United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/nSdxr7UxW_s


Why Top Pakistani Officials Are Getting Infected With the CCP Virus

Commentary by Yang Ning
May 20, 2020


One of Pakistan’s key political figures has tested positive for the CCP virus. According to the Pakistani ministry of national health services, there are 37,218 confirmed cases of infections and 803 deaths in the country as of May 15.

Asad Qaiser, speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly, announced on Twitter on April 30 that he self-quarantined after testing positive for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. Local media also reported that a number of senior Pakistani officials have also tested positive, including Sindh Governor Imran Ismail.

As speaker of parliament, Qaiser is a powerful figure. He is a senior leader of the Pakistan Justice Movement Party (the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI). He served as the speaker of a provincial legislature from 2013 to 2018. In July 2018, PTI emerged as the single largest party in the general elections for National Assembly. In August 2018, Qaiser was elected as speaker of the National Assembly. He won the position with 176 votes out of a total of 330 votes. PTI was founded in 1996 by former international cricket captain, Imran Khan, who is the current prime minister of Pakistan.

After winning the seat, Qaiser met Chinese ambassador Yao Jing on Aug. 27, 2018. During the meeting, Qaiser said that the two countries would work on deepening economic relations. Speaking at the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Qaiser said that the project promises opportunities for the entire region and the Pakistani government would fully support its implementation. In response, Yao said China values its relations with Pakistan and wants to assist in developing the entire region.

On Sept. 9, 2018, Qaiser met with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi to strengthen bilateral relations. Referring to the CPEC, Qaiser said the project was a “game-changer” for regional development, and only made possible through mutual cooperation between Pakistan and China.

Meanwhile, Wang said China would continue to support Pakistan in technology, infrastructure development, and exploration of renewable energy resources.

On Feb. 12, amid the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Qaiser said, “the government and people of Pakistan will be standing with China and will provide all our support in these difficult times.” However, when Pakistan was hit by the pandemic, China, which had previously promised to send high quality N-95 masks to the country, instead sent masks made out of underwear, Pakistani media reported. A news anchor of a Pakistani channel said in a local dialect, “China conned us.” She explained that the Sindh provincial government sent the masks to hospitals without checking their quality.

The Chinese regime’s mouthpiece Xinhua said that Pakistan and China were “true friends and good brothers.” But the regime chose to honor its so-called “all-weather strategic partnership” with underwear masks.

Looking back in history, CCP-Pakistani bilateral relations have been strong since both have border conflicts with India. The CCP and Pakistan developed a relationship as early as the 1960s. In 1970, the Pakistani government began to play the role of facilitator, leading ultimately to a secret meeting between then-U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger and the Chinese leadership in Beijing in 1971. Then, Pakistan supported China’s membership in the United Nations, and took China’s side during diplomatic rows with other countries such as the United States, Japan, Taiwan, among others.

Since the Soviet War in Afghanistan in 1979, China has joined Pakistan in supporting Afghan guerrillas fighting Soviet forces. China also started to invest in Pakistan with constructing roads, railways, telecommunications networks, and developing weapons.

In May 2017, Pakistan and China signed a $50 billion agreement that included full funding for the Diamer Basha dam and four other dams in the Indus River Cascade. Under the CPEC, construction of roads connecting Xinjiang in western China and Pakistan’s port city of Gwadar was promoted. In December 2017, Pakistan also agreed to accelerate the construction of nine industrial parks as part of the CPEC.

On Jan. 2, 2018, Pakistan’s central bank allowed the Chinese yuan to be used for bilateral trade and investment activities, replacing the U.S. dollar for transactions in CPEC projects.

In Feb. 2018, the Pakistan Air Force inaugurated a new JF-17 (a combat aircraft developed jointly by Pakistan and China) fighter squadron in Quetta, Balochistan province.

In June 2018, the Pakistan Navy confirmed its contract to acquire two Type 054A frigates from China.

These active bilateral relations with the Communist regime have pushed Pakistan into a debt trap. In July 2018, the State Bank of Pakistan borrowed $2 billion from China. Chinese loans to Pakistan stood at $6.5 billion in the fiscal year of 2018.

Maintaining “all-weather” diplomatic relations with the Communist regime may sound attractive, but speaker Qaiser and other Pakistani officials ended up contracting the CCP virus, a pathogen originating from China. The question is: did Pakistani officials learn any lessons from this?


https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-t...ting-infected-with-the-ccp-virus_3355810.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/PQFZmfoLlNM

Pennsylvania: Case Study of the CCP’s Infiltration into the Free Market and Erosion of Liberty

May 21, 2020 | By Tong Yun (Minghui.org)

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink our relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose cover-up of the virus information has resulted in one of the worst health crises in history.

There is evidence that countries and regions with close ties to the CCP were hit hard by the virus. The CCP, which survives and thrives on the ideology of class struggle, violence, deceit, and lies, has a track record of brutality against its own citizens—killing about 80 million people since it came to power a few decades ago. As the CCP grew its influence internationally, thanks to the long-term appeasement policy adopted by Western society, it has also exported its ideology and harm to the rest of the world.

The West didn’t hit the pause button to stop economic collaboration with China when the CCP committed human rights abuses time and again. The CCP-run China was able to join the WTO in 2001, which in turn enabled it to grow into the largest exporter of goods by 2009 with exports of $2.5 trillion in 2018.

China’s growing economy gave the CCP unparalleled leverage for domestic suppression of people of faith (such as Falun Gong practitioners) and dissidents (such as students in the 1989 democracy movement and whistleblowers during the coronavirus pandemic), as well as for international expansion of influence (such as silencing human rights criticism from other countries and the United Nations, and influencing organizations such as the WHO during the coronavirus pandemic).

In this article, we would like to use Pennsylvania in the
U.S. as an example to highlight the CCP’s infiltration of the global financial markets, and erosion of liberty.

As of May 17, 2020, Pennsylvania has over 65,000 confirmed coronavirus cases (6th place in U.S.) with a death toll close to 4,500 (4th place in U.S.).

Stocks and Mutual Funds

“China’s Ant Financial, Vanguard announce China advisory venture,” read the title of an article published by Reuters on December 14, 2019. China-based Ant Financial, also known as Alipay, is an online payment service affiliated with Alibaba, the largest e-commerce company in China. Vanguard Group, based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is the largest provider of mutual funds in the world, with close to $6 trillion in assets under management. The joint venture will be operated by Ant Financial (with 51% of the ownership), while Vanguard (with 49% of the ownership) will provide strategies on investment and funds allocation, according to information from qz.com and Bloomberg.

Such collaborations have raised concerns from analysts because they provided nearly unlimited resources to fuel the CCP regime. For example, after long-time rejection due to various concerns, Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), FTSE Russell, and S&P have all added Chinese stocks to their flagship benchmarks. As one of the biggest index compilers, MSCI alone has about $12.3 trillion in assets benchmarked to its products, wrote an article on May 6 from Washington Post with the title of “How Ordinary
U.S. Investors Own a Piece of China.”

This series of actions had assured that global investors would pour more money into the Chinese equity market. Over 1,000 Chinese firms had been added to various equity indexes and about $265 billion of mainland China equities are owned by international investors as of March 2020, according to the Washington Post article.

In addition to stock investments, China also holds sway in mutual funds, which many retirement funds invest in. For instance, 39% of the $51 billion Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets exchange-traded funds come from Chinese securities.

Financial Fraud

Investment in China not only strengthened the CCP’s political power, but also introduced risk into the financial stability of the free world.

Dan David, a money manager in Pennsylvania, was one of the whistleblowers who noted how some Chinese companies defrauded U.S. investors and retirees. He was featured in a 2017 documentary titled The China Hustle. This film documents a systematic security fraud that happened after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, as investment firms sought higher returns for their clients and more commission money for themselves.

These investment firms hyped up small, nondescript, private Chinese companies with the help of paid celebrity appearances, and got the companies merged with defunct American public companies. Such mergers were called reverse mergers because they allowed a private company to occupy and operate in a publicly trading company’s legal shell.

The reverse mergers enabled the Chinese companies to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange and see their prices spike. As the prices of these Chinese companies later crashed to their real value, investors were left with worthless stocks in their portfolios (many being retirement accounts).

One case covered in the documentary was China-based Advanced Battery Technologies (ABAT), which raised nearly $90 million through reverse mergers in three separate offerings, with a market-cap of $250 million. Even after being delisted by NASDAQ and later deregistered by the SEC, the company did not notify shareholders and continued to make false statements.

Reverse-mergers were common and the documentary said that one out forty CEOs in China was jailed for committing such fraud. Cases like these were reported to the FBI, but little was done to address them.

Alex Gibney, one of the producers for this documentary as well as a 2005-documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, explained the danger of investing in Chinese companies during an interview with Market Watch in 2018, “Yes, a lot of money is flowing around, but can you count on the kind of stability that you hope for if you’re a pensioner, or a nurse, or a doctor just hoping to keep their retirement savings in tact?”

“Investors need to understand the risks of what they are investing in: Every single Chinese company that goes public in the U.S. has a complex and convoluted structure, ostensibly a loophole to enable Western investment in a market that prohibits outside investors. But it also protects the core Chinese company through a host of offshore shell companies and subsidiaries,” wrote an article in Market Watch on May 16 regarding the scandal of Luckin Coffee (a Chinese company known as “China’s Starbucks” and caught recording bogus sales that were never made).

The article continued, “On top of these structural issues is the biggest problem of all: that the accountants who sign off on company financial statements in China don’t have access to those company’s actual books and records, only what they are allowed to see.”

Infiltration of U.S. Educational Institutions

Data shows that hundreds of non-U.S. organizations, with China being the biggest donor, had made financial gifts to the University of Pennsylvania since 2013, reported an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer on February 24, 2020, titled “Penn got $258 million in foreign money, and there may be more it hadn’t disclosed.”

Since July 2019, “10 schools have disclosed $3.6 billion in “previously unreported” foreign money, including two Pennsylvania colleges: Penn and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,” the article wrote. These educational institutions are required by law to report such transactions, said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. “Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are under-reporting or not reporting at all,” she remarked.

The Philadelphia Inquirer article also cited a Bloomberg report that found that the University of Pennsylvania received the third-highest funding from China, totaling
$67.6 million, behind Harvard and the University of Southern California. But the actual numbers could be much higher since the Higher Education Act only requires disclosure for gifts or contracts of $250,000 or higher.

The CCP’s infiltration of U.S. higher-education institutions through donations gives it leverage to influence American colleges. Take the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School as example. After launching the Center for the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC) in 2012, Wharton China Center was opened in Beijing in March 2015.

Zhang Qiyue, Chinese Consul General in New York, visited the University of Pennsylvania in July 2016 and emphasized China’s commitments to collaborate with the U.S. His visit was followed by the establishment of the annual Penn Wharton China Summit.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was proposed by the CCP in 2013 and was viewed by many Western countries as China’s expansion of influence into Europe, Asia, and Africa. A report issued by Wharton in April 2019 titled “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Why the Price Is Too High,” however, only discussed the risk and return of the initiative for China, without analyzing the initiative’s effect on other countries’ sustainability and long-term stability.

Although carrying a message similar to the CCP’s official assessment of the initiative, this Wharton report was widely circulated to world leaders and policy makers globally to aid in their evaluation of the BRI initiative.

Unprecedented Challenge for the Free World

Both being situated at 40° North latitude, Beijing and Philadelphia are like day and night when it comes to what the cities represent. As the capital for both the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Beijing had inherited the thousands-year-long traditional Chinese culture, which has unfortunately been nearly wiped out due to the CCP’s violence and atheism, during the past few decades. As a former and first capital of the United States, and also the birthplace of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia embodies the spirit of freedom laid by American founding fathers.

But such a difference has become insignificant as a result of deep infiltration from the CCP. Similar to other major cities, including New York, Sydney, and London, a four-day exhibition was held in Philadelphia City Hall on July 10, 2018, for the CCP’s propaganda, titled, “40 Years of Reform and Opening-up.”

On another occasion, during a China Day celebration at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia attended by the city mayor and Chinese Consul General in New York, the Philadelphia Symphony played music pieces including Liuyang River, one of the most well-known melodies in China that promoted Mao Zedong’s legacy.

In both cases, nothing was mentioned about the CCP’s brutality and human rights violations against its own citizens.

When a journalist from New York-based NTD Television attended a Chinese New Year Festival at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, she was expelled because the Chinese sponsor didn’t want her to raise the issue of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong. The university remained silent on her expulsion from the festival.

Pennsylvania is not alone. The CCP has successfully infiltrated many regions and countries in Eurasia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Few countries dare to openly criticize the human rights violations in China, as the CCP’s global influence has reached an unprecedented level. After the world witnessed how the WHO failed to alert the world of the coronavirus due to pressure from the CCP, China was appointed to a United Nations Human Rights Council panel on April 1, 2020 and will play a key role in selecting the world body’s human rights investigators, according to Unwatch.org.

While China provides much less funding to UN than the
U.S., it heads four of the body’s 15 specialized agencies. “No other nation leads more than one,” wrote an article on May 6 from The Atlantic titled, “China’s Bargain on Global Influence Is Paying Off.” “Beijing is working to rewrite the rules of the liberal system.” The article wrote, “…human-rights agenda [at UN] is not about human rights… It’s about Chinese politics.”

When the CCP plays a dominant role, the entire world loses. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic attests to this observation.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/21/185140.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/2pcMj1xjKt4

Death of Russian Spaceflight Chief Highlights Russia Space Agency’s Ties to China

Commentary by Yang Ning
May 22, 2020

The head of Russia’s human spaceflight program, Yevgeny Mikrin, recently passed away at the age of 65 after contracting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the national space agency Roscosmos announced on May 5. President Vladimir Putin offered his condolences to his family and friends.

Since 1981, Mikrin has worked for Energia, Russia’s largest aerospace company. He helped to develop crewed and cargo spacecraft control systems, multimodule space complexes, and automatic spacecraft. His death is a significant loss for Russia’s rocket and space industry.

Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of Russian aerospace firm Roscosmos, tweeted on May 1: “Data on space and rocket industry workers infected with a new coronavirus infection (2019-NCOV) at 20:00 on 04/30/2020 TOTAL DISEASE – 173, RECOVERED – 16, DIED – 6.”

As of May 22, Russia has 326,448 confirmed cases of the CCP virus, with 3,249 deaths, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

Why are there so many COVID-19 cases within Russia’s space and rocket industry? Countries, regions, and organizations that have close ties with the Chinese regime have been heavily affected by the CCP virus, which broke out in China in late 2019. What is the connection between the Russian space and rocket industry and the Chinese Communist Party?

The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War intensified as the two powers raced to put man on the moon. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, due to an economic downturn and lack of funds, Russia’s aerospace program diminished as technology and talent lagged behind. The United States has also slowed down its space programs due to the lack of strong competitors.

On the contrary, the CCP has invested heavily in China’s space program with strong capital accumulated after economic reforms in the 1980s, especially in launching satellites and carrier rockets. However, there is still a huge gap to fill in aerospace technology for China. The CCP knew it would be impossible to collaborate with the United States. So it turned to Russia for technical support in exchange for economic benefits.

On Nov. 1, 2017, China and Russia agreed to work together on six space-related technologies for the period from 2018 to 2022. The deal was one of roughly 20 agreements signed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Beijing at the 22nd regular meeting between the two countries’ heads of state.

According to a press release from Roscosmos space agency, the six sectors of cooperation are lunar, deep space, joint spacecraft development, space electronics, earth remote sensing data, and space debris monitoring.

“Cooperation in the field of space transport services could involve the launches of Chinese spacecraft on board Russian carrier rockets to deploy China’s multi-satellite constellation, as well as possible deliveries of rocket engines,” Russian state news agency Sputnik quoted Roscosmos director-general Rogozin as saying. “[From] China, it is the supply of microelectronics that we need.” He also said satellite navigation was a potential area of cooperation, with China set to complete its BeiDou Navigation Satellite System by next year, and Russia rolling out its GLONASS constellation.

Sergei Anatolyevich Gavrilov is deputy head of the lower chamber in Russia’s legislature, representing the Communist Party. According to the Chinese regime’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, Gavrilov has said Chinese collaboration in space programs will bring tremendous benefits to Russia.

To the Chinese regime, collaboration with Russia would boost China’s technical advancements, allowing it to potentially overtake the United States in satellite navigation, and to exert the CCP’s influence around the world.

On Nov. 29, 2017, Russia approved an agreement with China to protect classified technologies used in space activities, signed on June 25, 2016 in Beijing during President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to China.

Multiple collaborations have also taken place between Russian and Chinese research institutes and universities. In 2017, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Aeronautics and Moscow Aviation Institute launched a joint educational program.

Samara State Aerospace University also collaborated with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and conducted academic exchanges within the former’s Institute of Engines and Power Plant Engineering created in 2014.

On March 3, 2018, Roscosmos and China’s National Space Administration signed a deal to work together in the field of moon exploration and deep space, and the creation of a data center on lunar projects.

On June 12, 2019, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the China Manned Space Agency announced the winners of their joint opportunity initiative to conduct experiments onboard the China Space Station. The China Manned Space Agency selected nine projects, which involved scientists from 17 nations. Among the projects was an Indian–Russian observatory.

At the 2019 International Aviation and Space Salon held from Aug. 27 to Sept. 1 in Zhukovsky, a small town near Moscow, China showcased its domestically-developed drones, carrier rockets, and amphibious planes. China was the country partner at the event that year.

In an interview with Chinese state-run media Xinhua, Alexander Zheleznyakov, a member of the Tsiolkovsky Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, said he was impressed by China’s competitive edge in the international commercial launch market and the Chinese rockets’ technical advantage.

Satellite navigation systems are known to have multiple applications for communications, military, and navigation. The United States developed the Global Positioning System (GPS) which has been used in large-scale combat operations, such as the Gulf War. Likewise, GLONASS is Russia’s global navigation system. China’s BeiDou will be the fourth global satellite navigation system to be created, after the U.S. GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, and the European Union’s Galileo.

Through collaboration with Russia, China developed its own advanced positioning, navigation, and timing system, known as PNT, for the BeiDou navigation system. China plans to expand BeiDou with a military-driven objective. Now, the BeiDou system has moved to its third phase of development, which will feature middle-earth orbit satellites, three geostationary satellites, and three inclined geosynchronous orbits. The system currently has 33 satellites in orbit. The plan is to finalize the program in 2020 with 35 satellites in orbit.

China is marketing BeiDou to countries that are part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road) by offering them incentives. Through this initiative, Beijing invests in countries’ infrastructure projects while building up geopolitical clout.

According to Spaceflight Now, when the system is complete, BeiDou will have eight satellites in geosynchronous orbit, being the only country to do so.

A 2017 report by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) details the implications the BeiDou system will have on the United States global positioning system. “BeiDou could pose a security risk by allowing China’s government to track users of the system by deploying malware transmitted through either its navigation signal or messaging function (via a satellite communication channel), once the technology is in widespread use,” according to the report.

It is no doubt the speedy development and advancement of China’s aerospace programs and projects were supported by Russian experts and research institutes. Shall we say that the real factor behind the virus outbreak among many Russian aerospace experts is the space agency’s lucrative and political ties to the Chinese Communist Party?

Source:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/death...ssia-space-agencys-ties-to-china_3361126.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/jKOW4XF85kU

China, not Fauci, is the enemy

By Cliff Kincaid
May 21, 2020

A “conservative” columnist recently called for Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to be tried as criminals and imprisoned. This is crazy. American scientists and doctors are not the enemy. China is. And America can respond to this attack of the coronavirus by confiscating Chinese financial assets and property. Much of it is in California. It’s time for action.

Looking back, President Trump followed the advice of Fauci and Birx about locking down the economy, although he left most of this task to the governors of the 50 states. So, logically speaking, the columnist angry with Fauci and Birx should be advocating the jailing of the Commander-in-Chief because he took their advice. Such a course is lunacy. Trump did what made sense at the time.

Medical professionals can and should be second-guessed. There is also a need to investigate the collaboration of the Medical Deep State with China, including the millions of dollars that flowed to the Wuhan lab. But the finger-pointing ignores the ultimate source of the problem – Communist China.

