stages of development at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the vaccine research ran parallel to the modification of the virus itself as a bioweapon.

In his words, however, the Chinese authorities would take some time to release a vaccine, even if it was already ready, just in order to avoid global suspicion as to how they managed to develop of vaccine so quickly, ahead of other nations.

According to our source at the Justice Department, G. H. is presently applying for political asylum in the United States, and it will be a while before he speaks in public or to the media, if he ever decides to do that.

His identity might not even be made public at all as the US government is considering using him as a witness in any future court case involving China.

“With this courageous man’s revelations, we know have substantial grounds to consider the novel coronavirus a biological weapon under development in China whose development has gone so wrong so as to hurt the entire world,” one intelligence source told Whitebard.

He further elaborated on the potential military and strategic use of a bioweapon such as COVID-19 from the point of view of China, which is an enormous authoritarian society where the rule of the political elite of the Chinese Communist Party and its chairman, President Xi Jinping, remains completely unchallenged.

“Say you have all those anti-government massive street protests in Hong Kong. If you have a virus that you are able to control, and have developed a vaccine and a cure, you can just release that in the streets of Hong Kong, and pretty soon not much would be left from the protest movement,” the source said.

“And such an unorthodox ‘domestic’ ‘application’ would be just one of the ‘practical’ uses of a biological weapon of this kind and proportion as far as the Chinese government is concerned. It could also be used to wreak havoc on “enemy” countries, enemy armed forces, etc.,” the source added.

“The problem with all weapons of mass destruction is that one should be able to handle them and take care of them properly, unless you want them to somehow turn against you. If you want to avoid problems such as the coronavirus outbreak – which has hit China itself but has also wreaked economic havoc among its most important trading partners and clients around the world,” the source elaborated.

A total of 213,000 people have perished in the United States from COVID-19 so far, while the number of those infected has surpassed 3.3 million.

Worldwide there have been a total of 1.2 million deaths, and some 18.6 million people have been infected with the novel coronavirus.

***

The New York Enquirer
By Alex Spinoso
January 2, 2021

President Trump has done justice to his earlier vows to cut US funding to the WHO accusing it of being controlled by China and of failing to preempt the coronavirus pandemic.

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he was halting all US funding that goes towards the World Health Organization (WHO).

Trump has thus delivered on his vows regarding the WHO which he sees as being controlled by China.

He has repeatedly blamed the UN health body for failing to preempt the global COVID-19 pandemic, whose original outbreak was in China’s Wuhan at the end of 2019.

“This administration is reviewing the WHO’s handling of present coronavirus crisis. We are looking at precisely how it enabled China to hide the original outbreak. It is part of our promise to hold accountable those responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions of Americans!” Trump told reporters at a briefing in Washington on Friday.

“The WHO failed miserably at communicating properly the true danger of the COVID-19 threat. There is no way we can continue to fund such a flawed body, and we are pulling out of that organization as soon as possible,” the President added.

The US government has been the largest contributor the WHO budget, with a contribution of USD 400 million in 2019, or some 15% of its entire funding.

WHO needs money to conduct different vaccine trials, arrange test kits and distribute them, and also share valuable advice to different governments regarding different issues.

During his press briefing on Tuesday, Trump showed his concerns about whether America’s contribution to WHO had been appropriately used or not.

Especially after seeing the Covid-19 outbreak, the President seemed to be pretty perplexed about WHO’s role in responding to the global spread of the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 22 million people worldwide, and has claimed some 1.6 million lives.

The pandemic has dealt a significant blow to the scientific and medical community and no proven vaccine has been developed yet despite the fact that some 100 vaccine projects are in progress around the world.

Patrice Harris, President of the American Medical Association, commented on Tuesday that to fight the pandemic, scientific communities from around the globe must unite to share data. He also urged President Trump to reconsider his statement after stopping US government funding to the WHO.

Critics see Trump’s increasing attack on the World Health Organization as deflecting scrutiny of his prolonged response to the deadly pandemic, which has killed 233,000 Americans, and has infected more than 3.7 million.

“Trump’s failure to institute travel restrictions and other measures early on have proven to be disastrous, and he is now using the WHO as a scapegoat,” commented Isabelle George, a public health expert at the Pennsylvania Public Health Research Group, a private non-profit.

In her words, even though the WHO said that travel bans were going to be ineffective in most of the cases, they still accepted that they could buy some time to implement different awareness measures.

