China is *not* your friend
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/authoritarian-regimes-are-not-your-friend/
You have probably heard about reports of various countries ordering medical equipment from China, only to find upon delivery that the equipment is defective, poorly made, and unusable. What you probably don’t know is just how massive the scale of these botched orders is.
Even by the Chinese government’s own numbers, they’re producing jaw-dropping quantities of medical equipment that aren’t up to the right standards: “As of last Friday, China’s market regulators had inspected nearly 16 million businesses and seized more than 89 million masks and 418,000 pieces of protective gear, said Ms Gan Lin, deputy director of the State Administration of Market Regulation, at a press briefing.”
And that’s just the stuff they’re catching before it goes out the door.
Almost every country that is dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has ordered masks, tests, or personal protective equipment from China, only to open the boxes and find that the deliveries are unusable. In some cases, the equipment was distributed and used before the poor quality was discovered — offering false protection to medical personnel and exacerbating the spread of the virus instead of mitigating it.
https://tibet.net/china-is-working-overtime-to-suppress-research-about-coronavirus-origin/
the Chinese Communist Party knows this full well, which is why it’s working overtime to bury the truth as the world is mired in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
China has worked aggressively to suppress critical media and waged a widespread disinformation campaign to redirect blame for the coronavirus outbreak.
But its efforts to slow down knowledge about the Chinese government’s complicity in fueling the pandemic doesn’t stop just with the media. Beijing has also acted to shut down research in the country that portrays the government’s actions in a negative light.
Fox News reported that the websites of two Chinese universities, Fudan University and the China University of Geosciences, published—then deleted—research about the origination of the COVID-19 virus.
Importantly, the pages published and retracted by the universities had references to a new Chinese government policy that included extra government vetting of research on the coronavirus.
The directive issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education’s science and technology department instructed that any research dealing with the origin of the virus must be “tightly managed.”
“The directive lays out layers of approval for these papers, starting with the academic committees at universities,” CNN reported. “They are then required to be sent to the Education Ministry’s science and technology department, which then forwards the papers to a task force under the State Council for vetting. Only after the universities hear back from the task force can the papers be submitted to journals.”
It should be clear—if it isn’t already obvious—that China’s government is trying to orchestrate exactly what information is and isn’t getting to the public and the world.
https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-coronavirus-memories-page/
A group of volunteers in China who worked to prevent digital records of the coronavirus outbreak from being scrubbed by censors are now targets of a crackdown.
Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple’s families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under “residential surveillance at a designated place.” There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother.
It is unclear whether the arrest of the couple and the disappearance of Chen are directly linked to their GitHub project, named “Terminus2049.” The Beijing police could not be reached for comment.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/world/europe/backlash-china-coronavirus.html
Global Backlash Builds Against China Over Coronavirus
“As calls for inquiries and reparations spread, Beijing has responded aggressively, mixing threats with aid and adding to a growing mistrust of China.
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Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies
A growing number of reports indicate Chinese officials pushed their counterparts in Europe to make positive statements about China in order to receive shipments of medical supplies to fight the novel coronavirus.
Why it matters: The revelations further taint Beijing's attempts to portray itself as a responsible and trustworthy leader in global public health.
Context: Over the past two months, numerous high-ranking government officials from countries fighting coronavirus outbreaks have offered seemingly effusive praise to China for its assistance.
The Italian foreign minister credited China with saving lives in Italy, the Serbian president kissed the Chinese flag as he welcomed a shipment of medical supplies on the tarmac, and the Mexican foreign minister tweeted a photo of a plane delivering Chinese aid, writing "Gracias China!!!"
What's happening: Officials in some countries are now saying there was pressure to praise Beijing.Poland: In exchange for medical supplies, Chinese officials pressured Polish President Andrzej Duda to call Chinese President Xi Jinping to express gratitude
“Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda purposes, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, told the New York Times.
Germany: German officials have been approached by Chinese counterparts trying to get them to make positive public statements about China’s coronavirus response and international assistance, according to German newspaper Die Welt Am Sonntag.What they're saying: “What is most striking to me is the extent to which the Chinese government appears to be demanding public displays of gratitude from other countries; this is certainly not in the tradition of the best humanitarian relief efforts," Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.
“It seems strange to expect signed declarations of thanks from other countries in the midst of the crisis.”
The big picture: A quid pro quo for vital medical aid alienates global audiences who had at first been inclined to welcome Chinese Communist Party leadership in the fight against the coronavirus."The fairly aggressive party-state effort to 'tell a good China story' actually increases public awareness that these propaganda efforts on the Chinese side are going on," Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told Axios.
"They are shooting themselves in the foot by being so pushy on this." -
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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I hate the CCP, I have nothing against the Chinese people.
China would have become THE superpower, if they would have used Taiwan or Hong Kong as a model. I guess that's a "duh" statement.
The Chinese people do hate the U.S., from what I've ascertained. Mainland Chinese seem to be in a system where the government tells the people whom to hate, and why. Once again, "we're number 1!"
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Put this story in the light of "had we done something sooner..."
https://apnews.com/3c061794970661042b18d5aeaaed9fae
Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.”
But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found.
Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents.
Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.
WHO officials were lauding China in public because they wanted to coax more information out of the government, the recordings obtained by the AP suggest. Privately, they complained in meetings the week of Jan. 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.