As Americans, we should be united in our hatred and disgust for the Communist Chinese rulers. We should want to make them pay. How? The answer is simple – by seizing their property in the United States. Much of that is in California.

To understand what we have to do, we have to remember how we got there.

In a difficult situation, brought on by China’s release of the virus, Trump was advised on a course of action he was told was necessary to avoid more than two million deaths. When he was looking for how the federal government should respond, he turned to people who have handled other infectious diseases in the past and were on the government payroll. He turned to the government “experts,” Fauci, Birx, and others, in order to delay and contain the spread of the coronavirus. He did what anyone in that position would do. He had very little time, as a result of Chinese lies and cover-ups, to respond.

Fauci and Birx are not perfect, and there is legitimate criticism of the advice they gave the president. In the past, they both worked on an HIV-AIDS vaccine – a 23-year project that is still a bust. The government’s decisions during the pandemic have been questionable, on such matters as to whether or not to wear a mask and how long the virus lives and spreads on surfaces or objects. One day, a careful review of their advice and whether it was correct will be done.

But it’s silly to fault President Trump for turning to these people. These experts are being attacked and threatened with jail time by conservatives upset with the economic damage and dislocation caused by the government response to coronavirus. The critics of Trump, on both the right and left, are losing sight of the real villain – the Chinese authorities.

Even now, despite the brouhaha over a vaccine, our “experts” do not yet completely understand the nature of this virus and its ability to spread and mutate, possibly making a vaccine unlikely or even impossible. Curiously, China destroyed early samples of the virus. We need Fauci and Birx, and many others, involved in finding a solution. Trump would be wise to expand his circle of authorities and go beyond the Medical Deep State. But that doesn’t mean the authorities he relied on initially should be banished to Siberia.

In the meantime, our leaders need to quickly consider a necessary response to the Chinese regime. One approach to China is to sue the corrupt and evil rulers. When it comes to suing the Chinese government, one of the few lawyers I would trust to do so in an aggressive manner is Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. Klayman isn’t content to file Freedom of Information requests; he goes for the jugular. His lawsuit against China demands $20 trillion in damages and he intends to make the Chinese Communists sweat blood in court. He would tie the communist lawyers into knots, which would be something to see. He would humiliate them. And the communists deserve to be humiliated in a public forum.

John Yoo, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Robert J. Delahunty, argue for other measures, such as the imposition of economic sanctions on Chinese officials, general tariffs on Chinese imports, restrictions on Chinese investment in the U.S., and the expropriation of Chinese property in the United States.

“Conceivably,” they argue, “Washington could even cancel Chinese-held treasury debt and [use] the proceeds to create a trust fund that would compensate Americans harmed by the pandemic.”

Grzegorz Górny, a writer for the global publication Remix, did some digging into the controversy and points out that the U.S. Department of the Treasury clearly has the power to “confiscate Chinese assets in the U.S.” and “freeze all operations using American government obligations which were purchased by China.…” The latter is estimated at $1.2 trillion. He concludes, “In one swift move, the U.S. may annul that debt and free itself from the Chinese loop.”

In looking for Chinese investments to expropriate, the place to go is California. “California became the number one recipient of Chinese FDI [foreign direct investment] in recent years, with more than $16 billion in 2016 alone,” notes a report from the Asia Society and the Rhodium Group. “Much of the investment has gone into two important areas – real estate and technology.” Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, the China reporter for Axios, assembled the facts and figures about Chinese aid-and-trade with the United States, confirming that California is “hooked” on China. Of the top 10 states with the highest net trade with China. California is number one by far.

Last September, Democratic Party Governor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) announced the expansion of the China Trade & Investment Network (CTIN), in order to facilitate the state’s trade and investment efforts in China. “The trade relationship between California and China is one of the largest in the world, with two-way trade valued at $177 billion in 2018,” the release said.

Just a few months later China unleashed the virus on the world. That was quite an import.

Incredibly, Newsom made a nearly $1 billion deal to receive surgical masks from China to protect against the virus. They failed to arrive on time.

Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kincaid/200521

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/8MXPa7b_PPo


A Holistic View(I):
Can We Prevent Another Disaster Like the Coronavirus Pandemic?
– Part 1: Timeline and Analysis

May 26, 2020 | By Tong Gen and Wuxian (Minghui.org)

The coronavirus broke out in Wuhan City, China in late 2019. Within several months, this regional epidemic evolved into a global pandemic.

As people in over 200 countries and regions are combating the disease and searching for a cure, we would like to present a holistic view of what we can learn from the pandemic: about our society, modern science and culture, as well as history.

It is our hope that this four-part series will help our readers understand that the pandemic would not have happened without continued misleading information from the Chinese Communist Party (Part 1). We also examine theories of where the coronavirus started (Part 2) and how it started (Part 3).

Understanding the pandemic in the context of culture and history (Part 4), on the other hand, offers clues for how to reevaluate our principles and moral obligations while preparing for the next chapter in history.

Below is an outline of the series:

Part 1: Timeline and Analysis

Chapter 1: Cover-up of the Outbreak in China

Chapter 2: Will Such Tragedies Happen Again?

Part 2: A Mysterious Virus — Where Did It Start?

Chapter 3: US-origin Theory

Chapter 4: China-origin Theory

Part 3: A Mysterious Virus — How Did It Start?

Chapter 5: Man-made Theory

Chapter 6: Natural-origin Theory

Part 4: Rethinking Modern Science and Returning to Traditional Values

Chapter 7: The CCP Poses An Unprecedented Challenge to Humanity

Chapter 8: Reflections on Ancient Wisdom

* * *

Part 1: Timeline and Analysis

“Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning,” wrote Frank Snowden, Professor Emeritus of History and the History of Medicine at Yale University in his book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, published in October 2019, several weeks prior to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.

“Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are,” he elaborated in an interview with The New Yorker on March 3, 2020.

In this part of the series, we will first review how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) misinformed the public over the coronavirus outbreak. From this perspective, we can gain a better understanding of what went wrong and how to correct it.

Chapter 1: Cover-up of the Outbreak in China

The following timeline shows how the CCP mishandled the coronavirus outbreak.

On December 1, 2019, the first confirmed Wuhan coronavirus patient was treated. This person had no exposure to the Huanan Seafood Market, and he went on to infect 14 healthcare professionals who treated and cared for him.

On December 18, 2019, a 65-year-old shipping staff employee was admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital. The symptoms indicated pneumonia, but no pathogen was identified and no medication worked. On December 24, alveolar lavage fluid from this patient was sent to Vision Medicals in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, for diagnosis.

On December 26, 2019, data review of the 65-year-old patient’s metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) from automated data analysis result indicated a SARS-like coronavirus. The gene sequence was 81% identical to that of the SARS virus of 2003.

Internal communication on testing results on December 26, 2019, states that the best match for the genetic information of the new virus was a SARS-like coronavirus.

On December 27, 2019, Vision Medicals shared the gene sequence of the 65-year-old shipping staff employee with the Institute of Pathogen Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Wuhan Central Hospital was also notified of a new type of coronavirus and quarantine was recommended.

Between December 26 and 27, Zhang Jixian, Director of the Respiration Department at Hubei Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, examined a married couple presenting with an unusual pneumonia. Both of them, as well as their son, showed specific patterns in their lung imaging. That same day, a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market presented with the same symptoms. On December 27, this was reported to hospital officials and then to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Medical staff was instructed to wear masks, and medical isolation gowns were ordered.

Between December 28 and 29, 2019, three more patients with connections to the Huanan Seafood Market were hospitalized. Hubei Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine once again reported this to higher officials. The China Health Commission then sent officials to Wuhan to launch an investigation.

On December 30, CapitalBio MedLab in Beijing provided mNGS results of another pneumonia patient and concluded that it was a SARS coronavirus. Ai Fen, Director of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital, circled “SARS coronavirus” in the report and shared this with her colleague, a medical doctor, who then posted it on the social media groups WeChat.

Note: According to U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information, bat SARS coronavirus is categorized under SARS. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named it as SARS-Cov-2. Since the CCP claimed it had defeated SARS in 2003, it was suggested to change the name to 2019-nCov.

On December 30, the Wuhan Health Commission issued an urgent notice concerning the unknown pneumonia. The notice referenced multiple cases of unknown pneumonia that were related to the Huanan Seafood Market and warned medical facilities and individuals to not disclose related information without authorization.

At about 6 p.m. on December 30, Li Wenliang from Wuhan Central Hospital shared in a WeChat group that 7 SARS cases had been confirmed and he reminded his classmate doctors to be on alert. Liu Wen from the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital also posted a similar message on Wechat close to 8 p.m. about a case from Wuhan Central Hospital and warned medical staff to pay attention to safety. Xie Linka from Wuhan Union Hospital posted a note around 9 p.m. mentioning a SARS-like pneumonia related to the Huanan Seafood Market. She said that many such patients had been admitted to her hospital and reminded healthcare workers to wear masks.

At 1:30 a.m. on December 31, 2019, Li Wenliang was summoned by the Wuhan Health Commission for investigation. Throughout the day, he was called numerous times to the Regulations Office of the hospital and reprimanded. Similarly, Liu Wen was investigated by his hospital, while Xie Linka was interrogated by police over the phone.

Also on December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Health Commission issued another notice about pneumonia cases related to the Huanan Seafood Market. This time, the notice said that medical experts had concluded that it was a viral pneumonia but that no human-to-human transmission was observed and no healthcare workers had been infected.

On January 1, 2020, the Wuhan Police Department announced, “Because of spreading rumors related to the Wuhan pneumonia, 8 people have been summoned and investigated by the police.” The police, though, didn’t say whether the eight people included Ai Fen, Li Wenliang, Liu Wen, and Xie Linka.

On January 2, Ai Fen, the doctor who provided information about the coronavirus, was reprimanded by hospital officials so harshly that she almost collapsed. Liu Wen was summoned by the police for interrogation.

Starting from January 3, China began to inform surrounding countries of the disease but downplayed its severity. CCP officials claimed at a later time that the U.S. government had received 30 updates in January alone.

On January 5, Zhang Yongzhen from Fudan University and the Shanghai Public Health Center detected a SARS-like virus in samples from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention and obtained the virus’ entire genome sequence. In a report to Shanghai and national officials, Zhang said that the new virus had the same origin as the SARS virus and it spread through the respiratory system. He also called for the public to take precautionary measures.

On January 6, China CDC started a second level emergency response internally. On the same day, Wuhan City started the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

On January 7, Li Wenliang examined a patient with glaucoma. The following day, the patient had a fever and was later diagnosed with the coronavirus infection. On January 10, Li began to cough, followed by a fever the next day, and hospitalization on January 12.

After Zhang Yongzhen and his team reported the emergency of the SARS epidemic, he did not receive a response. He thus uploaded the new genome sequence online on January 10 and shared it with others. This made the healthcare industry aware of the virus and medical experts urged top CCP officials to publicize the information about the epidemic. In response, the Shanghai Health Commission shut down the Shanghai Public Health Center, where Zhang works, on January 12 for an investigation, without giving any explanation. Zhang submitted four proposals subsequently, requesting to reopen the BSL-3 lab. But the request was not approved until January 24 when the epidemic was out of control.

On January 11, a notice from the Wuhan Health Commission announced 41 coronavirus cases, two recoveries, seven severe cases, and one death. It maintained that no human-to-human transmission had been observed. The Commission claimed that the disease was “preventable and controllable.”

On January 17, the Wuhan Health Commission reported that 17 new cases had been detected with testing kits, bring the cumulative total to 62 cases. The Commission did not rule out the possibility of human-to human transmission, but claimed that such contagion risk was low. By then, insiders had heard from top officials in Wuhan that the city was to be put on lockdown. Some residents began to prepare to flee.

On January 18, the Baibuting Community held its 20th annual 10,000-Family Feast as scheduled, and around 40,000 people attended. This community would soon become one of the hardest-hit areas in the epidemic.

On January 20, pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan announced through the state-owned China Central Television that the new coronavirus could spread between humans.

On January 23, Wuhan was locked down. By then, 5 million people had fled the city, carrying the disease all over China. Had there been no coronavirus, the number of people leaving Wuhan during the Chinese New Year holiday was estimated to be around 2 million based on historical data. In other words, an additional 3 million left the city purely because of the outbreak, which exacerbated the spread of the virus.

Starting from January 24, China cranked up its propaganda machine to downplay the disease by saying that the flu deaths in the U.S. had reached 13 million since September 2019. What the propaganda did not say was that the seasonal flu usually claims 88,000 lives in China each year.

The death of Li Wenliang was announced in the early morning of February 7. Within several hours, the news about his death had hundreds of millions of viewers on social media with about one million comments. Posts on freedom of speech also reached millions of viewers, but they were quickly deleted by the CCP’s massive censorship apparatus and internet monitoring army.

Chapter 2: Will Such Tragedies Happen Again?

Miscommunication by the CCP continued after the outbreak, from suppressing the number of confirmed cases to blaming others, such as the United States, for starting the virus, to bragging about China’s “success” in defeating the disease.

The above timeline indicates that while medical experts had repeatedly sounded the alarm in the early stages of the outbreak, the CCP had been repeatedly downplaying the risk. This happened not because the CCP didn’t have the capacity to disseminate information but because it put “political stability” above people’s lives.

Cases Were Identified and Reported by Doctors

In the initial stages of the outbreak, doctors obtained a sufficient amount of information, such as the mNGS results from Vision Medicals on December 26 and the data from CapitalBio MedLab on December 30.

In addition, these doctors, as well as testing facilities, reported the findings to their higher-ups. This included communication between Vision Medicals and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences on December 27, and between Zhang Jixian and the Wuhan CDC on December 27 and over the following days.

Furthermore, Zhang Yongzhen from Fudan University and the Shanghai Public Health Center detected SARS-like virus in samples from the Wuhan CDC and obtained the entire genome sequence as of January 5. He reported this to Shanghai and national officials, indicating that the new virus had the same origin as the SARS virus. Since it spreads through the respiratory system, he urged the public to be on the alert.

Therefore, there were sufficient technologies, staff, and communications to prevent the disease from spreading, if action had been taken in time.

Role of Health Commission

China’s National Health Commission, which has branches at every government level, sent officials to investigate the situation in Wuhan on December 29. At that time, multiple hospitals were reporting coronavirus patients.

On December 30, the Health Commission sent a notice to healthcare workers warning them of an unknown pneumonia, without mentioning the coronavirus. Furthermore, it prohibited medical staff from discussing the information.

After Li Wenliang and others shared the information through WeChat—the only possible way ordinary citizens could do so in this case, all of them were reprimanded by officials and even the police.

While the outbreak was never broadcast on national media at the time, the state-owned Xinhua News Agency quickly published a report about the 8 individuals being punished for spreading rumors.

It was apparent that the CCP had the capacity for quick dissemination of information, but it was selective in what it chose to broadcast. Even when medical experts had repeatedly warned of human-to-human transmission, the Health Commission still claimed that the disease was “preventable and controllable.” It didn’t acknowledge human-to-human transmission until January 20, three days before Wuhan was locked down.

One cannot just blame the Health Commission for blocking information about the outbreak, though, as the agency was merely reporting what the CCP wanted people to know. The control of the narratives about the epidemic is just a manifestation of the nature of the CCP, which thrives on violence, deceit, and lies to maintain power.

Fault Starts at the Top

The State Council Information Office in China released a white paper titled “Development of China’s Public Health as an Essential Element of Human Rights” on September 29, 2017. The white paper stated, “China set up the world’s largest online direct reporting system of notifiable epidemics and public health emergencies in 2015, and the average reporting time has been shortened to four hours from five days before the introduction of the system.”

This system was further tested in July 2019 with over 8,200 participants from 31 provinces and provincial-level cities. The purpose was to practice how to handle a virus outbreak some time in 2020.

In addition, another emergency rescue drill took place at Tianhe Airport in Wuhan on September 18, 2019, before the 2019 Military World Games. The agenda included an epidemic survey, staff monitoring, temporary quarantine area, patient transfer, and deep cleaning.

But all these preparations fell apart three months later when coronavirus patients were detected and reported to higher officials, who downplayed the risk in order to maintain “social stability.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping was rarely seen during the epidemic crisis, even though he usually made high-profile appearances on a regular basis.

On the day that Wuhan was locked down, January 23, 2020, Xi gave a speech marking the Lunar Chinese New Year, but he didn’t mention the coronavirus. He attended a banquet celebrating the new year the next day, but again said nothing about the outbreak. On January 28, he met with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. On February 5, he met with Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen.

Xi wasn’t seen in public again until February 10, when he visited Beijing’s Chaoyang district to inspect the local officials’ work in fighting the virus. The next time Xi was seen was on March 10, when he visited Wuhan for the first time since the epidemic broke out in December 2019.

Xi’s inaction led to further mishandling of the crisis. A recent document received by Minghui.org reveals that China’s National Health Commission had issued orders to destroy coronavirus samples and prohibited related discussions during the coronavirus crisis.

Furthermore, raw, authentic data has also been deleted to comply with officially published statistics, according to a report issued by the Chaoyang City Health Commission to the Liaoning Health Commission on February 23, 2020. Several government agencies were involved in the data destruction, in which “Besides destroying data, officials also identified all individuals who had access to the data one by one, and required them to sign non-disclosure agreements.”

With such a comprehensive system in place to block information, cover up facts, and mislead the public, it is unlikely that any vital information would be available to the public in the event that another contagion breaks out.

(To be continued)

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/26/185216.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/QNGZJ1ZAToE

A Holistic View:
Are We Able to Prevent Another Disaster
Like Coronavirus Pandemic?

— Part 2: A Mysterious Virus — Where Did It Start?

May 27, 2020 | By Tong Gen and Wuxian, (Minghui.org)

(Continued from Part 1)
Part 2: A Mysterious Virus — Where Did It Start?

Scientists have found that virus, a lower form of life, is more complicated than what people normally think. For example, HIV-infected cells could circulate in the blood or interstitial fluid-like loaded weapons, and they actively shoot at cells that pass by. Below is a video on how HIV infected cells attack other cells.



After a cell infected with HIV (green), it attacks human cells (in red) actively and precisely like shooting a gun.

The novel coronavirus is even more complicated than a typical virus or its close relative, the 2003 SARS. For instance, the coronavirus is found to be much more “intelligent” than SARS:1) It is dozens of times more capable of infecting humans than SARS. 2) It has a longer incubation period than SARS. 3) It remains latent upon encountering medicine but would reactivate at a later time just like HIV.4) In addition to attacking the lungs and other organs like SARS, the coronavirus also damages the immune system in a way that resembles HIV.

There are many more puzzles about the coronavirus that scientists are eager to find answers to. To this end, many have been trying to pinpoint the origin of the coronavirus so as to better understand it and eventually find a cure to it.

Several theories have been circulated. One type of theory concerns where the virus started and the other examines how the virus started. As shown in the following image, we cover where the virus started in Part 2 and examine arguments in favor of the competing US-origin (Chapter 3) and China-origin (Chapter 4) theories. Part 3 looks into how the virus started and presents arguments in favor of man-made theory (Chapter 5) and natural-origin theory (Chapter 6).



Chapter 3. US-origin Theory

As discussed in part 1, the Chinese Communist Party has blocked every possible channel for the information to be brought to the general public during the early phase of the outbreak. After the CCP couldn’t hide the epidemic anymore, it shifted the narrative and attempted to blame the US for starting the virus. The tactics used included a social media disinformation campaign and propaganda articles run by the state-run media. Below are a few examples.

1. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused the US military of bringing the virus to Wuhan during the Military World Games.

On March 12, 2020, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Twitter, “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owes us an explanation!”

He included in his post a video of Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that some flu deaths in the U.S. were later confirmed to be actually coronavirus deaths.

The U.S. State Department summoned Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, on March 13 to protest against Zhao’s conspiracy theory suggesting the U.S. military might have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan.

David Stilwell, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, issued a “stern representation” of the US government’s position on the matter to Cui. A State Department spokesman said, “China is seeking to deflect criticism for its role in starting a global pandemic and not telling the world.”