“However, Trump failed miserably to manage the time bought by the travel bans. He was unable to prepare proper diagnostic testing and also ramp up the health care system to deal with the outpouring coronavirus patients,” she said.

“By late January, the WHO announced Covid-19 to be a pandemic. And during this time, Trump was still not accepting COVID-19 to be a threat and kept on comparing this disease to the seasonal flu,” George said.

Not unlike other public health experts, she did agree that the Chinese government had not been completely honest about the novel coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary-General, defended the WHO by declaring that its role in responding to the pandemic has been extremely critical, and everyone should support the WHO in its fight against coronavirus.

“After this pandemic is over, indeed, everyone will be turning pages to understand how this disease emerged and how it could spread in every part of the world so quickly. This needs to be evaluated, however, now is the time to fight with it, and not the time to dwell on answers for its evolution,” Guterres stated.

***

 

The Washington Era
By Robert S. Smith
January 7, 2021

The government of the People’s Republic of China has imposed a “total lock-down” in two provinces of the country, claiming that draconian measures are “the best policy” to contain and beat down two new flare-ups of the novel coronavirus.

Total lock-downs were introduced on Monday in the entire Hubei province, where the original COVID-19 outbreak began in November – December 2019, in the city of Wuhan, and in the northeastern-most province of Heilongjiang, which borders Russia.

The authorities resorted to the renewed lockdowns after for three consecutive days Wuhan saw more than 100 new cases of the novel coronavirus, while Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang itself recorded 438 new infections in the last five days.

Difference now is that the new “total lockdowns” imposed by the government dominated by the Chinese Communist Party appear to be more severe than any lock-downs so far, with people unconditionally confined to their homes, and visited by special teams of police, medics, delivery personnel, and communist party officials.

“The total lockdown is the best, most feasible way forward. It will allow our Party and our Nation to prevail over the coronavirus at a far lesser cost, and with much greater efficiency than could ever be observed in the West,” wrote on Tuesday the Middle Kingdom Times, an English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, extolling the Chinese authorities.

With the latest infections, China has reported a total of 88,123 COVID-19 cases so far, and 4,788 deaths, figures which are considered unreliably low by Western experts.

The United States, on the other hand, officially has more than 3.5 million cases, and more than 216,000 fatalities.

The number of infected people worldwide has reached 19.6 million, while more than 1.3 million people have lost their lives as a result of COVID-19 around the globe, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Many questions remain about China’s new policy of “total lock-downs”, including regarding its effectiveness, despite the Commies seeming enchantment with it, not to mention its likely horrendous economic ramifications.

Within 1 hour of the announcement of the total lock-downs, the provincial capitals of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and of Harbin, a city of 9 million, were entirely blockaded, and nobody could enter or leave them.

What is more, however, the Chinese Communist Party has also spearheaded the total banning of movement inside the respective cities: nobody is allowed to leave their homes for no reason whatsoever.

The above-mentioned team of government officials and employees go door to door for health checks and if anyone is found to be infected, they are forced in self isolation that they must adhere to.

This has caused great concern over the well-being especially of elderly people and people with disabilities, casting doubt whether the authorities run by the Chinese Communist Party would be able to take care of absolutely every single individual.

Controls have also been stepped up everywhere across China over fears of people leaving Wuhan just because of the growing number of cases in recent days.

In Wuhan and the entire Hubei province, as well as in Heilongjiang, the authorities are monitoring the body temperatures of people in every building, and no residential compounds can be entered by a nonresident.

In other Chinese provinces, all people are required to wear masks in public places, with the authorities even using drones to detect anybody in violation of this requirement.

Despite the Communists’ claims that the total lock-down is the best available policy right now to curb any new flare-ups of the novel coronavirus, experts have warned that such a strategy is hardly without major drawbacks, and could only be employed by those who react late to control the virus.

“Screening, testing and contact tracing are some of the best policies to apply in regions that are not much infected,” cautioned Sven Johansson, a health expert from the Public Health Institute in Sweden, which has become known for its lax approach to tackling the pandemic.

“You don’t have to send your entire population into a total lock-down when social distancing and wearing of masks prove to be effective. China’s new total lock-downs will come at a price,” he argued.

In his words, there are many policies that are friendly to humans and easy to adhere to.