Julian Gewirtz, a Harvard scholar, said of Zhao, “This small cadre of high-volume Chinese officials don’t seem to realize that peddling conspiracy theories is totally self-defeating for China, at a moment when it wants to be seen as a positive contributor around the world,” according to a New York Times article on March 13 titled “China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic.”

2. Author Larry Romanoff claims that the virus was manufactured by US military lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Larry Romanoff, a self-proclaimed “retired management consultant and businessman,” published an article on the fact-checking website “Global Research” on March 4, 2020, claiming that the US military lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, could be the place where the virus was manufactured.

Romanoff didn’t provide any evidence in his article, but drew his conclusion based on the fact that the Fort Detrick lab was shut down last year due to “an absence of safeguards to prevent pathogen leakages.”

According to an earlier New York Times report, titled “Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns,” the lab’s decades-old steam sterilization system to treat wastewater was ruined during a severe storm in May 2018. Although the lab implemented a new system using chemicals to decontaminate its wastes, an inspection by the CDC in June 2019 found several issues, which cost them the registration to continue operation. But the lab’s spokeswoman confirmed that there were “no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory.”

Romanoff’s article was later removed from “Global Research.”

3. ChinaXiv published a preprint, claiming most ancient virus strains were found in the US.

On February 19, 2020, ChinaXiv published a preprint from Yu Wenbin and others (later updated on February 21), titled “Decoding the evolution and transmissions of the novel pneumonia coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) using whole genomic data.”

Yu and his team studied 93 genome sequences of coronavirus collected from both Wuhan and other countries between December 24, 2019, and January 5, 2020. They found that a sequence sample collected from a patient in Washington State presented the earliest form of coronavirus. In contrast, the samples collected from Wuhan presented later mutations of the virus.

Based on this, many Netizens claimed the virus was not from China, but probably from the U.S.

A closer examination, however, indicated that the Washington State patient in Yu’s study traveled back to Seattle from Wuhan on January 15, which in turn supported the fact that the outbreak started in Wuhan.

But why didn’t Yu and his team find ancestral types of the virus in Wuhan samples? One reason is that most of the patients’ samples were not submitted for whole-genome sequencing. Another is that, the Chinese officials gave secret orders to destroy early samples in early January 2020, as described in Part 1.

4. Article on Xilu website on January 26, 2020, titled “Four Key Amino Acids on Wuhan Virus Substituted, Can Precisely Attack Chinese.”

Xilu, one of the major military websites in China, published an article on January 26, 2020, claiming four key amino acids had been replaced in the coronavirus, enabling it to accurately attack Chinese. It thus declared the coronavirus a gene weapon by the United States.

Th Xilu article cited a publication on Science China from Hao Pei and others from the Center for Biosafety Mega-Science in January 2020 but distorted its findings.

In Hao’s article, titled “Evolution of the novel coronavirus from the ongoing Wuhan outbreak and modeling of its spike protein for risk of human transmission,” it discussed the mutation on the spike protein of the coronavirus, but it didn’t mention anything about the virus’ attacking Chinese. As the virus has now spread to nearly 200 countries around the world, it’s clear that the virus afflicts people from all ethnicities, not only Chinese.

5. US funded a project that engineered a contagious and pathogenic virus in 2015.

One article titled “The US Made a Novel Coronavirus Five Years Ago, Can Cause Contagious Pneumonia in Human” began to appear on Chinese social media on February 1, 2020.

The article claims that a new type of coronavirus was produced in the U.S. five years ago, which could cause infectious pneumonia in humans. It refers to a Nature Medicine paper published in January 2015 by Ralph Baric and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina. The paper was titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”

Baric and his team engineered a virus, named SHC014-MA15, that was a recombinant of the non-toxic, human transmissible bat virus SHC014-CoV and toxic, mouse-adapted SARS-MA15. They found that this man-made virus carried potential capacity to be used as a backbone for the generation of a more advanced version that can both cause severe disease and spread between humans.

The aforementioned article on Chinese social media cited Baric’s paper as evidence that the current coronavirus was manufactured in the U.S., but detailed examination revealed that Shi Zhengli, a principal scientist of Wuhan Institute of Virology, was also one of the authors of the Baric’s paper. After the U.S. later halted funding to Baric’s research due to ethical concerns, Shi and her team nevertheless continued the study in Wuhan.

The 2015 Nature Medicine paper


Chapter 4. China-origin Theory

To shirk responsibilities, the CCP broke the naming convention for the past pandemics and worked with the WHO to call the new coronavirus COVID-19, instead of Wuhan Virus.

Common sense tells us that wherever there is an outbreak, there would be a source of the virus and patient zero. As the patient zero travels, it would lead to infection along the way. If patient zero stays in one city, that place would have an outbreak of the disease.

After the novel coronavirus broke out, some people suspect that the virus may have originated in Wuhan based on the following arguments.

1. Wuhan has the only P4 lab in China that handles the most dangerous pathogens.

Whether it was coincidental or not, the only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) lab, the highest safety level lab, in China that handles highly infectious pathogens such as SARS and other coronaviruses, is located in the epicenter of the outbreak, Wuhan.

The BSL-4 lab in Wuhan Institute of Virology was established in 2015 and approved in August 2017 as a Highly Pathogenic Microorganism Lab. The lab certificate was issued on November 27, 2018.

2. US embassy warned of the safety issue of the Wuhan lab in 2018

It was even more concerning that when two science diplomats from the US embassy visited the lab in 2018, they found “inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.” Their findings further triggered people to question whether it was possible for the virus to have been leaked from the lab.

3. Small scale lab leaking events in Beijing in 2004

In fact, shortly after the SARS outbreak in 2003, there was a leak accident in China CDC BSL-3 lab in Beijing in April 2004. After the SARS virus was inactivated, one lab staff brought the virus into a regular lab for research. Because the inactivation was not complete, the virus spread to two other lab members.

4. Respiratory disease outbreak drill in Wuhan in September 2019

Wuhan authorities held an emergency rescue drill at Wuhan Tianhe Airport on September 18, 2019, to practice how to respond to a contagious respiratory disease outbreak.

The event took place only months before the coronavirus outbreak, fueling suspicions that Wuhan authorities may have already known about the imminent outbreak beforehand.

5. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology part of a 2015 study that produced a virus that can infect and sicken humans.

The 2015 Nature Medicine paper mentioned above had Shi Zhengli as one of the coauthors, and she continued the research even after her coauthors in the U.S stopped research due to the funding issue. Some people questioned whether the new coronavirus came from Shi’s research.

By comparing the SHC014-MA15 strain that was reported in Shi’s Nature Medicine paper with the new coronavirus, people have found several similarities, including, 1) both of the viruses came from bats; 2) both of them are SARS-like coronavirus, with the mushroom-like spike protein on the surface; 3) both viruses’ spike proteins interact with the ACE2 receptor on the human cell to mediate its entry; 4) last but not least, both viruses target the host’s lungs and respiratory system, although the new virus was later found to target almost every organ of the human body.

Of note, the interaction between the novel coronavirus’ spike protein with the receptors on human cells is like opening a lock with a key. The specific 3-D configuration of the spike protein, usually called the S-protein, has to be precisely complementary to the receptor protein on the surface of the human cell, for it to open the lock and enter the cell.

In other words, the sequence and configuration of the S-protein of the new virus is one of the key factors to determine its origin.

If the new coronavirus is indeed a derivative strain from the SHC014-MA15 virus, then its key component, the S-protein, should remain the same. But so far, no such evidence has been reported by any lab.

6. A Chinese researcher claims that the virus originated from a lab in Wuhan

Another argument of the lab leak theory is based on a study published on a non-peer reviewed website called ResearchGate, by Xiao Botao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology in February 2020.

Xiao suspected that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Wuhan CDC). He reasoned that the Wuhan CDC is only 280 meters (less than 300 yards) from the wet seafood market. The CDC studies hundreds of bat coronaviruses, but with minimal protection, and its staff members have reportedly been attacked by bats or exposed to bat urine before.

But just as many scientists started looking into the leaking event he described, Xiao withdrew the paper, because it “was not supported by direct proofs,” according to his interview with the Wall Street Journal.

(To be continued)

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/27/185233.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/gQ9jN00Isp4

A Holistic View:
Are We Able to Prevent Another Disaster
Like Coronavirus Pandemic?
— Part 3: A Mysterious Virus — How Did It Start?

May 28, 2020 | By Tong Gen and Wuxian, (Minghui.org)

(Continued from Part 2)
Chapter 5: Man-made Theory

So far, the main arguments that support the man-made theory about the origin of the virus are centered around the sequence of its spike protein (S-protein), as well as a piece of sequence insertion that appeared to come from an artificial vector used for DNA manipulation.

1. The spike protein of the new virus contains a unique cut site not present in its close relatives.

Scientists have found that the S-protein of the new coronavirus has a special fragment of sequence that can be cleaved by a special protein in the host cell. After the sequence was cut by the protein called furin, the virus gains the ability to enter the host cell and infect multiple organs.

Some people argued that the furin cleavage site in the virus is unique and hasn’t been found in its close relatives of other coronaviruses, but some scientists also point out that such sequence does exist naturally in other viruses, including some coronaviruses not directly related to the new virus.

While one could argue that the insertion of the furin cut site to the virus is through genetic manipulation, as it’s a well-established bioengineering process, one can’t completely rule out the possibly that the virus takes up the sequence from the environment itself, given the fact that coronavirus is a RNA virus, which isn’t stable and is constantly mutating and taking in sequences from the environment (a process called genetic recombination).

As a result, the furin cut site alone isn’t enough to conclude that the virus was a product of lab manipulation.

2. Indian researchers claimed the virus contains HIV sequences

There are also some other arguments about the virus’ S-protein containing HIV sequence. A preprint of an article from Bishwajit Kundu and others at the University of New Delhi was published in bioRxiv in late January. The Indian team noticed four insertions in the virus S-protein are unique. They are not present in other coronaviruses, and amino acids are actually identical or similar to proteins in HIV. The Wuhan virus “is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature,” wrote the authors. Two days later, however, the Indian team withdrew this paper.

3. The new virus contains sequence similar to that from an artificial p-Shuttle SN Vector

Another argument that claims the Wuhan virus to be a lab-engineered strain was based on an article published on January 30, 2020, by James Lyons-Weiler, who formerly worked at the University of Pittsburgh as a bioinformatician.

In his article, Lyons-Weiler wrote that he observed a gene sequence in the Wuhan virus being 67% identical to the p-Shuttle SN Vector, which has been used in many labs to produce SARS vaccine. He then speculated that the novel coronavirus was a man-made virus used for SARS vaccine research.

Another researcher, Steven Salzburg, a computational biologist and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, searched the virus sequence against the database on NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), only to see the top hits were sequences from other bat coronavirus, but not the vector.

Salzburg argued that if the virus sequence did come from the vector, it would be “near-identical,” not [67%] “distantly related.”

Chapter 6: Natural-origin Theory

Given above rebuttal to the man-made theory, no solid evidence could support the argument that the virus was actually generated in a lab. Many scientists agree that the new coronavirus was probably a naturally occurring virus that originated in bats.

1. Bat virus has closest relationship with the new coronavirus, but needs intermediate hosts to facilitate mutation

On February 3, 2020, Shi Zhengli published a paper on the prestigious journal Nature, titled “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin.”

In this paper, Shi reported that through whole genome sequencing, her team has identified a bat coronavirus named RaTG13, sharing 96.2% identity with the novel coronavirus. This is the closest strain to the novel coronavirus reported so far.

The 96.2% similarity does not mean that the bat virus would directly infect humans and be responsible for the current pandemic. According to Trevor Bedford, a bioinformatics specialist at the University of Washington, it would usually take 25-65 years for the bat virus to mutate enough to become 100% identical to the current coronavirus.

However, the new coronavirus broke out only a few months ago, and there was not enough time for the bat virus to eliminate the 3.8% difference (=100% – 96.2%) and become the coronavirus if it had directly infected humans.

The only possibility for the bat virus to quickly mutate into the coronavirus was through intermediate hosts. In other words, if the bat virus had infected an intermediate host, which then spread the virus to humans, that’d greatly accelerate the mutation speed. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University argued that “the mutation rate may have been different as it passed through different hosts before humans.”

The quest is on to identify the intermediate host(s). In previous zoonotic outbreaks (diseases spread from animal to human), both the 2003 SARS in China and the 2012 MERS in Saudi Arabia were found to result from bat viruses that used palm civets and camels as intermediate hosts, before jumping back to human and causing diseases.

By the time the virus broke out in Wuhan in the winter of 2019, bats have already gone into hibernation and there were no bats sold at the wet market. So it’s possible that the virus has been around in the environment for months or even longer and has gone through a comprehensive mutation process before developing the deadly traits.

Several candidates came up in the search of the intermediate host, including mink, ferrets and even turtles. Although the list was narrowed down to pangolin as a hot contender, it soon proved to be impossible too.

The pangolin lives in a warm environment and has to stay in a subtropical environment unlike Wuhan. Its diet is limited to ants and termites. It also has a weak digestive and respiratory system. Pangolins get sick easily and the illness is often lethal. Because of these reasons, pangolin is not suitable for captive breeding. In fact, China does not approve its trading, so pangolins come from smuggling and very few of them are alive.

Had pangolins been an intermediate host, the first patients would have been smugglers. The outbreak would have also spread in various locations, since Wuhan is not a distribution center of the smuggling.



International trafficking routes for pangolins

Also because of their weak respiratory system, pangolins get sick easily upon coronavirus infection. If they are sick, they could die before spreading disease.

Researchers at South China Agricultural University at one point announced that their sequencing result of the virus isolated from pangolins share 99% similarity to the new virus, but that turned out to be miscommunication within the team and the actual genome homology between the pangolin virus and the Wuhan virus is only 90%.

In 2003 SARS, civet was determined to be the intermediate host for the bat virus to make the jump to humans, after Shi Zhengli found a virus on civet that was 99.8% identical to SARS. So the 90% homology in pangolins was not sufficient to determine pangolins were the ultimate intermediate host that the scientists are looking for regarding the new coronavirus.

Even though there is no definitive answer to what could be an intermediate host for the coronavirus, tracing back Shi Zhengli’s journey to find the source of the 2003 SARS origin provides a clue of how the bat virus she discovered years ago may have eventually resulted in the coronavirus.

It took Shi 7 years to eventually find the very first origin of the SARS, very likely to the be RaTG13 strain, in a bat cave in Kunming City, Yunnan Province. But that begs the question of how the bat virus she found traveled 1,000 miles from Kunming to Wuhan, before jumping onto the unknown intermediate host?

We present two possible routes (see image below): first, the virus was brought back by Shi’s team and leaked into the environment through mishandled lab animals; second, Shi’s team members were infected with the bat virus and unknowingly became the first generation of intermediate host before transmitting the virus to the next host (animals) and jumping back to humans and caused the pandemic.



2. Shi-discovered bat virus leaked to environment through mishandled lab animals

While many people suspect that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan virology lab and it’s also widely known that Chinese research labs often have loose safety management, it isn’t that easy for a virus to be leaked from the lab after all.

First of all, BSL-4 labs are rare and they are designed for highly dangerous microbes. They are used to handle fatal microbes that do not have treatment or vaccines such as Ebola viruses.

A person is required to change clothing before entering and shower upon exiting. All materials are also decontaminated before exiting. In addition, one must wear appropriate personal protective equipment, as well as a full body, air-supplied, positive pressure suit.

A BSL-4 laboratory is extremely isolated—often located in a separate building or in an isolated and restricted zone of the building. The laboratory also features a special supply and exhaust air, as well as vacuum lines and decontamination systems.



BSL-4 lab at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID): Both operators wore clothing and head protection with positive pressure.

Moreover, a BSL-4 lab operator is often accompanied with colleagues with the lab under video surveillance. This makes it almost impossible for a lab member to intentionally leak the pathogens by oneself.

That being said, there are still some other ways for a virus to get out from the lab.

2.1 Mishandled Lab Animals

One Netizen, Wu Xiaohua, raised the safety issues of lab animals in February 2020, “Some labs have very poor management on this and sell lab animals for profit. For example, dogs were raised as pets (Union Medical College has done this previously) … The dead bodies of lab animals were also handled inappropriately. Instead of paying the costly incineration expense, South Medical University and other places have sold them, including macaques, as wildlife.

“I have seen students in the lab cooking specific pathogen free eggs [for vaccine production] for meals; Lab pigs were slaughtered with meat shared by lab members…. Some took lab mice out in pockets and raised them as pets…

“The mutation and recombination of virus could happen by accident. But the lab management has lots of troubles.”

Because what Wu said was reality and it existed in many Chinese labs, no scientists refuted his message.

The CCP official media did not respond to Wu’s opinions either; it instead said the BSL-4 lab had high security and the negative pressure would prevent accidental leaking.

But if Wuhan Institute of Virology is unable to contain pathogens because of mishandling of lab animals, that alone would endanger its safety measures.

According to policy, lab animals first need disinfection on the surface, being sealed in bags, and kept in freezers. Like other medical infectious waste, they are then sent to an incinerator for two-stage incineration, which is a process of a minimum 4 hours of burn time at 1,800 ºF (about 1,000 ºC).

Wuhan Institute of Virology does not have its own incinerator and sends its lab animals to contractors for incineration, including mice, pigs, sheep, and so on. This is also how lab animals are handled in the Western countries according to medical ethics.

But in the CCP-ruled China, this can be a serious loophole.

People may think, after formalin treatment and freezing, the lab animals would only be burned. In China, however, anything can happen.

Simple searching in Baidu, a popular Chinese search engine, with keywords of “formalin” and “meat” would lead to a large number of websites with information on how to use toxic formalin to preserve meat. More specifically, formalin treatment would make rotten meat, or meat from dead animals, look fresh.

After the addition of meat tenderizer (which in itself could also be poisonous during adulteration with nitrites) and other seasoning, consumers would probably enjoy the flavor without knowing what is in it.

It is apparent that even if lab operators closely follow all procedures, what happens outside the lab is out of their control and may still allow pathogen to infect people with no limitation.

In the above discussions, Wu Xiaohua challenged Shi Zhengli about lab safety. Shi did not respond to this probably because lab animal handling was something outside of her responsibilities.

On February 17, an article appeared on the social media site of Weibo, claiming that Wang Yanyi, director of Wuhan Virology Institute, had leaked pathogens.

“I am Chen Quanjiao, a research fellow at Wuhan Virology Institute and my ID number is 422428197404080626,” read the post, which said that Wang was promoted to her position because of her husband Shu Hongbing, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of Wuhan University Medical School.

“She [Wang] often takes some animals from the lab and sells them to vendors at Huanan Seafood Market,” the post continued.



Chen Quanjiao of Wuhan Virology Institute disclosed that Wang Yanyi, director of the institute, sells lab animals to vendors.

After this post, however, Chen was silenced and detained by police. It was reported that officials attempted to force her to withdraw those statements publicly on TV. It was unclear whether she complied with the demand.

Chen was later released, but neither she nor her family was willing to talk more about it. “We don’t want to get in trouble,” one family member said.

2.2 System Failure

What Wu Xiaohua and Chen Quanjiao said was supported by numerous evidence. On January 2, 2020, Li Ning, member of Chinese Academy of Sciences in China Agricultural University, was sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment. According the verdict (2015-Songyuan County Criminal Case No. 15), Li embezzled 37.6 million yuan of scientific funds, among which 10.2 million yuan came from selling deserted lab animals and milk. That is, Li sold the genetically modified cows and milk in the lab to consumers and made a fortune.

Neither China Agricultural University nor Wuhan Institute of Virology has effective safety monitoring systems in place. Just like the CCP itself, the self-monitoring process is usually neglected. Only after major issues break out do people know of their existence.

As for what Chen reported, the profit from selling animals is not that much. Among animals in Wuhan Institute of Virology, mice do not sell well, and the numbers of pigs, dogs, sheep, rabbits, or snakes are small (as the lab is different from an agricultural lab). The bigger sum could be the portion of scientific funding that pays for the medical waste processing (including incineration of lab animals).

Some greedy contractors could receive payments from research facilities (like Wuhan Institute of Virology) for incineration and also make money by selling lab animals instead of burning them as specified in their contracts.

After the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in February that lab biosafety should be treated as a national security issue. The next day, the Science and Technology Ministry rolled out new regulations via a document titled “Guiding opinions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses at the same level as the new coronavirus.”

It remains unclear how effective such regulations would be. As described in Part 1 of the series, the CCP had all the resources in place to identify, report, and publicize outbreaks such as coronavirus. But when doctors, scientists, and testing facilities identified coronavirus and reported to higher-ups, they were silenced and punished.

As for the lab animal handling, it involves underlying social responsibility and ethics. It’s also beyond regulations and we will discuss in Part 4.

Unfortunately, as medical professionals were reprimanded for raising awareness of the epidemic, officials ordered a deep cleaning of Huanan Seafood Market on December 31 and it was shut down on January 1.

These series of actions make it difficult to further investigate the wet market, that the Chinese authorities claimed was where the virus first broke out and where some of the dead animals disposed of by the virology lab were sold.

3. Shi-discovered virus infected her team and facilitated later transmission

Another possible transmission route for the virus to be spread from the bat to the unknown intermediate host was through Shi’s team members.

To have a full picture of this possibility, we will have to look at what Shi did after the 2003 SARS outbreak.

3.1 A Look Back at the Discovery of SARS

After the 2003 SARS epidemic, Shi and her team from Wuhan Institute of Virology set out to look for the origin of it, in order to prevent another major epidemic.

They spent seven years and went to many places to look for the virus. They didn’t know whether they would succeed until one day they stopped by a bat cave in Kunming, Yunnan Province.

Through sequencing, Shi was delighted to find that a naturally occurring virus from the horseshoe bat, sharing 97% homology to the SARS virus.

After another five years of sampling and analysis, Shi’s team proved the horseshoe bat species was the source of the SARS virus in a 2013 Nature paper.

Shi proposed the infection route of the 2003 SARS:

SARS virus in bat in Yunan à civet in Yunan (from captive breeding) à Guangdong Province where civets were sold and the virus eventually evolved into SARS-CoV à outbreak in humans.

Shi’s work was recognized by her peers, which earned her the title of “Bat Woman.”

3.2 Possible Infection of Team Members Back Then



Minimal personal protection by Shi Zhengli’s team when collecting bat virus samples: Left, collecting sample; upper right, looking for bats in caves; lower right, arm bitten by bats.

As shown in the above pictures, when Shi’s team spent six years working in Yunnan collecting bat virus samples, they worked in close proximity to bats including taking samples. Some did not wear facial masks or gloves. Even those who wore gloves had been bitten by bats and bled.

Shi explained that only when there were too many bats in a cave and the dust caused breathing difficulty did they put on additional personal protection. “Although bats carry many viruses, their chance of infecting people is minimal,” she said during a lecture in June 2018.

But that could be very risky. The paper from Shi’s team on Virologica Sinica in March 2018 found 3% village residents in the area near a bat cave they worked at had antibodies against coronavirus, which is a clear indication of previous infection. Because antibodies concentration would decrease to below detection level over time, the actual infection rate of the villagers could be higher.

How were they infected? Some had seen bats flying into the village and one person had handled a dead bat; occasionally, some had been near the cave. If so, Shi’s team went into the cave studying the bats and their chances of being infected could be much higher. It is just that the virus was non-toxic and the infections couldn’t cause illnesses.

To note, the bats in the cave, especially the horseshoe bats, are natural hosts of SARS and other viruses. They carry all kinds of SARS-related genes. As the virus constantly goes through exchanges of genetic information (recombination), it is hard to predict what would come out of there. To some extent, it can be called a Pandora’s Box.

If Shi’s team members were infected by the virus and brought it back to Wuhan, it might also explain why the bat virus RaTG13, brought back by Shi’s team members in a test tube, shares 96.2% sequence identity to the Wuhan virus, the closest strain reported so far.

To some extent, this could also explain why the Wuhan Institute of Virology has reported zero infection cases so far. The staff members could have already developed antibodies from previous exposures to non-pathogenic virus. It works like dairy workers’ contact with cowpox protected them from infection by smallpox.

But would antibody detection of the team members help identify how the disease was transmitted? It may not help much because when the virus are not active, the antibody level also drops; it increases only when encountering similar viruses.

(To be continued)

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/28/185258.html

 

[spilledthebeer]

Still blowing the stupid c*nts who gave us this virus and then lied about it for weeks eh? What China calls foreign aid, the rest of us call "blood money". It's about f*cking time the CCP stepped up and started taking some responsibility for their contemptible behaviour.

TRUE DAT! It is a fair statement Jinentonix makes about the Beijing Butchers!

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/GA6UnS2VbEE


A Holistic View:
Are We Able to Prevent Another Disaster Like the Coronavirus Pandemic?
— Part 4: Traditional Values

May 29, 2020 | By Tong Gen and Wuxian (Minghui.org)

(Continued from part 3)
Part 4: Rethinking Modern Science and Returning to Traditional Values

There are over 1,000 types of bats and China has nearly 100 types. As indicated in Part 3 of the series, Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute and her team traveled to 28 provinces in 7 years in their quest to find the origin of the 2003 SARS virus. The task was like finding a needle in a haystack, but they were fortunate to have found the bat virus that caused the SARS outbreak.

Little did they know that they had also opened the Pandora’s Box when they brought the virus samples back to Wuhan. In part 3, we proposed two possible transmission routes of the current coronavirus: one was through the lab animals infected with the bat virus brought back to Wuhan, and the other was through Shi’s team members who were infected with the bat virus. In either case, we believe that the bat virus that Shi and her team found in a bat cave in Yunnan Province seeded the current outbreak.

This unexpected outcome was opposite to what Shi set out to accomplish. Her team had hoped to learn more about the 2003 SARS virus so as to prevent future epidemics. But her well-intended scientific efforts were followed by the ongoing global pandemic.

In summary, science has yet to find answers to the many puzzles about the mysterious coronavirus, that has killed more than 300,000 people worldwide. It may be time to rethink science and reflect on why pandemics would happen in the first place.

Chapter 7: The CCP Poses An Unprecedented Challenge to Humanity

Our planet has nurtured numerous civilizations in history, including the 5,000 years of Chinese culture that spanned many dynasties. For example, as the Western culture had the great Roman Empire, China’s Han Dynasty was also well known for its literature, art, prosperity, and openness.

The prosperity in the Han Dynasty continued, from the Tang Dynasty (when the prototype of Journey to the West occurred) to the Ming Dynasty (when Zheng He’s voyage reached East Africa). Even during the Qing Dynasty (last dynasty in China), Emperor Kangxi and China were well known for prosperity and cultural exchange.

As depicted in shows presented by Shen Yun, a United States-based performing arts and entertainment company, ancient Chinese dynasties across thousands of years were keen to preserving China’s divine traditional culture, which emphasized the harmony between heaven, earth, and man.

Ancient Chinese, from emperors to their subjects, valued virtue and focused on spiritual enlightenment, which in turn helped create advanced science long before modern science came into existence. Below is one such story.

A Solar Eclipse

Suitang Jiahua (Stories in Sui and Tang Dynasties) documented a story of Li Chunfeng, a well-known sage in the Tang Dynasty. After Li calibrated the calendar system, he told Emperor Taizong of an upcoming solar eclipse.

The emperor did not believe him and asked, “Are you sure? What if there is no eclipse?” “If there is no eclipse, I would accept punishment and die,” Li replied.
When the day came, the emperor and Li waited in the yard for a long time, but the eclipse did not occur. “You can go home now and bid a farewell to your family,” the emperor joked.

“It will come in a moment,” Li pointed at the sundial, “the eclipse will happen when the shadow reaches here.” About fifteen minutes later, the solar eclipse occurred as he predicted. This was September 3 of 639 and Li was said to be the first to predict a solar eclipse.

Besides astronomy, Li was also a great mathematician (British sinologist Joseph Needham considered Li the greatest math annotator in Chinese history), historian, scholar of I-Ching (Classic of Changes), and prophet. His prophecy, Tui Bei Tu (Push Back Chart) was also one of the most known prophecies in Chinese history.

Culture Lost

The traditional Chinese culture has nearly vanished since the Chinese Communist Party took over China decades ago.
Similar to that in the former Soviet Union, the CCP’s core theory is class struggle, brutality, and lies. Historians found that the CCP has caused about 80 million unnatural deaths, including at least 45 million who starved to death in the Great Leap Forward movement in the late 1950s alone.

“With 800 million people, how can it work without struggle?” former CCP leader Mao Zedong once claimed, and also planned to conduct a Cultural Revolution “every seven or eight years.”

Such cruelty also extended overseas. “An excellent example of the Communist Party’s use of violence is its support of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Under the Khmer Rouge, a quarter of Cambodia’s population, including a majority of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, were murdered,” wrote Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (Nine Commentaries hereinafter). The book also noted, “China still blocks the international community from putting the Khmer Rouge on trial, so as to cover up the CCP’s notorious role in the genocide.

Needless to say, such brutality is accompanied by lies.

“Since a young age, we have thought of the U.S. as a lovable country. We believe this is partly due to the fact that the U.S. has never occupied China, nor has it launched any attacks on China. More fundamentally, the Chinese people hold good impressions of the U.S. based on the democratic, and open-minded character of its people.”

It is hard to believe that the above words came from the CCP’s official newspaper Xinhua Daily, given the long-time hostility that the CCP had towards the U.S. In fact, these words were from an editorial published on July 4, 1947, when the CCP needed help from the U.S. When the CCP sent troops to fight American soldiers three years later in Korea, however, it depicted the Americans as the evilest imperialists in the world.

Through constant brainwashing of its people especially during the political movements, the CCP instigated people to attack each other, and even family members were coerced to turn in each other. This quickly damaged moral standards in China, making lying, adulterated products, fake merchandise, and intellectual property theft a norm.

It was not until these past few months that the international community began to realize the harm of the CCP’s constant lying, and massive propaganda. In reality, the CCP’s tactics have been continuing for decades, and they have posed a serious threat to both China and the world, as the pandemic has shown us.

Truth Silenced

Unlike ancient scholars, who dared to speak their minds, modern intellectuals in China, have been targeted repeatedly for voicing their opinions.

One example was the suppression of intellectuals in 1957. The CCP first appeared humble, and urged the intellectuals to offer their opinions about the government. It then persecuted them as “rightists,” using their speeches as evidence of their “crimes.”

When some criticized the persecution as a conspiracy or “plot in the dark,” Mao claimed publicly, “That is not a plot in the dark, but a stratagem in the open,” accordingly to Nine Commentaries.

Unfortunately, this has become a standard tactic in the playbook of the CCP in its numerous political movements, from the Great Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Massacre, from the persecution of Falun Gong to the 2003 SARS, and the 2019 coronavirus. In almost all these cases, the CCP would punish those brave enough to voice different opinions, as a tool to intimidate the rest to reinforce its ruling.

Li Wenliang was a doctor from Wuhan Central Hospital. After learning about the coronavirus from colleagues on December 30, 2019, he posted the info on social media on the same day. But he was summoned by Wuhan Health Commission at 1:30 a.m. several hours later and criticized, followed by other types of punishment.

Li was a CCP member and he was easily silenced, just like other doctors. Later on he followed the Party’s order of taking minimal protection, and died of the disease.

But the real danger is beyond his death.

Were another outbreak to occur, would there be anyone who dares to challenge the totalitarian CCP, and speak out? For most people, it is quite unlikely, but there are a few exceptions, one of which is Falun Gong practitioners.

Persecution Based on Belief

Introduced to the public in 1992, Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is a meditation system, based on the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance. Together with five easy-to-learn exercises, it attracted about 100 million practitioners within several years.

Coming from all walks of life and of all ages, these practitioners have witnessed dramatic physical improvement. Many have also reported that they were glad to find the principles of Falun Gong consistent with the traditional Chinese culture, and a great guidance of moral improvement, just like what happened in the past thousands of years of Chinese history.

Despite the huge mind and body benefits Falun Gong has brought to practitioners, and their families, former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin began to suppress it in July 1999.

Through a nationwide Gestapo-like organization called 610 Office, a large number of practitioners have been detained, imprisoned, and tortured for their belief. Some of them have become victims of psychiatric abuse, and forced organ harvesting.

Taking Wuhan as an example: When Jiang first decided to suppress Falun Gong in 1999, he met with resistance from top communist leaders, including other members of the Politburo. Zhao Zhizhen, director of Wuhan Television Station, however, acted on Jiang’s order. Zhao dispatched a crew to Changchun in Jilin Province, the hometown of Mr. Li Hongzhi (founder of Falun Gong), and filmed a 6-hour video that defamed Falun Gong and its founder.
This video was played among top communist leaders, and later throughout all of China in the news media, including the state-owned China Central Television. Countless other videos were produced over the next 20 years to demonize Falun Gong and its practitioners.

In addition, Tongji Hospital in Wuhan was one of the earliest medical facilities involved in forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, a crime first reported in 2006, and corroborated by extensive evidence from third parties. Investigations revealed that at least 14 types of organs, and tissues were transplanted at Tongji Hospital. In February 2005 alone, more than 1,000 kidney transplants were carried out at this facility.

To some degree, the persecution of Falun Gong in China highlights the clash between the CCP and traditional values. It is unfortunate, but it also gives China and the rest of the world, a chance to reverse the moral decline brought by the CCP.

Our Moral Obligations

Before President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the international community had little collaboration with the CCP. Since Nixon’s trip, however, lots of activities have taken place. The U.S. and China established a diplomatic relationship in 1979, and China joined the WTO in 2001. Similarly, the investment from the U.S. and other Western countries to China also increased dramatically.

Many world leaders believed economic development would eventually lead to political openness and democracy. But as analyzed earlier, this turned out to be wishful thinking. Within one month after Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the U.S., he launched a war against Vietnam in February 1979.

Ten years later, Deng ordered the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Not only that, but he promoted Jiang Zemin as the successor due to the latter’s tough position on this issue. Jiang in turn began to suppress Falun Gong after another 10 years, in 1999.

In a new report released by Freedom House in March, “Freedom in the World 2020,” China was listed as “one of the 15 worst-performing countries” with only 10 out of 100 points for “global freedom.”

“China pressed ahead with one of the world’s most extreme programs of ethnic and religious persecution, and increasingly applied techniques that were first tested on minorities to the general population, and even to foreign countries,” according to the report. “The progression illustrated how violations of minority rights, erode the institutional and conventional barriers, that protect freedom for all individuals in a given society.”

Without continued support from the Western countries, the CCP would not have become as strong as it is today, and its global influence (such as influence on the WHO), would likely have been curbed.

A closer look at the countries where the coronavirus hit the hardest indicates that many of them have close financial ties with the CCP. For example, some of them supported the CCP’s entry to the WTO, some supported its expansion plan for Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while some compromised their principles in exchange for collaboration with Chinese companies such as Huawei.

We have now witnessed the price of working with the CCP. Distancing ourselves from the regime will help with our long-term safety.

Chapter 8: Reflection on Ancient Wisdom

According to traditional Chinese medicine, plagues such as the coronavirus pandemic are considered “vicious qi” (or “vicious energy”). Huangdi Neijing (The Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor), one of the most respected books on Chinese medicine, relates a conversation between the Yellow Emperor and Qi Bo, an ancient physician.

Emperor said: I heard that, when plagues come, people infect each other regardless of their ages. Their symptoms are similar, and it is difficult to treat them. Do you know how to prevent the infection?

Qi Bo said: When a person has righteous qi residing inside, no viciousness is able to invade.

In modern science, the relationship between mind and body is also widely recognized. Vyacheslav Gubanov, a Russian scientist and President of the International Institute of Social Ecology, believes all illnesses are closely associated with one’s mental state. Therefore, he believes the soul also needs to be cured when dealing with an illness.

Looking Within

Throughout Chinese history, from emperors to ordinary citizens, people tended to look within when disasters hit, and reflected on what they had done wrong, that might have invited plagues or other misfortune. They would then correct their mistakes, and improve themselves. Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty (206-9 AD), for example, issued a decree reflecting on his political mistakes, known as the “Repenting Edict of Luntai:”

“The most important task at the moment, is to prohibit officials at all levels from being harsh, or cruel to the people, and to prevent them from increasing taxes without authorization. By doing so, it will be possible to greatly enhance agricultural production.”

Several emperors in later dynasties issued similar edicts of repentance including Emperor Ming of the Han, Emperor Taizong of the Tang, Emperor Lizong of the Song, Emperor Xizong of the Ming, and Emperor Yongzheng of the Qing Dynasty.

Personal Improvement

Such a mentality also existed in ordinary people. Zhang Daoling, a renowned Taoist during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 BC–220 AD), had tens of thousands of disciples. Like other Taoists, he focused on character improvement and spiritual enlightenment. Besides teaching his disciples, Zhang also guided the public to strive for a higher moral standard and better conduct. One example was his unique way of dealing with plagues.

Zhang asked those infected to write down all the wrongdoings they had ever done in their entire lives. Then they were to place the paper in water, and vow to the divine not to do bad things again. They also had to promise that, were they to do wrong again, they would rather end their lives.

Many people followed this advice and recovered. More people heard about this, did as instructed, and were cured. As a result, Zhang and his disciples saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Lessons from the Ancient Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was one of the largest and longest-running empires in human history. With a population of about 65 million, it rivaled its counterpart in the East, the Han Dynasty of 60 million people. At its peak, the Roman Empire spanned about 5 million square kilometers (or 1.9 million square miles), close to the landmass of the Han Dynasty.

After Rome’s suppression of Christians, however, this powerful empire went downhill. Stricken by three major plagues, the Western Roman Empire ended in 476. The fourth disaster, the Plague of Justinian (541-542) killed another 25-50 million people, further weakening the empire.

The most notorious attack against Christians came from Emperor Nero between 64 and 65 AD. Nero, who became emperor at 54 AD, killed his mother, brother, and two wives. After labeling Christians a cult and a danger to society, Nero mobilized the Roman public to persecute them. As a result, many Christians were killed – torn apart by beasts, or burned alive as human torches.

Many people who followed Nero, and persecuted Christians soon faced the consequences. A plague broke out the following autumn in Rome, killing some 30,000 people. Three years later, a rebellion against Nero took place. He fled Rome in AD 68 and died, possibly by suicide.

By 680, people awakened and began to reflect on the cruelty against Christians, as well as the general moral decay of society. In 680, Roman citizens carried the bones of Saint Sebastian (256 – 288, killed during the persecution by Diocletian), and proceeded through the streets. As people repented of their wrongdoings, the plague miraculously vanished in Rome.

History Repeating Itself

In many ways, the suppression of Falun Gong by Jiang Zemin and his followers, is similar to the religious persecution by Nero, which included defamation, detention, torturing, and killing.

Compared to Nero, however, the CCP’s actions are much more comprehensive. From the central Politburo to the lowest level (villages in the countryside, and streets in urban areas), from schools to government agencies and private businesses, the CCP has mobilized nearly all resources to slander Falun Gong, and mistreat practitioners.

Together with the police, procuratorates, courts, detention centers, and prisons, the CCP has detained practitioners and tortured them severely. Inside brainwashing centers and mental hospitals, practitioners are also further humiliated and deprived of basic rights, such as sleeping or accessibility to the toilet.

Furthermore, with strong censorship (in collaboration with Western technological companies), and massive propaganda apparatus, the CCP has been defaming Falun Gong in the past 21 years. It has also exported such propaganda overseas through Confucius Institutes, and other pro-CCP associations (some of them disguised as NGOs).

As we have now seen, during the past several decades, through help from Western countries, companies, and technologies, the CCP has built a state-of-the-art massive system to police its citizens, manipulate opinions, and fabricate lies to deceive people, domestically and abroad.

Any hope that the CCP would change for the better is futile, as the CCP survives and thrives on violence, class struggle, and lies, and will need to constantly deceive people in order to maintain its power.

Epilogue

Liu Bowen, a sage and renowned prophet in the Ming Dynasty, once wrote in the Taibai Mountain Monument Inscription:

Heaven has eyes, earth has eyes, and everyone has a pair of eyes; Heaven is looking, earth is looking,[by nature] life is happy and worry-free.