“Such policies have proven effective in other countries like Singapore and Taiwan. Total lock-downs can only be used in the most severely hit regions where they feel there is no otherwise and that the case is overwhelming. Even then, declaring that is the best approach there is is hardly substantiated,” Johansson concluded.

***

ECONOMICO
MARY CHOLNOCKY
March 30, 2021

In what was likely a move to incense Washington, China has resorted to the expulsion of five more major US corporations from the country – rounding up the list to a total of 20, after it already kicked out 15 American companies earlier.

The companies subjected to immediate expulsion from the People’s Republic of China this time Chevron, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM.

Although the Chinese government has not announced its reasons, the direct pretext for the expulsions appear to be the growing security and military tensions in the South China Sea.

Back in September, in reaction to a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports, the government of Chinese President Xi Jinping kicked out Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Cisco Systems, Ford, General Motors, Marriot, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, NBA, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Walmart and Walt Disney.

Back then, the different US corporations were “kicked out” by different Chinese institutions, and the same approach appears to have been adopted now as well.

US institutions and experts are calculating the loss incurred to the “original 15” from their expulsion from China, although pundits have been categorical that the self-inflicted losses for the Chinese economy are substantially greater in terms of jobs, tax revenue, innovation and technology transfer, not to mention the shattered investment destination image.

Considering the paramount importance of constant high-rate economic growth to the legitimacy and stability of the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, many commentators have been surprised that Xi has been willing to force the Chinese economy and society to stomach major economic damages for the sake of great power political considerations.

The further expulsion, this time of five American companies, indicates that the Chinese leadership is willing to go even further in that regard, in order to strike back at the US, and demonstrate its resilience and resolve.

The kicking out of the new batch of US corporations came right after President Donald Trump reprimanded Beijing for “fomenting conflict in the South China Sea to ensure personal gain” and encouraged American investors to divest from Chinese companies in response.

Key economists say that this likely means that entire supply chains are going to be uprooted from China, which is going to cause the companies to scramble for supply stability of raw materials elsewhere.

“This presents an unfortunate, if sudden, turn of events,” chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce (China) William Zarit commented at a news conference.

“Threatening the livelihoods of thousands and interrupting legitimate goods production for political reasons are… harsh steps to take,” he said

The fact another major tech firm, IBM, is among those expelled from China, is fanning fears of a technologically bifurcated world, which experts say will be an additional economic disaster on top of already diminished economies.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that “the last thing countries need is to have to spend money refurbishing their machinery… to cater to a new Chinese OS (Operating System)”.

The move is largely seen as a muscle-flexing rebuttal to Trump’s call to action, and it is unknown if further action will be taken against companies that continue to operate in China.

Making a televised press statement before the expulsion had become clear, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that China needed “a countermeasure to prevent American intrusion into local matters”, citing that the Chinese government had been “more than reasonable” in its response to “hostilities” by the United States.

Rising China-US Tensions, Then and Now

Even before China expelled the “original 15” US corporations, the Chinese government revoked the media credentials of all American journalists from The Washington Strategist, The New York Enquirer, and The Wall Street Intelligencer in response to the U.S. Administration’s restriction on the number of Chinese who could work for five Chinese media outlets, effectively expelling them from the United States.

Growing pressure from an increasingly anti-China American voter base is also pushing the U.S. to greater opposition against the Chinese government.

This is driven in no small part by the worldwide swath of destruction that was carved by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the CCP’s continuous efforts to deflect criticism and undermine evidence of its less-than-ideal handling of the situation.

Recent military escalation at the South China Sea has also aggravated the worsening sentiment against China around the world.

Yet, as the President seeks to restart the engines of America’s economy after the pandemic, he will find himself running low on options should China, too, completely close its doors.

Even as domestic production is at an all-time high, global trade is still largely crippled, and foreign buyers of American goods are comparatively fewer than previous years.

Whatever decision that is made by Washington now may very well determine the vitality of the administration.

***

The Huntington Post
By Marcia Hinkelmann
Jan 3, 2021, Sunday

Various reports circulating lately that Chinese locals are attacking the Nigerian community residing in China have spurred anger across Africa.

That development is now being combined with growing indignation among African states with respect to the conditions, under which their governments had agreed to borrow vast sums of money from the Chinese government, most often for infrastructure projects.

Seemingly racist attitudes towards black Africans in China have translated into outright discrimination, and widespread Chinese inclination to blame them for the spreading of the novel coronavirus, a pandemic whose original outbreak was in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei province, at the end of 2019.

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has been especially notorious with respect to the treatment of Africans residing there, who have suffered from arbitrary quarantines, forced evictions, and even mass coronavirus tests forced upon since almost the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.

The discrimination, however, doesn’t end there: blacks are being discriminated against in hotels and restaurants as well, apparently all throughout China.

Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, My Geoffrey Onyeama, who was the first top African official to react against the outburst of racism towards blacks in China, already in April 2020, by meeting with Zhou Pingjian, China’s Ambassador in Abuja, has issued new warnings to Beijing.

“We saw images of Nigerians in the streets with their possessions and this was of course extremely distressing for us at home,” Onyeama wrote on Twitter informing about his latest of several meetings with Zhou.

Many Nigerians residing in China have now been forced to live on the streets with all their belongings.

Nigeria’s Foreign Minister told the Ambassador of China that the situation in question was “not acceptable” at all and demanded “immediate action” from the Chinese authorities.

“The entire African – Chinese friendship is at stake here. Unfortunately, our friends in Beijing have not acted upon this realization quickly enough to right the wrongs and mitigate our fears,” Onyeama added.

He stated that the mass virus tests that have been conducted on Sub-Saharan Africans living in China are a clear indication of “racism” and a “clear violation of human rights”.

According to African diplomatic sources, at least 25 countries from the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa are preparing a host of diplomatic measures vis-à-vis Beijing.

The local authorities in Guangzhou, China, where many Nigerians and other Sub-Saharan Africans reside, confirmed that there have been at least 72 cases of Sub-Saharan Africans who tested positive for COVID-19 in the course of the past two months.

Dozens of them, however, allegedly broke the mandatory quarantine rules, sparking anger among the Chinese citizens.

Many Africans in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese cities have been evicted forcibly from their rented homes, and many have also been refused service in hotels and other accommodation venues.

Ever since the first African complains with respect to attitudes in China connected with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese authorities have vehemently denied any racism or xenophobia on part not just of the state institutions, but also on part of the general public.

Racist incidents are felt by Beijing as being particularly embarrassing considering China’s push for “friendship-based investments” in Africa, in the wording of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, over the past couple of decades.

Since the spring of 2020, the Chinese government has also been sending massive amounts of personal protective gear and medical equipment as well as dispatching large numbers of Chinese doctors to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic in African countries such as Nigeria, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, and Djibouti (where Beijing also has a military base).

***

Yongbyon News Agency
By Lee Wonju
May 5, 2021

 

At least three ballistic missile warheads believed to have been produced in North Korea have been discovered by the Turkish military during an operation in Northern Syria in a development allegedly exposing Pyongyang’s connections to other rogue regimes around the world.

The missile warheads were discovered when Turkish forces – which control a sizable strip of land in Northern Syria along Turkey’s border – took over a strategic weapons depot known to have been used by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the heavy involvement of foreign regional and global powers. Until now, little had been known publicly about the presumed cooperation between Al-Assad and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The DPRK, which is the acronym of North Korea’s official name, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is known for cooperating with other dictatorships and rogue regimes around the globe to defy the international order. An example in hand is its secret nuclear program cooperation with Pakistan, which helped it develop its own nuclear bombs.

The Syrian army depot found by the Turkish military is located not far to the south of Manbij, which was taken over by Al-Assad’s government forces back in 2019

“The missile warheads [we found] are indisputably of North Korean origin,” Turkish President Recep Erdogan, who is an adamant enemy of the embattled Syrian President, announced in a special statement.

Erdogan further expressed “grave concern”, calling the discovery, “a disheartening and an alarming one”.

“The Syrian regime has been committing crimes against its own people for many years now. It is now revealed that it has been up to being in bed with a country capable of providing it with ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction,” Turkey’s President added.

Sources from the Turkish government are quoted by Kismet Evening News, a daily, as saying that no traces of nuclear or other WMDs had been found on the site where the North Korean ballistic missile warheads were discovered.

The sources further said that the warheads appeared to be from a KN-25, a short-range North Korean ballistic missile, with an operational range of 500 kilometers.

However, they cautioned that for the being, it was impossible to establish with concrete evidence as to how the North Korean missile warheads ended up where they did – it remains unknown whether they were procured deliberately from Pyongyang by the Assad regime, or whether they might have been smuggled into Syria through terrorist networks to be used against Syrian and Turkish forces.