In the above, he warned people that heaven and earth have eyes, and are aware of the good and evil people have committed.

In his prophecy, he also predicted a devastating pandemic that would cause huge damages to those who committed evil deeds, but would spare those who harbor kindness in their heart. He further predicted that Falun Gong would guide people to safety:

Pursue your defenses, your auric physique, But compassion in heart is the only safety. …

In an era when some are spreading the great gospels, it is not worthwhile to remain foolish and lose the future.

(The end)

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/29/185263.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/kbZ2IXHao5s


A Virologist’s Covid-19 Infection Highlights US Institutions That Collaborate With Chinese Regime

Commentary by Yang Ning
May 28, 2020

In a media interview from his hospital room, virologist Dr. Joseph Fair talked about how he may have become infected with the CCP virus through his eyes while on a plane flight. He described how it felt like a moderately severe flu for the first week. But then his condition got progressively worse and he had trouble breathing. He declined to be intubated, and responded well to oxygen and drug treatment, and has since been taken off the critical list.

Amid the pandemic, a pattern has emerged in which individuals, countries, and regions hit-hard by the CCP virus have close ties with the Communist Chinese regime.

Throughout Fair’s career, the institutions he’s been involved with have close ties with Beijing.

Fair holds a PhD in molecular biology and a Master of Public Health in tropical medicine from Tulane University. He earned a Bachelor of Science in biology and biological sciences from Loyola University, New Orleans. He is a scientist, business entrepreneur, and media consultant.

According to Fair’s LinkedIn résumé, between June 2015 and September 2017, Fair was a chief advisor for the research lab company MRIGlobal.

He was also a research professor and senior fellow at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University.

On June 3, 2013, when Fair was vice president of the U.S.-based nonprofit focused on preventing pandemics, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, he paid a one-day academic visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He was invited by Shi Zhengli, a researcher of the Wuhan institute. During the visit, Fair attended the “Ge Hong Elite Forum” and presented his report on “Biosafety Level 4 Containment Research and Recombinant Biology: How advances in molecular biology can advance in-vitro product design.” Many teachers and students of the Wuhan institute attended the seminar.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was modeled after the P4 Jean Mérieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon, France. China and France signed an agreement in 2004 to build the lab in Wuhan.

James Le Duc, the director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas, one of the largest active biocontainment facilities on a U.S. campus, was closely involved in training the Wuhan institute’s staff before it opened in January 2018.

Notably, Le Duc’s Galveston laboratory provided short-term training to staff from the Wuhan institute in 2013 and also hosted two postdoctoral scientists from the facility, who completed the almost year-long training needed to gain independent access to facilities rated at BSL-4—the highest level of bioresearch safety.

From May 17 to 19, 2017, the second China-U.S. Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety and Global Health Security was co-organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Hubei Society for Microbiology. Le Duc attended the workshop as a special guest.

Le Duc also defended the institute’s deputy director Shi Zhengli, whose work in researching viruses in bats made her a target amid ongoing inquiries into the source of the CCP virus.

U.S. officials have said there is evidence suggesting the virus had leaked from the Wuhan institute, but that the virus was naturally-occurring. Investigations are still ongoing as to the exact origins of the virus.

It is interesting to note that the U.S. Education Department’s Office of General Counsel sent a letter, dated April 24, 2020, to Chancellor James Milliken requesting records of gifts or contracts that the University of Texas received from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Department of Education has asked the Texas university system to provide records of its relationship with the Chinese lab that is being investigated by U.S. officials as a potential source of the pandemic.

According to the letter, the University of Texas Medical Branch operates the Galveston National Laboratory, which has contracts with the Wuhan institute, a maximum biocontainment laboratory.

Previously, in February 2017, MRIGlobal mobile labs provided a tour to staff at the Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biosafety Laboratory, a lab built by the Chinese regime.

Fair is a research professor at the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University. The Scowcroft Institute is housed in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A and M University. The Institute is named in honor of former Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. The Institute’s core mission is to foster and disseminate policy-oriented research on international affairs.

The Bush School has an open exchange agreement with the Institute for International Studies in Shanghai, which is managed by the Shanghai municipal government, China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, and Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu. These institutions are also directly under China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Institutions that collaborate with the Chinese regime only serve to empower its tyranny.

As indicated by The Epoch Times editorial, “Taking history as a mirror, as ancient Chinese scholars did, it is apparent that the coronavirus pandemic is a calamity linked with the CCP and its 70 years of brutal rule. And today, the world is an interconnected community. Any country, community, or organization that keeps too close to the CCP and falls for its deception will taste the bitter fruits of that involvement.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-vir...-collaborate-with-chinese-regime_3366986.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/tznV5IF7sIo


Chinese Media Peddles Unfounded Claim in Latest Campaign to Shift Blame for COVID-19 Pandemic

May 26, 2020 | By Li Zhengkuan (Minghui.org)

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the globe, resulting in more than 342,000 deaths as of May 23, 2020, an increasing number of people and governments are demanding accountability of and compensation from the Chinese government for its failure to report the initial outbreak in Wuhan in a timely manner. In response, the Chinese communist regime has been going all out to shift the blame, including spreading false narratives, that the virus originated in the U.S.

The mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, a town of 36,000, recently became the newest subject of the Chinese media frenzy.

In the report, “N.J. mayor makes unfounded claim that he had coronavirus in November” by NJ.com on April 30, 2020, Belleville Mayor Michael Melham said that he tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies and that he probably had contracted coronavirus four months earlier in November when he suffered fever, chills, and other flu-like symptoms.

The Chinese Communist Party controlled media seized on this report and publicized it on TV, newspapers, and cellphones as “evidence” that COVID-19 had started in the United States. Chinese media also reported that random tests in Massachusetts found that one-third of people have COVID-19 antibodies, implying the coronavirus had infected Americans earlier, but were treated as flu, etc.


Screenshots of the NJ.com article and Chinese article on Xinhua.net

The Chinese media’s report of Melham specified that Melham had “admitted” that he contracted coronavirus last November. But there was no clear medical evidence to support the claim. The NJ.com report stated that Melham called a doctor in November and was told that he likely had the flu. There was no detailed diagnosis or other medical records. But the Chinese state-run media took it as evidence, and claimed that the virus had started in the U.S., calling on the world to demand compensation from the U.S.

It is widely believed that the Chinese regime silenced whistle-blowing doctors, censored news about the outbreak, destroyed samples of the virus in laboratories, and refused to hand over samples to international scientists at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now distorting facts and trying to shift the blame. But the world is not deceived this time.

Inside China, there is an increasing public demand for accountability of the government’s cover-up as well. Yang Min, a woman from Wuhan, went to the Wuhan city government building and demanded punishment for those who had concealed the danger of the virus. The next day, she was locked inside her own residential area, and had lost contact with the outside world. Her story had drawn international attention.

Under international and domestic pressure, the CCP seized on the news of Mayor Melham in order to deflect the attention of the Chinese people. However, this incident precisely reflects its depraved and true nature.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/26/185223.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/QwHw55KngW0

The new normal

By Steve A. Stone
May 27, 2020

Dear Friends and Patriots,

Have you heard the many talking heads on TV telling us we have to get used to a “new normal?” It’s an interesting reference, don’t you think? So, what exactly is this “new normal” they’re talking about? You should know. Many of you have been my friends for years, and I know for certain every one of you is a patriot. You’ve all heard this “new normal” stuff before. You should already have ideas about what they’re talking about.

The “new normal” is the exact same thing President Obama referred to as “fundamental transformation,” only, to a great extent, it’s now been realized and we’ve been experiencing it. “New normal” is how certain progressives are characterizing their desire to retain many of the social constraints placed upon us recently. They want us to get used to following rule by edict instead of the rule of law. None of the changes in our lives over the past four months has been the result of any law. How could it be? Congress hasn’t done anything except pass a couple of funding bills that added almost $4T to our nation’s already huge debt. It’s the changes recommended by long-time government bureaucrats, the “guidelines” if you will, that have changed our behaviors, that and the impositions of our state governments. We now queue up at least 6 feet behind other people in lines, and then we look behind us to make sure the next person is at least 6 feet behind us. We only go out of our houses if we have to. We no longer shop at many of our favorite stores—they’re not open. We are just now being “allowed” to do things like go to church, go to the beach, eat inside a restaurant, gather in small groups, and attend some public events. The states are now allowing such things, but only if they’re done within the “re-opening guidelines” and we maintain the social distance and mask guidelines.

We’ve heard certain Democrats in national office urge their constituents to accept permanent changes. They speak of a great opportunity to become a different kind of nation once we’re “allowed” our liberty again. They argue for an entirely new social structure, a “new normal.”

Here are a few things the “new normal” movement wants to institutionalize: wearing masks whenever out in public; teleworking instead of going in to the office; staggered work and school schedules in attempts to minimize peoples’ exposure to each other; more and more disposable “safety” wear like masks and gloves; sports and music events playing to vastly reduced, socially-distanced crowds; social tracking to monitor our interactions with others; re-engineered factories that are set up to allow for social distancing; more expensive products as the costs of achieving the “new normal” affect company profits; more and more consumer goods ordered on-line and delivered to the customers’ homes instead of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores; on-line business meetings utilizing conferencing technologies that are adapted to any kind of computing device, including smart phones; health assessments before entering office buildings, schools, hospitals, and other places where large numbers of people congregate. There are many more aspects of the “new normal.” This sampling should give you the essential idea, though. Do you get a flavor of fear included in all of it? Yes, one aspect of the “new normal” is the institutionalization and general acceptance of irrational fear.

At this point, it’s useful to wonder if any nation on Earth would respond to the next epidemic or pandemic in the same way. Is the idea of shutting down an entire country to be considered part of the new normal, with the attendant inconveniences, destruction to economies, and constant fear-mongering? Gee, I certainly hope not.

Did you notice in the list of “new normal” items above how much technology is factored in? Yes, it’s true. The “new normal” being promoted would take more advantage of technology and purposely push people farther apart.

I know all this is distressing to you. It’s been distressing to me, too. Not that much has changed in my life. To an amazing degree, I didn’t change my routine. At work, I was deemed “essential” and continued to report in to my office every day. But, over 80% of my organization didn’t. They supposedly teleworked and stayed home. I’m sure some of them did work, too, but others couldn’t possibly do most aspects of their normal routines because the heart of their jobs wasn’t office-based. It made as much sense to put them in telework status as it might if your sanitation company told the people that collect your trash to stay home and phone it in. Things that we consider vital to do in normal times just aren’t being done—and our leadership says that’s okay. To a disturbing extent, my own organization is already adopting the “new normal.”

You all know I use certain methodologies in my writing. When I try to delve into a complex subject, I apply principles of critical thinking. I use the Socratic Method in my analysis and ask “Why?” as many times as necessary to arrive at conclusions that are logical and seem to be the best fit for the known circumstances and objective evidence. This COVID-19 episode has required a bit more than my normal routine. I’ve had to add considerations for motives. It appears to me there may have been crimes committed. In criminal law, prosecutors do not have to prove any motive, but they often do have to provide a logical sequence of events that best matches the material evidence. They have to bring forth witnesses, explain the evidence, articulate their theory of the crime, and convince the judge or jury of the guilt of the accused. But, they aren’t required to prove motive. Such things are necessarily unprovable, so prosecutors are allowed to openly speculate on motive. Judges and juries have to pay attention to actual evidence presented, but are free to make up their minds on whether or not any prosecutor’s theory of the crime – their speculations on sequences of events and motive – has any credibility. We’re all watching the COVID-19 saga and we’re all participating in it. It affects everyone to some greater or lesser degree. My compromises are relatively few, but I have made some. Others have been affected to their limit—they’ve acquired COVID-19 and succumbed to it. We’re all in this, but we should all be asking questions. After all, there are those calls for adopting a “new normal.” Shouldn’t we understand why? Shouldn’t we wonder what motivation is behind the calls for any “new normal?” What was so wrong with our “old normal?”

There are some questions we can’t answer with any degree of fidelity. We are all certain the virus first appeared in Wuhan, China. That seems to be well-accepted, though not definitively documented. China doesn’t unequivocally admit it did, and instead hints broadly that it may not be true. If not in Wuhan, then where? If not a Chinese-sourced infection, then who else did it, and where did it really come from? We’ll only hear learned speculations on the origination. The Chinese government has every reason to want to lie, and one thing the Chinese government has excelled at for the past 70 years is the creation and propagation of lies.

We don’t actually know if the virus is natural or not. There are quite a few virologists who assert it has traits that indicate it was at least modified in a lab somewhere. Somewhere? We can ask where, but we’ll never actually know. No one will ever admit to creating the COVID-19 virus. Why would they?

We don’t know why the World Health Organization hesitated for over a month in alerting the world that a new and deadly coronavirus was loose in the world. Yes, they did that. They knew at least by December that the virus was loose and already affecting Korea, Japan, and some places in Europe. They knew the virus was being spread by people who had been in Wuhan. But they didn’t say anything. Why not? It’s easy to speculate on the appearance of a pro-Chinese tilt to their actions, but was that really it? Were they urged to stay quiet by the Chinese leadership for a reasonable purpose? Did they remain quiet according to any arrangement with the Chinese to allow them time to take some kind of proactive measures? Or, were they individually rewarded for their silence? We’ll never know. No one will tell us.

We don’t know why certain governors in the U.S. decided it was better to concentrate COVID-19-positive patients in nursing homes. We can speculate those decisions in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and at least a couple of other states were the result of dumb recommendations from the senior health officials in those states, but was that the reason? Early on the Center for Disease Control put out that the severity of infections depended somewhat on what they termed “virus load.” They noted that health care workers, regardless of age or physical condition, had a greater risk because of continuous exposure to infected patients, increasing their own personal virus load. Orders to transfer people who had tested positive at hospitals back to the nursing home where they came from and, later, to send even more infected people to those same nursing home became death sentences for the elderly residents. In state after state, it was deaths in nursing homes that accounted for the majority of victims. Was that because of some evil plan? Was it ineptitude? Was it poor infection control by poorly supervised staffs? Was it due to just plain inadequate patient care? We may never actually know, but we do know that in almost any case concentrating COVID-19-infected people into one building that’s not equipped to isolate the sick from the healthy will almost certainly guarantee the spread of the virus and result in avoidable deaths.

We don’t know if this episode in world history is largely a natural event that just got out of control or if it was purposefully done. Even if the virus was lab-engineered, will we ever know if it was purposefully released and then kept quiet by China until it was well-established in several overseas nations? That’s a common speculation, but is there any reason to believe anyone will ever admit to it? Even beyond those questions, there are others that go deeper and ask if this entire event was facilitated for some greater purpose. Was this done as part of a demonstration of the effectiveness of a deadly virus when used as a weapon? Was it done with the specific intent to kill hundreds of thousands of older, less healthy people? Was it done to just to reduce population? Was it done to wreck the economies of the developed world to the advantage of one or more nations and perhaps one or more groups of very powerful people? We can speculate, can’t we? And we can be suspicious of any story we hear regarding who did what and for what overall objective.

We can speculate on the questions of who and why, but we will never get positive confirmation. But, do we need it? I say dwelling on questions you can’t get answered only wastes your time and energy. It’s counterproductive and not a good critical thinking practice. Once you’ve posed the question and realized the answer may never be forthcoming the right thing to do is put that question on the pile with other questions with no answers and move on. Concentrate your energies on finding questions that have answers, and also spend more time trying to understand the potential motives at play that led to this event unfolding the way it did.

I’ve been trying to unravel that motive question from the beginning of February. Why is this going on? Who is set up to gain from it all? Who is set up to lose? What are the objectives? Is timing a factor?

What’s unusual about this COVID-19 episode is how complex it is. When you speculate on motive you’re already saying you don’t think anything about the event is natural. You’re already saying you believe not only the virus, but its release was manufactured; that it was all a planned and staged event. Perhaps not all that well planned, and possibly not very well staged, but whenever you’re dealing with something as hard to manage as a disease vector, how good can that be – and how good does it need to be? It’s not far-fetched to believe the Chinese government purposefully allowed the virus to spread to western nations. It’s also not far-fetched to believe they did it to create chaos in the nations affected, and possibly even with the understanding that economies would falter and governments might even topple. It’s not even far-fetched to speculate the Chinese believed in the end the whole pandemic thing would be a great benefit to their international objectives and their economy.

There is another potential motive that has to be considered. China has been exercising a lot of influence in the world through its participation and funding of various United Nations initiatives and their Belt and Road initiatives. Indeed, the Belt and Road projects are a global effort to gain influence in the world; to put many nations in their debt. So far, over 70 nations have signed on as recipients of China’s magnanimous outreach efforts, including…Italy. Italy became a hot spot for COVID-19 thanks to the assistance from Wuhan-based Chinese workers. It is estimated there were as many as 13,000 Chinese nationals working on a Belt and Road project in Tuscany, where the outbreak in Italy began. Northern Italy is also the home of almost half of the nation’s 310,000 ethnic Chinese citizens, many of whom were traveling to and from China as tourists and visitors. Could it be that China used its Belt and Road projects as conduits to ensure the positive spread of the virus to where they wanted it to go? The main question of motive in this scenario deals with the potential of China as a power player in the globalist agenda to unite the entire world under one governmental body. China’s own internal objectives include having the dominant national economy on Earth by 2050 and becoming the undisputed most powerful nation on Earth shortly after. If a pandemic could wreak havoc with most of the developed nations’ economies, it’s likely that would aid and abet China’s interests and accelerate their timeline.

There is a third motive to consider. That motive is tied to the UN’s Agenda 2030. It’s hard to understand exactly how the Chinese see their nation’s role in accomplishing the objectives of the Agenda, but it’s clear they factor themselves in there somehow. They seem to like to use the UN for whatever purposes they can steer them to and there’s some likelihood they’ve determined a path to world domination that piggybacks on whatever success Agenda 2030 achieves. One thing is fairly certain—there are many in the world today trying to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic and use the resultant chaos and fear to promote policies more in line with pushing the needs of the Agenda than needs to deal with the effects of disease. A perfect example of that is the CARES Act, passed by Congress. It was larded with old progressive agenda items that also promote aspects of Agenda 2030. The version passed by the House had acceptance of The Green New Deal embedded in it. That was stripped out by the Senate, but in the spirit of “bi-partisanship” a lot of the progressives’ wish list items were allowed to remain. From a different perspective, it’s wise to consider the response to the pandemic appears to play to the peculiar desires of the de-population and de-growth movements, both of which are substantially supportive of the globalist goals of Agenda 2030.

I’ll close by stating my own beliefs in the simplest terms. I believe the virus is lab-altered, and the release was purposeful and planned months before it occurred. I believe the epidemic is only a single operational test in a long-series of biological weapons tests to document how such pathogens spread and to determine the effectiveness of new methods used to tailor a virus to infect specific parts of target populations while largely sparing the rest. I believe creating chaos in western economies, and especially the U.S. economy was a major objective. I believe this whole episode is China’s way of expressing their outrage at President Trump’s trade policies and those of other nations who have followed the U.S. lead. I believe the Chinese were acting in partnership with globalist operatives whose interests are predominately to accelerate the rate of progress in achieving Agenda 2030 goals. I believe the progressive Democratic-socialists in Congress and in certain states have purposefully made the situation in our country much worse than it otherwise would have been. To believe otherwise is to believe they’re all just incredibly stupid ideologues. I also believe President Trump might have managed the pandemic response far differently if the political climate had allowed him to. But, he understood he was in a “no-win” box and managed things as well as any human could in similar circumstances. I believe this entire episode in history has backfired on those who cooked it up, including the globalists and especially the Chinese. I also believe we will be a very long time assessing the magnitude of damage done to our nation and other western nations, beyond the many tens of thousands of our citizens who have been lost.

One last thought. To accept any state of “new normal” is to accept diminished liberty. All the compromises our society made to assist in coping with the virus were detrimental to some aspect of our individual and collective liberties. This nation was founded upon principles that were intended to guarantee those very liberties for all eternity. Whenever you hear anyone speak of a “new normal,” rest assured they’re talking about taking something away from you, me, and that fellow behind the tree. That’s the way it works.