The possibility that either Russia, or China might have been complicit in the procurement and transportation of the missile warheads in question are only nothing more that guesses at this point.

At the same time, the Turkish government is also a suspect because of the unexpected discovery – with some Russian commentators having been quick to suggest an attempt to divert attention from Turkey’s “constant encroachments against Syria’s sovereignty”, most recently exemplified by October 2019 Turkish offensive into Northern Syria, right after US President Donald Trump pulled out American forces from Kurdish-controlled areas in Northeast Syria.

The discovery of the North Korean weaponry in Syria announced by the Turkish government nonetheless alarmed major powers around the world who have been expressing fears of North Korean weapon proliferation.

The US President and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have responded strongly against these developments.

The West Wing said that “this is a big threat to world peace,” while Johnson criticized both Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for facilitating a “flagrant disregard of international law”.

Meanwhile, the current President of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Sven Jürgenson called for an emergency virtual meeting to form a cohesive international response to the proliferation of North Korean warheads around the world.

Any coordinated response, however, is expected to be hampered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen countries divert much of their resources internally to the enhancement of healthcare and economic defenses.

The North Korea – Syria Link

Even though the two authoritarian regimes in North Korea and Syria are separated by the entire Asian landmass, they are known to have developed close ties in the field of weapons development and trade, especially in the past couple of decades.

Aside from being a long-time supplier of Scud missiles and chemical weapons to Syria, the North Korean regime has also attempted to utilize the isolation of the Syrian desert to develop nuclear capability.

Under Operation “Outside the Box” in 2007, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with assistance from the United States, destroyed a Syrian nuclear facility at Al-Kibar that was built with North Korean aid.

This, among other high-profile incidents, highlighted the North Korean regime’s activity in the Middle East.

While the recent discovery of North Korean munitions in Northern Syria is expected to evoke a worldwide call to action, COVID-19 proves to be a resilient distraction for those who currently have the ability to restrict further proliferation of weapons to the war-ravaged region.

Since the start in 2011, the civil war in Syria has killed more than 400,000 people and displaced millions of others.

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June 10, 2021

CHINA — Li Wenzao, Director of the Science and Technology Commission of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) reported that China is establishing a “Earth-Moon Special Economic Zone.”

China who is one the countries leading players in world’s economy and technological growth has now cited a possible sovereign rule on the moon. As some insiders said that China has been building space shuttles to go over the moon.

Rival countries have been falling behind research and exploration, the United States who is known to be China’s tough rival hasn’t made a progress over the last few months.

Li Bao stated in an interview a month ago, “China is have been planning for years and it is probably the right time to put things in action.”

The powerful country is considering creating the Earth-Moon Economic Zone by 2030, China is investing in studies and scientist on how much to would cost to build one, and how much manpower is going to be sent into the moon.

CASC is China’s main contractor for the National Space Program, while the project could have China shell out around US$50 trillion, the Chinese government has not mentioned any worries about the said budget.

With the Earth-Moon Economic Zone is pushed and China will become the first ever country to finally build a working Economic Zone prompting their sovereignty in place, China ensures that they will have the ability and presence and rights to the moon, can easily put rules in whoever can come and use it capabilities.

Those countries that have exploration to the moon has to submit themselves to China’s terms regarding research and excavation.

Bao claims that the moon has a huge potential thus why the country has out a lot of money on studies and facilities that are beneficial, also making low-cost aerospace transport systems between the Earth and Moon for their scientist to further their studies.

“We are making evolution in these times, we are building technology that can help us further our knowledge that’s we are trying to make this happen soon.” Bao said.

It is difficult to determine what China spends annually on its space exploration efforts and studies, but they claims that budget is always part of their defense spending.

Though the U.S has also a nations that spent millions of dollars of explorations and space program, but two countries have different approach toward their exploration and intentions.

Though some are not convince on China’s claims over the moon, they think China is far from owning it, some experts are even suggesting that they can bring along international partners like the United States to lessen the cost.

Will China be able be fully equip to go on their own within years and can it be possible for humans to migrate to the moon?

Or will United States be the first to go to Mars as few sources claims that the country has now cited the red planet for exploration after losing the moon to China.

A few scientist had now been questioning.”Is China the new owner of the moon?” “Will world bow in China’s name?”

Those are the questions scientist and leaders have been uttering out in the public.

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