In Liberty,

Steve A. Stone

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sstone/200527

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/tPJkjzxhxmQ

Bannon: We Will Be in a Kinetic War with China
If We Don’t Win the Information and Economic War

By Fiona Yang May 29, 2020

Beijing is poised to pass a national security law for Hong Kong that could drastically undermine civil liberties in the semi-autonomous city.

In this interview with Zooming In’s Simone Gao, Steve Bannon called the Chinese leader Xi Jinping a criminal. He believes the United States will be in a kinetic war with China if it doesn’t win the information and economic war now. He also believes the trade deal with China is finished and there are forces in Washington DC pushing the United States to establish formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

Simone Gao: Thank you, Mr. Bannon, for being with us today.

Steve Bannon: Thanks, Simone, for having me.

Ms. Gao: As we speak, Beijing has reached a decision to implement national security law for Hong Kong despite the protest on Hong Kong street and international pressure. Beijing is very bold and very determined this time compared to 2003 when they tried to push the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23, and also last year, the extradition law. Both times are targeting dissidents in Hong Kong, but this time is different. They didn’t even try to pass the law in Hong Kong. They did it themselves. So what is on Xi Jinping’s mind, and why are they so determined and so bold this time?

Mr. Bannon: I think it’s very simple why he’s so bold this time. He’s a criminal, he thinks like a criminal, and he’s gotten caught. The whole world now realizes through the great reporting at Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty TV, and others, we think war room pandemic’s been part of that, that they’ve been exposed that regardless of whether it came out of a lab or not, which overall I think it’s pretty convincing it did, regardless of whether it’s part of their bioweapons program, which a lot of people think it is, that there’s an exact chain of title. For one, they understood there was human transmission and communities spread back to late December of 2019. And so Xi understands the game’s up. He understands the internet national community is going to close in on them, I think in a relatively short period of time, but what their culpability is, he understand that they’re going to be found guilty of tens of trillions of dollars of damages throughout the world, and also, obviously, hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths, and that’s with the Chinese people and the rest of the world. And so I think he’s just saying, “Hey, what we’re going to do is start to roll up various territories that we’ve been thinking about for a while,” and that’s why I think he just even gone away from the the facade of having any type of rule of law, if it’s going to foreclose on Hong Kong and take it over, and just take the treaty everybody signed [and] agreed to in 1992 and did the transition in 1997, and just tear it up.

Ms. Gao: The assessment of Hong Kong’s economic and political status according to the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act is almost due. I think it’s due by the end of this month. Do you think America will revoke Hong Kong special status if this law is going to pass, and what else is America going to do?

Mr. Bannon: I think America is going to … Revoke the underlying trade agreement, the underlying ability to have this free trading zone with Hong Kong in the United States. We’re actually going to [toughen their sanctions]. I believe they’re going to be sanctions on China. I think there may be even sanctions on individuals. I think even [making a Magnitsky Act] and things like that, and maybe even stopping the flow of dollars. I think … The United States may start to actually focus on the Hong Kong dollars as a currency for exchange with the Chinese communist, allowing them to get dollars. I think United States is going to do a lot and I think the West is going to join them. I don’t think that CCP cares. I think Beijing’s made a decision that no matter what the economic consequences, the showing freedom and democracy in Hong Kong is more of a problem to them right now than the financial losses they will take. There’ll be substantial financial hit to the CCP and the Beijing, and I don’t think they care. I think they feel that with everything that’s going on inside of China how bad they handled the coronavirus, how bad they’ve handled the CCP virus, the deaths, the economic destruction—I think they don’t care. I think they feel they have to shut down democracy and freedom anywhere Chinese people have it. Otherwise, that could spread to the mainland. So I think they’re going to take a big financial hit, and I think they’re telling the world, “We don’t care. We don’t care if you think we’re outlaws, we don’t care if you think we don’t live with our treaties, we don’t care if you think we need you financial-economically—we don’t care. We want control of not just Hong Kong, we want control fo those Chinese people.”

Ms. Gao: They can say they don’t care but do they actually? If Hong Kong is gone, how big of a financial impact will be on the CCP?

Mr. Bannon: It’s a huge impact and they don’t care—that the world has to start to understand. We have to hit them. They’re engaged in a hot economic war with the West. We have to engage in a hot economic war, and I keep telling people, this is like 1938 with the Nazis in Czechoslovakia when you didn’t cap it. We have to stand firm. If we don’t stand firm, they’re going to be terrible consequences. But I think the world’s got to understand something: I believe we will hit back hard, economically and financially. The Chinese Communist Party, I think, maybe it would be beyond that right now, … I think they’re telling the world, “We don’t care if you think we’re lawless; we don’t care if you think we’re barbarians; we don’t care if you think we’re dictators. It doesn’t matter. What matters is our control of the apparatus and we’re going to take control.”

Ms. Gao: Very alarming. Are you aware of a newspaper called, “Xing Dao”?

Mr. Bannon: Yes.

Ms. Gao: It’s one of the biggest newspaper. It’s originated in Hong Kong but it has a big presence in the United States. The chairman of Sing Dao News Corporation in Hong Kong, his name is Charles Ho (Ho Tsu Kwok). He recently published an op-ed on his own newspaper commenting on the national security law that Beijing is going to introduce. The title of the article is, “The Law is Totally Legitimate.” It has big capital letters on the newspaper. This newspaper is one of the largest Chinese newspapers distributed in America. I know the Trump administration is identifying foreign agents acting like a media in America, but these more traditional media organizations who have deep ties with the CCP and are toeing the CCP lies, they are left out and there are a lot of them. America has freedom of speech. How do you balance this and guarantee the Chinese Americans in this American soil get truthful information?

Mr. Bannon: Yeah, I think we have freedom of speech and remember, it’s the first amendment. It’s the first amendment because it was so important. However, we’re not in a situation that allows pure propaganda from state institutions. This individual you talked about that, that piece that was in the Hong Kong page, he’s a running dog of the CCP. Everything in that piece was a lie. … We’ve already done it with the state controlled apparatuses, which I think that Secretary of State Pompeo should be acknowledged for taking a very bold and courageous move. I believe there needs to be full investigation immediately of all these different Chinese media outlets that particularly print in Chinese. They’re trying to influence Chinese Americans and expatriate trainees that are here in the United States. I think there needs to be a total review, and if they have any ties whatsoever—financial ties, business ties, political ties, the CCP—they have to have the same type of ban and the same type of designation as the official state media, so people know that you’re hearing pure propaganda. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a Hawk.

Ms. Gao: I happened to notice that just a few moments ago. About the same time when they first let out the news that they were considering implementing the national security law for Hong Kong, the CCP also had some aggressive statements about Taiwan—”Forceful unification with Taiwan,” and stuff like that. And now they went ahead with the law for Hong Kong. Does that mean their threat to Taiwan will be just lip servicing or does that mean they are determined to take Taiwan as well?

Mr. Bannon: They’re more determined than ever and here’s one of the reasons: Taiwan, the free Chinese and the free Republic of Taiwan—free Republic of China on Taiwan—have basically put to shame the CCP, in particularly Xi’s leadership and Wang Qishan in Beijing, that Beijing has lost huge face, lost huge face to the great patriots in Taiwan. Remember it was Taiwan CDC that notified the World Health Organization on the December 31, 2019, that there was a SARS outbreak that they believed had human-to-human transmission and community spread already—on December 31, to the World Health Organization. University of Southampton in England has said: If the World Health Organization and the CCP had acted when Taiwan, little Taiwan, notified them, then 95 percent of the deaths, 95 percent of the economic destruction, in Hubei and Wuhan, also the rest of the world, would have been avoided.

Taiwan has put Beijing to shame. And let’s be very specific: In this entire coronavirus, this entire CCP virus process, Taiwan has 440 cases of COVID-19 and only, I think, seven or eight deaths, and this is because of the unity, the brilliance, the bravery, the technological sophistication of the free Chinese people that are on Taiwan. The free Republic of China on Taiwan has shown you that the Chinese are ready for democracy, and it shows you how powerful [an entity could be] and quite frankly, what a contributor—what a contributor to the world; what a contributor to mankind. This is what the CCP can’t: They cannot allow the democracy of the young kids in Hong Kong, they can’t allow the freedom to fight for freedom, they can’t allow the success of capitalism, they cannot allow the success of universities in Hong Kong, and they cannot allow the success of Taiwan. That proves the lies of the CCP. That’s why they have to shut this down and you’re seeing a brutal takeover after an entire year of failing to crush the spirit of the Chinese young people in Hong Kong—the Hong Kong Chinese. They now just got to tear up the rule of law and just move on. Remember Jimmy Lai said on 60 Minutes here in the United States, he cried and broke down, and said: His generation of Hong Kong Chinese had failed to stand up to the CCP and that’s why it was left to the young people in the streets. Well, the CCP the communist party in Beijing understands they’ll never break the spirit of the Hong Kong kids, and that’s why they’ve, just in front of the world, tear up the treaty and just take it off.
Same thing in Taiwan. Taiwan has humiliated the Chinese Communist Party. They’ve humiliated Xi in front of the entire world, they have shown his incompetence, they’ve shown his lies, they’ve shown his coverup, they’ve shown that this is his biological Chernobyl, they show that the regime is completely incompetent, and they’ve done it with world class, private technology; world-class medicine. But the basis of it is freedom and democracy, and so that’s why they’re going to go hard at Taiwan. There’s no doubt about it. Taiwan every day proves, and even more so in this pandemic of how incompetent and corrupt, and pure evil, comes out of Beijing.

Ms. Gao: Then would you say America is more determined than ever to protect Taiwan at this moment?

Mr. Bannon:Well, I think there’s certainly a part of America that’s more focused on this than ever. The people in Taiwan say, “You really have many power players now in the administration and on Capitol Hill,” and the American people are now awakening to the fact of what the threat is of the Chinese Communist Party, and how the Chinese Communist Party’s biggest victims are the people in China, and now the people in Hong Kong, and hopefully not the people in Taiwan. … Their evilness, and incompetence, and corruption, everyday becomes a topic of conversation. America, remember: The polling of the Pew Research Center and Harvard-Harris, some of the top [polls] in the world, are showing a dramatic sea change in the American people’s attitudes to the Chinese Communist Party, and this pandemic has done that, and the response to this pandemic out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Taiwan has humiliated the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party cannot stand for that.

Ms. Gao: Have you read President Tsai Ing-wen’s inauguration speech?

Mr. Bannon:I did. She’s very much a practitioner—”let’s get things done.” She’s a doer; not a talker. She doesn’t have a lot of high flown rhetoric. She’s not a hot talker like I am. She’s very calm and very measured. I think her core message was very even handed and looking for unity. But I thought it was quite powerful. I thought it was quite powerful particularly the way she does not have any back down to her—she’s not going to back down; she’s not going to kowtow to the CCP. Her election victory I thought was magnificent in particular the way she’d beat Terry Gou, who I think Terry Gou’s essentially a running dog of the CCP. And the way she defeated [him]—he was so easily defeated. … The people in Taiwan really stood up and I think it made the world take notice. I thought her inaugural address was very even handed but quite powerful.

Ms. Gao: And she said, “We’re never going to accept ‘One country, two systems.’” I think that’s a very powerful line in that speech.

Mr. Bannon: That’s a very powerful [one]. She wasn’t in their face about, “We want independence, and we want independence now,” but … She took the example of Hong Kong and said what she’s not going to have. Because of her actions and how she accomplishes things, and remember she won her second term—but this entire pandemic really happened in the transition period—and the way that the Taiwanese government responded, to me, is a model for the world including the United States. I think the entire world has something to learn from Taiwan and how they’ve handled this, and I believe then Taiwan got to be brought into the family of nations. Taiwan should be able to participate in every conference. … And I’ve advocated in the United States, we should not give a penny to the World Health Organization. We should not give a penny to any organization that does not allow Taiwan to have full representation. And if anybody wants to say, “Well, why,” just say, “Look at the pandemic—the pandemic that brought the world to its knees. The Taiwanese stood up and they were the solutions provider. 440 people have the disease; only 7 or 8 deaths. And they gave the early warning shot to outside country. They gave the early warning shot in 2019. If the world had listened to the Taiwanese, there would’ve been virtually no deaths, there would’ve been no agony, there would’ve been no economic destruction. That’s what the world owes the Taiwanese.”

Ms. Gao: Some people in the Trump administration is talking about building this Economic Prosperity Network, EPN, to include countries like New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, [and] India. Do you think Taiwan should be included as well?

Mr. Bannon: It’s not even a question. Taiwan is [prosperous] and smart, in areas like biotechnology and microchip design. They’re best in class. You’re talking about a country of 23-24 million people—something like that—that is a world leader, a virtual world leader in certain industries. Look how they’ve handled the pandemic. They’re a world leader in public health. They’re a world leader in understanding complex problems and complicated situations. Absolutely to me, it would be ridiculous to have this new economic partnership, this economic union, this kind of alliance economically and not have Taiwan in there. And I don’t care what Beijing thinks about it. If Beijing doesn’t like it, that’s Beijing’s problem. Tough luck for them. They’ve proven their incompetence in their evil. They’ve got to worry about their problems. They shouldn’t try to interfere with the internal dynamics of either Hong Kong and certainly not Taiwan, and particularly they don’t get to choose who the United States does business with. And I think this would be a very powerful message.

Ms. Gao: A Taiwan prominent semiconductor manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, I think the Chinese name is “Taijidian”, recently made the announcement that it intends to build an advanced semiconductor factory in Arizona. What do you make of that?

Mr. Bannon: I think it’s great. I think you’ll see a lot more there. I think you’ll see a lot more cross border investments—American investment in Taiwanese company. … Particularly, very important for us to bring manufacturing back from mainland China as long as it’s under the reign [of] the dictatorship of the CCP. After the CCP goes away, that’s a different story. But I think you’re going to see that was a very big announcement. It’s very important and I believe we’re going to see a lot more of them.

Ms. Gao: Now the ultimate question on Taiwan: Do you think the United States will establish a formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan anytime soon?

Mr. Bannon: I believe you’re seeing a big push from myself and many others, and you have strong voices on Capitol Hill: the Marco Rubio’s; the Josh Hawley’s; the Tom Cotton’s. You’ve got Mike Pompeo—the CCP went crazy when he sent the greetings to President Tsai’s terrific speech to her inauguration. So I think you have many, many, many people in the United States now, both Democrats and Republicans, and people not even involved with politics that much, they’re saying, “Now it’s time. We should recognize Taiwan,” and this should be a big push for us. The CCP should not have a vote on who is recognized and who’s not, and particularly after the heroism of the Taiwanese in this pandemic. Remember: If the world had listened to Taiwan and not listen to the lies of Beijing, there were only five percent at most of the deaths that were to happen in the economic carnage.
This entire economic carnage is because the CCP lie. They lied about human-to-human transmission. They misled the incompetent World Health Organization who put out on January 12 and 14 that after consultation with senior members of the Chinese health ministry, there was no human-to-human transmission and no community spread—that was a lie. While the Taiwanese were finding out exactly what was going on in Wuhan, exactly what was going on in Hubei province in December 2019, the CCP was lying to the world until lunar new year actually came along and they couldn’t hide it anymore. Remember: People listening to this broadcast [have to] understand, if lunar new year hadn’t happened, if it had been in the summer or some other time, the CCP would have lied for months until this thing exploded into Wuhan. They will lie for months and many, many more people would have been killed. They don’t care. They don’t care about human beings; they don’t care about the Chinese people; they don’t care about any parts of the civilization. They are true criminals and barbarians, and they must be dealt with. And one of the ways you deal with them is to support the free Chinese on Taiwan.

Ms. Gao: I think in your interview with The Wire you talked about during … The end of December, … In domestic news, President Trump was impeached and the media focus was entirely on the impending Senate decision, and also the US-China trade war and stuff. And that’s when the news of this new virus [from]Wuhan arrived in CDC, Atlanta. It took the Chinese government more than 20 days to reveal that this is a human-to-human transmission. Besides what you talked about, the habitual lies by the CCP, … Is there any other particular reason for the CCP to hold off this information to the world?

Mr. Bannon: They wanted to make sure on, first off, they knew it came from the lab. I think this global times a day rules up the wet market. They knew immediately came from the lab. Remember they had to cover their tracks and on, I think January 2nd or third, they went in and cleaned out the they sanitize the wet market. They had to build their alibi. Folks have to remember it was not for lunar new year. And the greatest human migration takes place every year. The fiber may have people in China that go back to their ancestral homes. They would have suppressed this information until that absolute moment when muon exploded. So this just shows their guilt. This shows how evil they are. This shows that they don’t care about people. So, no, I think what they were doing was trying to figure out how they were going to spend this.
Also, remember they shut down when they had to. They shut down domestic travel, but they let international travel go. They didn’t care. They wanted to use innocent Chinese people who had no earthly idea. They had the virus to basically exacerbate the problem worldwide as they’ve been sucked up. All the PPE, the personal protective equipment from Europe, the United States, Brazil and Australia. This shows you, it’s premeditated. I’ve said before that what they did with PPE and what they did with the Lang, the virus to spread is premeditated. Merck, the hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths that we have from this. Ultimately, and remember, it’s not just deaths or many people that get this disease, they get better. Their lungs are destroyed. They’ll never feel the same again. I mean, this is a horrible, horrible virus. We still know very little about it. That’s all at the doorstep of the CCP.

Ms. Gao: Hmm. Do you think? There’s also the reason that they want, they don’t want this news to, to impact, to affect the us China trade deal.

Mr. Bannon: I think the trade deal is over, first off, they’re not living up to any of the commitments to it. I don’t even know if they financially can live up to the commitments to what’s happening in Taiwan, what’s happening in Hong Kong with the certification of the Hong Kong Freedom Act. I don’t think anybody on the Hill would want President Trump to go through with the trade deal. I don’t think we can trust, if they look all the years it took to negotiate Hong Kong, all the commitments to “one country, two systems” for 50 years and they’ve been encroaching on that from day one. But now they’ve just taken the mask off and they’ve ripped it up and they don’t care. How can you possibly have a trade deal? You can’t deal with these guys with intellectual property. It’s impossible. They’re not to be trusted. They’re a criminal organization.
They think like criminals. Criminals will tell you anything, but they just want to kind of get advantage and get leverage over you. This is a criminal regime. The Chinese people understand that. They see how they were treated in Wuhan. They see they treated in a group way province, right? So they know all the religious and spiritual groups know how they’re treated. Now the whole world, you see for the criminality, how brazen it is. And this is brazen. So having even negotiate a trade deal, which you know, and they’re married even living up to their convinced on the trade deal. Anyway, so it’s, I think president Trump has tried to go out of his way to work with the CCP to try to integrate them into the world system. But they walked away from this big trade deal in the spring of 19 they walked away from the Bob Lighthizer deal, which would integrated them into the world economic system.

They started seeing decouple from the West as far as technology goes. Taiwan included. They were going to have their own tech standards build their own ships have Made in China 2025, they’re going their own way to control the Eurasian landmass, of Hong Kong and Taiwan being part of that. This is a plan outlined and unrestricted warfare and they’re moving down that plan. They may take a few years, but they’re heading down. That’s what they have to be. They have to be confronted. We have to confront them. We have to bond together and confront the CCP today. If not, it’ll be just like Munich in 1938 of that I’m as sure as the turning of the earth.

Ms. Gao: Hmm. Interesting. Talking about the geopolitical ambition you said that there are a group of players in Europe and Asia including Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, and of course China. They’re trying to rely on China’s economic and political power and the 5G technology to establish a, a separate sphere of influence from the West. And at center of that plan is the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025. So do you think that plan is severely disrupted now because all the things happened?

Mr. Bannon: I think it can’t be disrupted. I think people are seeing, and by the way, I would add Iran, they’re partners in Iran and also in Turkey. I would add those countries. They’re trying to kind of consolidate other Eurasian landmass against South Korea and Japan, India, Australia, the Western European countries, and in the United States and Israel. I think that they look at that Eurasian landmass as their first hegemonic victory and that’s where they’ve got One Belt, One Road, Made in China 2025, and also the rollout of Huawei, which gives them the backbone of quantum computing. I think in their model, they’re pretty far down there. Remember, 2025 is only a couple of years. I believe that the Trump administration and the awakening in the West, particularly by people like Prime Minister Abe, Prime Minister Morrison in Australia, many of the countries in Vietnam and Singapore, you’re seeing an awakening to what the situation is.

The young people in Hong Kong, I think, lead the way. I think you’re seeing an awakening in Europe. I think you’ve seen a major awakening in the United States, a major awakening in Brazil. These countries that have gone along with what the CCP was doing as far as being part of the world economy. They see that the CCP doesn’t really want to be in the world economy we have today, that [the CCP] wants to dominate a new world economy that’s really run by their dictatorship. And that’s just not going to be acceptable to people that understand democracy and freedom. They see what’s happening to Hong Kong. They tore up the treaty. They don’t care. They don’t care. They’re gonna have to name for economic losses. They’re gonna put their hand on the throat of the Hong Kong Chinese, like they want to put your hand on the Taiwanese.

But the mask has been ripped off. I think that’s one of the providential blessings, if there are any at all in this pandemic besides the fact that I think people appreciate and have gratitude for the small things in life and for family that maybe we got too busy and too preoccupied to see before. But that since we’ve been sheltering, essentially we’ve been having to be away from activities, we now start to appreciate what we had. The one thing I believe we’re appreciating more and more is freedom and liberty. And we understand how they really underpinned everything. And I think we’re seeing how when the Chinese people have freedom and liberty, how much they blossom and how much they add to the world. All you have to do is look at Hong Kong and look at Taiwan during this covert situation and see how they supported themselves and how they acted and how they added to the world.
That’s all you need to do to see what the Chinese people like when they’re given freedom and when they’re given liberty. And that’s really the fight that this is about. This whole thing boils down to the freedom of the Chinese people. The Chinese people are in a great struggle for freedom against a totalitarian dictatorship. And it is going to be very simple. Are the democratic industrial West from India to Japan to Singapore, to Korea, to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Western Europe, are we going to sit by and allow another dictatorship like there was in Nazi Germany, like there was in Russia after world war II? Are we going to have another one just to sit there and roll up people’s freedoms? Or are we going to learn the lessons of history and finish off the 20th century? Taking down the CCP is the unfinished work of the 20th century and it’s another dictatorship that’s got to be kicked into the desperate of history and I think it’s incumbent upon all the men and women to come together, support the patriots in the streets of Hong Kong, support the great heroes of Taiwan. That could have saved the entire world from the pandemic. It’s now time for the world to have their back.

Ms. Gao: Hmm. You said last week we’re going to confront China now in the information war and economic war and that we are going to slide into a kinetic war. So can you explain that? Are you making an analogy to what happened before the World War II? Like what happened to Germany?

Mr. Bannon: I’m making a direct analogy. This is 1938. If we don’t confront them, we’re the fool. As you know, from , there’s three types of warfare. There’s information and cyber, there’s economic, and there’s kinetic, which is actually the traditional military experience. They are in a hot war. People are talking about a cold war. It’s not a cold war. It’s a hot war on information and cyber, more cyber intrusion. They even tried to break into the companies that make the vaccine. They’re fully engaged in a hot economic war. You see what they’re doing in Australia, punch them right in the mouth, right? And if we don’t confront this regime, this dictatorship right now, it’s going to be like 1938 we’re going to inexorably slide into a kinetic war in the South China Sea because they will try to… They’ve already militarized it. They’re going to try to control the South China Sea and cut off any access to Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. And they’re going to try to force the West at a time and place of their choosing. That’s what we’ve got to confront them. We’ve got to stop the Chinese Communist Party today.

Ms. Gao: If you were to advise president Tsai Ing-wen right now, obviously there are many policy priorities Taiwan is focused on. For example, [Taiwan] is trying to take advantage of the migration of the supply chain. But if you were to advise her right now, what would you say should be the policy priority of her administration?

Mr. Bannon: Their policy priority has always come from her strong stance. She’s a woman of few words and not high blown rhetoric, but she’s a woman of action and particularly those types of actions you have to take every day in order to make something a success. I would tell her right now that this is Taiwan’s moment in the sun. This is your time to come on the world stage and really say, if they had listened to us, this pandemic would have never happened. That we are a free Chinese people and this shows you that we can be true for the world. We’re a beacon for freedom and democracy throughout the world. Our time has come. And what I would tell her to do is continue to just head down the path you’re doing to continue to be the leader in biotechnology and chip design. These other industries are doing, reach out and have more companies, partner with companies in the United States and other places throughout the world. This is your moment. You’re on the main stage now. You’ve performed amazingly. You could’ve saved the world from so much happening. You have been such a net benefit to human health, prosperity and peace. I think [Taiwan] is an example for the world. So I will tell Taiwan, keep being the example by your actions. Your actions are speaking louder than any words.

https://www.ntd.com/bannon-we-will-...-the-information-and-economic-war_470692.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/bxPI_o2hUlg

From John Leighton Stuart to Mike Pompeo, the Chinese Communist Party Attacks Whoever Reveals Its True Colors

June 2, 2020 | By Shu Zhuo, (Minghui.org)

In early May, Chinese state media attacked U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, calling his remarks on the origin of the coronavirus “insane and evasive.”

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), devoted entire editorials vituperating Pompeo for his criticism of Beijing. China’s state broadcaster CCTV called Pompeo a “public enemy” in one of its commentary segments. The Xinhua state news agency denounced him as “one of the worst secretaries of state in American history.”

Pompeo was not the first American politician to be publicly condemned by the CCP. John Leighton Stuart served as the ambassador to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government of China in 1946. When the Communist Party seized power in 1949, Mao Zedong published a monograph on the front page of the People’s Daily titled “Farewell, Leighton Stuart,” in which he called Stuart an aggressor of the U.S. imperialists and the enemy of China.

But the truth was just the opposite.

Stuart: “Communism is a System of Demons”

John Leighton Stuart was born in 1876 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in China. His parents were missionaries. Stuart returned to the U.S. at age 11 to complete his education. He attended New York Concord Theological Seminary and returned to China in 1904 as a missionary. He lived in China for 50 years. He once said there was more Chinese substance than American elements in his blood.

Stuart taught at Yuying College and Zhejiang School. He founded the famous Yanjing University and served as its first president. He was fluent in Chinese and had a deep understanding of Chinese culture. He said in his memoirs, “The core of Chinese traditional literature points out the harmony between human beings and the cosmic moral order. In addition to deepening my respect for Chinese culture, reading in the long term also cultivates my character and makes my belief in God more solid.”

Due to his Christian background, Stuart had a clearer understanding of communism better than most people of his time. “Communism is a system of demons that denies the existence of God and denies that people have souls. They declare that everything is material, and all actions are materialistic. They force all human beings to accept them and use force and deception to achieve their goals. Communism is to devour everything to achieve its own survival. Its desire is never satisfied. Neither kindness nor warmth can change its attitude. For this demon disturbs the world, we must do our best to stop it,” he wrote.

He warned that American policy toward China should be based on the U.S.’ founding principles and should not be influenced by hypocritical promises and economic interests. For that reason, he was labeled by the CCP as an enemy of Chinese people.

The CCP Incites Hatred to Achieve Its Goals

For the CCP, the purpose of chastising someone is not so much about criticizing the accused’s position or opinion, but to provoke anger and incite hatred. It is not to make people understand the mistakes or absurdities of the accused, but to make people obey the Communist Party. To show loyalty to the CCP, one must follow its lead and lash out at whoever it targets.

Historically, the CCP smeared intellectuals, landowners, foreigners, religious leaders, and others. Chinese people were forced to condemn those who were labeled enemies of the Communist Party.

For example, during the persecution of Falun Gong, police officers forced practitioners to curse Falun Gong and its founder. Those who refused were imprisoned. The authorities can arbitrarily extend their prison terms if they refuse to curse at and renounce Falun Gong. In brainwashing centers, practitioners are forced to use profanity to show that they had met the requirements of renouncing Falun Gong.

Recognizing the True Colors of the CCP

In its attacks against Pompeo in early May, CCTV accused him of four crimes and of falling below the baseline of humanity. He was labeled the “common enemy of mankind.”

According to a report by RFI, “Pompeo might have been the first U.S. Secretary of State to be attacked in the ‘Cultural Revolution Style’ since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.” Some analysts believe that this is because Pompeo took a hard line against China and did not hesitate to expose Beijing for hiding the truth about the coronavirus.

In an interview with Fox News on April 29, Pompeo said, “The Chinese Communist Party now has a responsibility to tell the world how this pandemic got out of China and all across the world, causing such global economic devastation.” He accused the CCP of using “classic misinformation” to cover up the truth.

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week” on May 3, Pompeo said, “We’ve seen the fact that they kicked the journalists out,” referring to orders that American correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal leave China. “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, the way Communist parties operate.”

Can the CCP Evade Responsibility?

In the 70 years after Mao Zedong wrote “Farewell, Leighton Stuart,” over 80 million Chinese people have died unnatural deaths under communist rule. The CCP has never admitted its own wrongdoings. Instead, it has always insisted on its “greatness” against its assumed enemies.

When most of China was still under lockdown due to the pandemic, the CCP published a book titled The Great War on the Pandemic in February 2020. The two-million-word book praises the CCP and its leader for the strategic vision and excellent leadership in the fight against the pandemic.

With growing calls for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, Xinhua published a short animation titled “Once Upon a Virus” mocking the U.S. response to the pandemic.

The Chinese government is also taking an increasingly harsh stance toward any criticism from other countries by adopting “wolf-warrior diplomacy.” A recent article by Voice of America stated, “While many countries in the world intend to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and seek compensation for concealing the truth about the spread of the coronavirus in China which led to the global pandemic, the CCP state media have been engaged in smear campaigns in recent weeks.”

Undoubtedly, Mike Pompeo is one of the targets.

Some analysts have compared the loss of lives, chaos, and devastation to the global economy caused by COVID-19 to the equivalent of another world war. Many countries have launched investigations into the CCP’s role in covering up the spread of the virus. Can the CCP evade its responsibility this time?

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/6/2/185330.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/iy_zccygLOc


High Virus Death Toll in Northern Italy Highlights Ties With Beijing

Yuan Li
June 3, 2020
Commentary

Italy, one of the heaviest hit countries outside China, has more than 233,836 confirmed cases of CCP virus infections and more than 33,601 deaths, as of June 3.

As indicated in The Epoch Times editorial, “Wherever Ties to the Chinese Communist Party Are Close, the CCP Virus Follows”: “The path of the CCP virus as it has spread around the world goes through the countries, cities, organizations, and even individuals that are closely related to the CCP.”

This article would like to stress the consequence of forming an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In March 2019, Italy became the only European country to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as Belt and Road). Being the first Group of Seven (G-7) country to join the BRI, Italy hoped it would boost its sluggish economy by establishing a strategic partnership with China.

Italy has 74 sister cities or twin towns formed with China, including places that were hit-hard by the CCP virus, such as Milan, Brescia, and Bergamo of the Lombardy region.

A Chinese Couple Spreads the Virus

On March 23, China’s state-run media reported that Italy’s first two confirmed virus patients were an elderly Chinese couple. They both recovered after being hospitalized for 49 days. The wife, Hu Yamin, is a faculty member of Central China Normal University, which is located in Wuhan.

According to Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, the couple left Wuhan on Jan. 22—a day before the city was locked down—and arrived in Milan the next day. A few days later, the couple developed a fever and cough. On Jan. 30, their conditions deteriorated. Then the couple was hospitalized and tested positive for the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

The media report had caused widespread disturbance on Chinese social media. Netizens responded with the following comment: “Spread the virus thousands of miles away, indeed.”

On March 26, Italian journalist Marco Respinti wrote an article titled, “Don’t Call It a Chinese Virus. Call it the CCP VIRUS.” He criticized the Chinese regime’s botched handling of the initial virus outbreak and its human rights abuses.

CCP Blames Italy for the Pandemic

While the Chinese regime was being criticized unanimously by world leaders for its delayed response and concealment of the severity of the outbreak, China’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, issued a series of tweets on March 12 blaming the United States for the virus. However, China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, referred to the statement that “the virus originated in the U.S. military laboratory” as “crazy rumors.” When asked again about Zhao’s claim on March 22, Cui said, “That was my position then, and that’s my position now.”

Italy quickly became the target of China’s conspiracy theory. China’s state-run mouthpiece China Global Television Network (CGTN) published an article on March 22 that claimed the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) remains unknown but that Italy might be its birthplace. Statements made by Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi were taken out of context in the article.

In fact, concurrent with spokesperson Zhao’s tweet, CGTN’s report on March 12 also implied the virus came from Europe by distorting the statement of Massimo Galli, head of the university research group and of the infectious-diseases department at Milan’s Sacco hospital.

Remuzzi refuted that Beijing’s attempts to twist his words to suggest the novel coronavirus originated in Italy is a textbook example of “propaganda.”

Mattia Ferraresi, a writer for Italian newspaper Il Foglio said, “Italy is an ideal outpost for China’s wide-reaching propaganda effort to cover up its own responsibility for the global spread of the new coronavirus, all the while presenting itself as a compassionate power aiding Western countries in need.”

The Hard-hit Northern Region

As of April 29, there were a total of 75,134 confirmed cases and more than 13,679 deaths from the CCP virus infection in Italy’s Lombardy region.

Lombardy welcomed Chinese business in the past.

China’s Minister of Science and Technology, Wang Zhigang, visited Bergamo for the 9th Italy-China Science, Technology and Innovation Week in early December 2018. He also visited the Kilometro Rosso Science and Technology Park, located along the A4 motorway at the gates of Bergam—the area hosts research companies and industry leaders, such as Brembo, a company known for its braking systems.

According to Chinese state media, 19 cooperation agreements in trade and research were signed between Italy and China during the opening day of the China-Italy Science, Technology, and Innovation Week.

Wang said that “Italy is a strategic partner,” and “…we will keep working together on pilot projects in many sectors, from aerospace to intelligent manufacturing. Particular attention will be paid to sustainable energies.”

The mayor of Brescia, Emilio Del Bono, met with the president of the Chinese Association in Brescia in the city hall on Feb. 17. At the meeting, the mayor expressed his solidarity with the Chinese community: “To our fellow citizens I say that there is no danger or risk of contracting the epidemic by visiting restaurants or shops run by Chinese people.”

However, as of April 29, there were more than 12,000 confirmed cases of CCP virus infections in Brescia, only second to the hardest-hit Milan.

Piacenza is also one of the hardest-hit regions in northern Italy. On July 9, 2018, the mayor of Piacenza, Patrizia Barbieri, welcomed a Chinese delegation from Jiangbei District of Ningbo city. Piacenza and Jiangbei signed a sister agreement to promote economic and cultural ties.

On March 4, Barbieri announced that she had tested positive for the CCP virus.

Virus Infection Rate Plateaus

In early April, the CCP virus infection rate in Italy started to plateau. Different opinions and voices were heard about the phenomenon.

On March 26, Italy journalist Marco Respinti stated in an article on Rete Liberale, “Italy was the first country to be hit hard by the pandemic, and its people have been paying a great toll in human lives.” He claimed, “Under international law, China and/or the CCP could and should be sued for the enormous damages they caused to the world.”

On April 21, the website for “COVID 19 Class Action” was established. Its goal is to obtain compensation for people who suffered damage from the spread of the CCP virus. The chief financial officer and head of the Ferdinando Perone project explains, “We estimate that there will be more than 500 thousand adhesions to the class action and therefore it is not impossible that the request can exceed 100 billion euros (approximately $108 billion).”

The most influential media in Italy, Corriere della Sera, commented on April 26: “Too many ambiguities about China … the M5S looks favorably on Beijing despite doubts about its responsibilities spreading around the world. Government allies will have to clarify their positions.” The M5S, Five Star Movement, is a political party in Italy.

On April 29, Paolo Grimoldi, deputy of the League and secretary of the Lombard League Salvini Premier, announced that Lombardy will ask China for 20 billion euros for damages caused by the CCP virus. Members of the political party Forza Italia asked the president of the northeastern region of Veneto to do the same.

It is worth noting that since these Italian politicians issued the appeal, the number of infections and deaths across Italy had significantly dropped.

Only when the Italian people jointly denounce and blame the Chinese Communist regime for the losses brought to Italy can they ensure a bright future for their country.

Massimo Marcon contributed to this commentary.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/high-...aly-highlights-ties-with-beijing_3369493.html

 

[gerryh]

The premise is a pile of horse shit.

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/hfCMiuflb-g

Reaping What We Sowed: Coronavirus Pandemic Is Our Wake Up Call

Suzanne Scholte, June 5, 2020, Commentary

One great positive development that could result from the coronavirus pandemic. is the potential for the international community to finally wake up to the atrocities the Chinese Communist Party has been committing since its inception.

For too long, the CCP’s crimes against humanity have been ignored, and now we’re all reaping what we sowed.

It all started in 1971 at the United Nations when a critical vote was taken. I have a strong memory of that day, because as a child I remember my mother being so shaken and angry. I remember her presenting us, her children, a list of countries she had written out carefully on a yellow piece of paper in her beautiful script handwriting that we had to boycott because they had done something absolutely horrible.

It was Oct. 25, 1971, and these nations had just voted to have communist China, replace the Republic of China as a member state of the United Nations. On that date, the ambassador to China of then-communist Albania, Reis Malile, whose country had introduced the resolution, gleefully pointed out that vote was “a great defeat for the United States of America,” while exalting the great People’s Republic of China as “a bastion of socialism and justice.”

Giving communist China U.N. status began the ascent of a dictatorship, that was propelled to greater and greater power as, during the succeeding decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations, sold out the people of China—and the people of America—with the false narrative, that opening up to China economically would lead to China improving its human rights.

Although I was not able to boycott every country on that 1971 list, I was successful for my entire youth to never buy a single product made in communist China. Only as a young mother was I forced to break down on my boycott, because I had two young sons who needed sneakers, and Converse All Stars had joined the many American companies, who sold their souls (no pun intended) to communist China, for cheap labor at the expense of the American worker, and human rights concerns. You could no longer find a pair of sneakers, that was made in America.

While our political elites were selling out to China, we repeatedly turned our backs, on those who were suffering there. Another vivid memory I have, is being at a meeting of conservative leaders to press then-White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, on why then-President George Bush was selling out to the communists. It was bad enough that former President Jimmy Carter had given..most-favored nation status to China… Was the United States also going to turn its back, on the political prisoners in labor camps, and the hundreds of students murdered in Tianamen Square?

Sununu, who had just returned from a trip to China, assured us that there was no turning back—China’s booming economy and our trade relationship was going to lead to reform! Yes, capitalism will lead the way forward!

How many times in subsequent years, of both Republican and Democratic presidencies have we heard that sorry misleading statement, or the one “China is on a peaceful rise”?

One thing both the left and right in congress, and the human rights community have been in unity about, is concern about the CCP. We were all dismayed when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) picked Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Again, the IOC assured that this would lead to China opening up to reform. Instead, the CCP intensified its police state.

While we skipped away to this fantasy, betraying our own American workers, and international human rights concerns, how many Chinese and other citizens of the world suffered: 15 million were killed in China’s labor camp system, while another 40 million to 50 million suffered imprisonment there; the people of Tibet continue to suffer under brutal occupation; the Uighurs of Xinjiang have at least 1 million, and possibly as many as 3 million of their people jailed in concentration camps; and practitioners of Falun Gong since 1999, have been under brutal persecution, including hundreds of thousands imprisoned with many killed to harvest their organs.

So many Chinese heroes, from intellectuals like Charter 08 author Liu Xiaobo, to labor activists like Wei Zhili, from lawyers like Gao Zhisheng, to journalists like Zhang Wenmin, have been killed, jailed, or disappeared, while tens of millions of girls have been aborted, due to the CCP’s One Child Policy, and abortions forced upon mothers who were pregnant with their second child.

The CCP has for decades brutally repatriated hundreds of thousands of North Korean men, women, and children back to North Korea to face certain torture and imprisonment, and even death for simply wanting to survive. We have yet to calculate the death toll of North Koreans killed by China’s repatriation policies.

The failure of the international community due to expediency, and greed to address the suffering of the people of China, is now clearly exposed for all to see, in how the CCP unleashed the coronavirus on an unsuspecting world.

We may have turned our backs on the people of China, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and the North Korean refugees, but now because we are reaping what we sowed, it is our chance to address this wrong, and never again sacrifice the well-being of human beings, to this brutal and evil dictatorship.

Suzanne Scholte is the president of the Defense Forum Foundation, which has hosted many Chinese dissidents on Capitol Hill since the 1990s.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/reapi...rus-pandemic-is-our-wake-up-call_3375920.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/rKWGAOckQG8


Nigerian Diplomat Defends His Citizens While a Chinese Official Labels Overseas Chinese Wanting to Return Home “Political Virus”

June 3, 2020 | By Xinzhou, (Minghui.org)

During the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese Communist Party has been indifferent or even cruel to the Chinese living overseas. A Nigerian diplomat in China, on the other hand, stood up to defend his citizens who were mistreated in China. The sharp contrast affirms the CCP’s disregard for people’s lives.

Defending Own Citizens vs. Blaming Them

An online video on April 11 showed that the Nigeria Consul-General Anozie Maduabuchi Cyril confronted the Chinese coronavirus control enforcement team who had confiscated the passports of three Nigerians living in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province. The Nigerians tested negative but were still ordered to go into quarantine.

A visibly angry Cyril snatched the passports from the Chinese officials’ hands, and gave them back to his people, “Listen, Nigerian passports belong to the Nigerian government. There is an international treaty that no country can confiscate it!”

“If you want to carry out your quarantine policy, you should do that to everyone. Close every door and let every person stay at home, including Chinese, Nigerian, and even all of you! You should not discriminate anyone!”

Then a Chinese official tried to threaten him, “If you continue, your name will be known all over the world.”

“I do not care if my name is known! Your name will be known, too! According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, as a foreign consul, I have the right to protect my citizens. What I’m doing tonight is to protect all Nigerian citizens. They are not criminals. Why do you harass them?”

This video was widely watched and received many “likes.”

Compared with how Cyril protected his people, how the CCP responded when the Chinese citizens were mistreated in other countries, was stunning.

According to China’s media, there are about 150,000 Chinese in Russia, with 27,000 students and the rest merchants and workers. The Russian authorities treated them toughly amid the pandemic. The city of Moscow deported several dozen Chinese for violating quarantine regulations on April 10. The Chinese media, “8 AM Health Insight,” reported on April 14 that Russian authorities locked down the Friendship Hotel in Moscow where many Chinese were staying, took away their passports and quarantined them for 14 days. The Russian government also sent many Chinese to the Sino-Russian border, asking them to go back to China.

However, the CCP showed no sympathy for its citizens. First, the government cut its flights to make it almost impossible for those Chinese to come back. Since March 26, each airline in China is only allowed to make one flight to a foreign country each week; foreign airlines are only allowed to make one flight to China each week.

Secondly, China closed all checkpoints between China and Russia. The Heilongjiang Provincial government issued an order on April 13, encouraging people to report any person illegally crossing the border. A person who gives a tip to the government will receive a 3,000 yuan reward. People who catch the border-crosser and hand him to the authorities will receive a 5,000 yuan reward.

On April 17, Zhang Hanhui, China’s Ambassador to Russia had an online discussion with several representatives of the Chinese in Russia. Zhang labeled those Chinese people wanting to return to China a “political virus” who wanted to bring “the poison” to China. He criticized them for “eating the meal of Sino-Russian cooperation but smashing the pot of Sino-Russian relations,” and scolded them for “having no moral bottom line.”

The CCP rejected not only the Chinese in Russia, but also hundreds of thousands of Chinese in other countries when it cut off flights. For those who managed to come home, the CCP had a “welcoming slogan” for them: “You stayed overseas when our country faced problems, but then you are the first to fly thousands of miles back to poison our country (when it is getting better).”

The CCP’s abandoning Chinese in Russia is quite a contrast to the Nigerian diplomat’s protecting his citizens and many countries’ sending additional planes to evacuate their citizens out of the pandemic regions.

A responsible government should promptly help its citizens when they are facing unfair treatment or being bullied. This is a must, from the angle of either emotion, moral, legal, or civil responsibility. Why a Nigerian diplomat can do it but the “world’s second-largest economy” cannot? Didn’t the CCP claim that it has all Chinese’s backing?

Some people may say this is an exception at a special time. But, is it just an exception?

Learn from History: The CCP Was Indifferent to Chinese Overseas

From 1975 to 1979, the Cambodian Communist Party (Khmer Rouge) started a mass manslaughter throughout its nation. Chinese and Vietnamese were also targeted.

Many Chinese community leaders went to the Chinese embassy to seek help, but the Chinese officials scolded them, asking them to “follow up with the Cambodia revolution development.” With no option, many Chinese in Cambodia went to villages to hide. Some were killed, some were put in prison, and some managed to escape to Thailand and became the United Nations’ refugees.

The Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people, a quarter of the country’s population during its reign. The Chinese population in Cambodia was reduced from 600,000 to 300,000, with most of the missing population tortured to death. Ironically, it was the CCP who taught the Khmer Rouge the killing methods.

In Vietnam, though also a communist regime, sent its army to Cambodia to end the Khmer Rouge regime, after hearing its people were killed. Lacking a border with Cambodia, the CCP could not send its army to defend the brutal Cambodian regime. It then invaded Vietnam to take revenge for the Khmer Rouge.

Another case was the anti-Chinese riot in Indonesia in May 1998. Over two thousand Chinese were killed, several hundred Chinese women raped, and property loss was hard to measure. The mobs raped Chinese women on the street or in front of her relatives, cut Chinese men into pieces, and even cut little girls apart.

Many countries and people, especially Chinese overseas, strongly condemned the violence. However, the CCP announced that it would not “interfere with Indonesia’s internal affairs.” It also prohibited Chinese media from reporting the incident in China and prohibited Chinese students from organizing protests.

The U.S. strongly condemned the violence and helped to end the riot. It sent a ship to bring its citizens and some Chinese back to the U.S. When the ship arrived at the U.S. port, Chinese on the boat put out a banner “We’d rather Be An American Dog Than A Chinese Person.”

Learn from History: The CCP Has the Traitor Nature

Why is the CCP so cruel to its people? Looking at the CCP’s history, we can find out that from the beginning, the CCP has been acting as a traitor to the Chinese nation.

When the CCP was first established, it was the “Far East Branch” of the Third Communist International under the command of the former Soviet Union. Its goal was to “use force to defend the Soviet Union.”

During WWII, while China’s official government fought fiercely against the Japanese army, the CCP, which stayed in a northwest region of China, signed a secret treaty with the Japanese army: The Japanese army gave six counties to the CCP to manage and the CCP would not attack the Japanese army. Thus, there was almost no military clash between the CCP’s army and the Japanese army.

After the CCP took power, it has killed 80 to 100 million Chinese people and destroyed traditional Chinese culture through many political movements.

In 1989, the CCP openly fired at and used tanks to smash protesters who asked for democracy and an end to government corruption, in front of the world.

The Kosovo War started on March 24, 1999. The U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launched airstrikes against the Yugoslavia government. Jiang Zemin, then CCP top leader, provided land-to-air missiles to help Yugoslavia to fight NATO planes. He also let three of Yugoslavia’s core intelligence units move into the basement of China’s embassy to develop a meter-wave Radar antenna.

U.S. President Clinton called Jiang Zemin and gave him an ultimatum: The U.S. would bomb it if China did not stop. Jiang didn’t stop, nor did he inform the embassy. Then the U.S. dropped a few bombs onto China’s embassy, exploding in the basement on May 8, 1999. Three Chinese reporters were killed. At least another 14 engineers were also killed but the CCP didn’t disclose it to the public.

Jiang didn’t dare to respond to the U.S. bombing. He just asked Hu Jintao, then Vice President of China who had no substantial power yet, to give a symbolic protest on television. Jiang also took the opportunity to divert domestic attention from the 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners’ peaceful appeal at Zhongnanhai on April 25 that year, to the Sino-US relationship. He used the U.S. bombing to incite Chinese people’s strong nationalism and hatred towards the US.

Months later, Jiang Zemin launched the persecution of Falun Gong, a mind-body traditional Buddhist school practice, in July 1999. Millions of practitioners have since been arrested, imprisoned, and their relatives and friends implicated. Thousands were tortured to death. And tens of thousands, if not more, were killed for their organs while still alive.

Now with the coronavirus pandemic, it was also the CCP that covered up the information and allowed the virus to spread to every corner of the world, which has sickened over six million people and killed more than 370,000 lives, as of May 31, 2020.

On April 16, 2020, an Argentine lawyer Alejandro Sanchez Kalbermatten filed a criminal complaint in the Criminal and Correctional Court 12, accusing the CCP of unleashing a “viral genocide.”

It is high time for people to see through the true killing nature of the CCP and stay away from it.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/6/3/185345.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/biVrtiVDF7I


Cuba and COVID-19

Commentary by Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat and Otto Reich
June 8, 2020

As if the COVID-19 pandemic were not sufficiently destructive, now Cuba, with the help of China, is again attempting to expand its influence abroad and totalitarian control at home by weaponizing it.

The political atmosphere in Cuba before the pandemic was charged with unusually large public protests, creating serious challenges to the police state. Facing disappearing subsidies from the insolvent Maduro regime in Venezuela, and the Trump administration’s targeted sanctions against Cuba’s military, security, and intelligence machinery, the Castro regime was desperate to avoid losing income from the tourism sector.

In his end-of-year speech on Dec. 21, 2019, “President” Miguel Diaz-Canel predictably blamed the United States for his government’s failures before the Cuban National Assembly of People’s Power, the Communist Party’s rubber-stamp legislature: “n our economic results, is the impact that this [United States’] aggression has caused. Virtually every sector was obliged to face interruptions or delays in production.” Days before, the regime had taken small liberalization steps and released a few political prisoners.

When the pandemic struck, the regime pretended it would not affect Cubans or visitors “because of the tropical sun’s warmth.” When the virus became impossible to contain, however, information about it became tightly controlled.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Manuel Marrero adopted an unprecedented conciliatory tone in a speech directed at the political opposition, calling for unity “beyond political preferences. …” Repression, however, remains unabated, so the meaning of these words is in doubt.

Internationally, the Castro regime, with Chinese regime support, launched a propaganda campaign touting a Cuban “miracle drug” that could cure COVID-19 patients. On Feb. 7, Diaz-Canel tweeted, “Interferon alpha 2B: Cuban drug used in China against coronavirus. Our support to the Chinese government and people in their efforts to combat the coronavirus.” The claim was false.

Embarrassing Cuban propagandists, on March 18, the international news agency AFP reported: “The Cuban antiviral Interferon Alfa 2B is used in China to treat patients with the new coronavirus, but it is neither a vaccine nor a cure.” Dr. Nils Graber, a biotechnologist and health anthropologist at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, told APF the Cuban drug was a “me too” antiviral, an imitation of existing drugs on the market.

Shifting its disinformation focus back to the island, the regime announced the successful containment of the coronavirus. It also announced sending Cuban medical missions to many countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In the last two years, however, Cuban medical workers have been expelled from three countries in Latin America, accused of interference in domestic affairs in Bolivia and Ecuador, and “slave labor” practices in Brazil.

Through the government’s exploitation of medical personnel, the missions serve two main regime political purposes: First, they are the largest single source of foreign exchange to Havana, and second, they serve as intelligence and propaganda operatives in the host countries.

One example of the medical missions’ ulterior objectives was revealed by Cuban doctors who defected from Venezuela and informed the New York Times that Cuban officials had ordered them to withhold medical supplies and treatment from a number of impoverished patients until a date closer to the Venezuelan presidential election on May 20, 2018, in order to ensure that patients would vote for Cuban ally Nicolas Maduro.

Months later, in November 2018, Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro accused Cuba of violating Brazilian law by keeping 75 percent of the doctors’ wages under the medical program Mais Medicos, and forcing them to work under surveillance and in conditions akin to “slave labor.”

In November 2019, the Ecuadorian government ended the Cuban medical program whereby 250 Cubans had traveled to Ecuador during a wave of violent protests a month earlier. The same month, the Bolivian government expelled four Cuban doctors who, according to eye witnesses, were distributing cash among supporters of ousted strongman Evo Morales, attempting to overthrow the new government of Jeanine Áñez.

As of June 7, the Castro regime claims that only 2191 people have been infected and 83 Cubans have died from the virus. The data are difficult to accept, given the long-established regime reputation of manipulating statistics for political objectives, and of no supporting public data or independent auditing.

Dissident sources in Cuba believe that the rate of COVID-19 spread is significantly higher, as illustrated by the regime’s recent reinstitution of draconian food distribution controls, forcing Cubans into ever-longer food lines where social distancing is impossible and compounded by a shortage of face masks.

Independent Cuban sources report regime censorship of COVID-19 outbreaks in Cuban prisons, such as La Pendiente, in the province of Santa Clara, a widely acknowledged virus “hot spot” where prisoners are overcrowded in small cells, with poor hygiene, insufficient food, and constant abuse from guards.

In March, political prisoner Roberto Quiñones denounced conditions in the Provincial Prison of Guantanamo: “Despite reports of the vulnerability of older adults … to COVID-19, many of them are kept in cubicles where they live in overcrowded conditions with almost two dozen people.”

More recently, Jose Daniel Ferrer, one of Cuba’s key opposition leaders, released from Aguadores Prison in Santiago de Cuba as a result of international pressure in April, told the authors that, “COVID-19 is spreading in the population. The statistics provided by the regime can’t be trusted.”

Cuba’s tireless resistance has not ceased its activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through sophisticated underground coordination and support from the exile community, activists continue to attend meetings and access the Internet occasionally to generate prayer circles and virtual “human chains” in an effort to support the release of thousands of Cuban political prisoners.

In 2020, dissidents on the island launched the “Yo los Quiero Libre” (I want them free) campaign demanding the release of political prisoners amid the pandemic. The campaign is an outgrowth of the “Pa la Calle” (to the streets) campaign that saw citizens openly demanding political and social rights.

Many Cubans joined the Yo los Quiero Libre campaign, creating a prayer chain, sharing messages of support, and promoting the plight of political prisoners by posting pictures and videos of Cubans wearing yellow, the color of the Cuban resistance. Given the dangerous conditions imposed by the repressive apparatus, the campaign is more evidence of the people’s will to fight for liberty and freedom.

As a realignment of U.S. foreign policy occurs, given new international realities caused by the pandemic, it is essential to address the continuing danger to this hemisphere of a totalitarian regime in power for over 60 years. In addition to the innumerable lives extinguished, and the destruction of what once was one of the most prosperous economies of Latin America, Cuba’s communist rulers have long used false information to undermine U.S. interests in the region.

Otto Juan Reich is a former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, Ph.D., is an author, educator, and analyst. He is the co-founder and spokesman for the Cuban Democratic Directorate (Directorio).

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cuba-and-covid-19_3378304.html

 

[Ellanjay]

https://youtu.be/EJkuPdCzuHY

Three Lessons From the Pandemic and the Lockdown

Mark Hendrickson
CONTRIBUTOR
June 10, 2020
Commentary

The pandemic and subsequent government-mandated lockdowns and their devastating economic effects have affected Americans differently.

The relatively affluent and financially secure have been free to engage in introspection and personal growth. While that might not have been their first choice, for most it wasn’t nearly as challenging a period as it was for Americans who have been scrambling (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to keep from going broke.

Regardless of the impact of this cluster of crises, this spring has taught us (or should have taught us) three major political lessons that will affect us all going forward.

Lesson Number One: The CCP Threat
The threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to our country and the whole world has become impossible to overlook or ignore.

With varying degrees of clarity and concern, Americans have been aware of the CCP’s ruthlessness. Most of us recognized that China has been waging war against American businesses, stealing their intellectual property and targeting them for destruction.

A smaller group of Americans know about the CCP’s persecution of their Muslim Uighur minority—the arrest of over a million of them without trial, forcibly separating them away from their families and depositing them in “re-education” camps. Similarly, too few Americans have heard about the CCP’s horrifying practice of killing political prisoners by harvesting vital organs from their bodies. A higher profile example of CCP evil has been its naked attempts to trample and extinguish the rights and freedoms of the residents of Hong Kong since last summer.

But now there’s no excuse for the mass of Americans to be oblivious to the unmistakable malevolence and the clear and present danger posed by the Chinese regime. So arrogant have the Chi-coms become that they no longer even try to hide their aggressive goals. The way they have conducted themselves during this global pandemic should remove all doubts about them.

The CCP made a cold-blooded policy decision not to warn the rest of the world about the emerging coronavirus; instead they allowed infected citizens to travel and to spread the virus around the world. What was that, if not a hostile act?

The contempt that the Chinese communists have for everyone else is unmistakable. It has gotten so blatant that the editor of The Global Times (a mouthpiece for the CCP regime) responded to Australian concerns about the Wuhan/CCP virus by publicly insulting Australia, writing that that free nation is “like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes.” Their public relations offensive against the United States has been even more offensive—making the outrageous claim that the United States spawned the pandemic.

None of this hateful behavior should surprise us. Remember: Vladimir Lenin himself openly taught, “Hatred is the basis of communism.” Some naïve people think all we have to do is be nice to the Chinese regime, and they will respond in kind. Sorry, but communists aren’t like that—it’s against their (atheistic) religion. American food aid averted mass starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, and the Soviet regime repaid our kindness by marking us as their Number One enemy.

Lenin once scornfully asserted that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which the latter would hang the former. But communists would not be so foolish as to sell us things that we vitally need, such as crucial pharmaceutical drugs or masks needed during a pandemic.

The bottom line: We need to understand that the communist virus is many times more lethal than COVID-19, and we need to rethink every aspect of our relations with China.

Lesson Number Two: Incompetence of Socialism

The U.S. government’s policy response to the pandemic illustrates the clumsy incompetence of socialism in practice. Central economic planning simply isn’t viable. Unsurprisingly, then, the implementation of emergency relief measures has been a veritable comedy of errors:

1) Tax-paying Americans have been given stimulus checks, but then ordered to avoid most stores, resulting in money sitting in bank accounts—unless the recipient has become unemployed and is using the checks to pay the rent and other expenses that would have been spent anyhow.

2) Unemployment benefits for many workers exceed their take-home pay. This has created massive disincentives to return to work, which in turn jeopardizes the survival of the small businesses (and the jobs they provide) that Congress hoped to save.

3) Thousands of loans were issued to ineligible recipients. The Small Business Administration alone issued more loans in 14 days than it had in the previous 14 years. Can you imagine how many billions of dollars were wasted and dispensed inappropriately?

4) Lending institutions were ordered to suspend collection of mortgage payments without any guidance for how they were to be made whole at some future time, and with meager protection against future prosecutions to punish them for doing what Congress ordered them to do.

5) American business owners were arrested for daring to open their businesses before getting a government green light at the same time those governments were releasing convicts from jail to protect them from the virus.

The bottom line: Socialism is economic poison, not some mythical panacea for people’s economic needs.

Lesson Number Three: Radical Greens

Lesson number three is related to number two. It was both stunning and appalling to hear how radical greens exulted in this spring’s economic slowdown.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicly stated in late March that “the pandemic could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines,” Scientific American reported.

In other words, in the name of their destructive obsession with reducing carbon dioxide emissions (emissions that are environmentally beneficial), greens would like to slow down economic activity to an even greater extent than what we have experienced as a result of the pandemic. It doesn’t concern them that economic prosperity goes hand-in-hand with fossil fuel consumption.

The bottom line: If you like living like you have the last few weeks, then vote for green politicians. But if you prefer healthy economic growth, then the greens aren’t for you.

The coronavirus and its aftermath have highlighted vitally important lessons about the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party, domestic socialism, and green fanaticism. These are dear-bought lessons. Let us not squander the benefits of these lessons by ignoring them after having paid so dearly for them.

Mark Hendrickson, an economist, recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/three-lessons-from-the-pandemic-and-the-lockdown_3384230.html

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