Boris Johnson’s plans to seek alternatives to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in the 5G network could spoil plans for Chinese companies to build nuclear power plants and the HS2 high-speed rail network, the Sunday Times reported.

Liu Xiaoming signaled that Beijing is viewing the decision over Huawei as “a litmus test of whether Britain is a true and faithful partner of China,” the newspaper reported the ambassador telling business leaders, saying that the words were “interpreted as a threat by those listening.”

To get—and keep—Beijing’s attention, Washington needs to target the regime with meaningful measures.

Hua Chunying 华春莹
✔
@SpokespersonCHN

We urge the #US side to fully appreciate the great sensitivity of the Taiwan question. We advise the US side to ditch its illusions and political calculations. We ask the US side not to make any attempt to challenge China's red line.
3,742
9:07 AM - May 24, 2020

Ted Cruz
✔
@tedcruz

We urge the Chinese govt to fully appreciate the great sensitivity of 343k people dead because CCP lied & covered up a damn global pandemic. We advise CCP to ditch its illusions & political calculations. We ask CCP not to make any attempt to hide behind a fake red line of lies. https://twitter.com/spokespersonchn/status/1264558636363210752 …

If the United States doesn’t follow through to revoke Hong Kong’s special treatment, Beijing may be emboldened to take aggressive actions against Taiwan.

There has been much back-and-forthing over whom should and shouldn’t get money from the CARES Act.

A new Deutsche Bank survey shows 41 per cent of Americans will not buy ‘Made in China’ products again, while 35 per cent of Chinese will avoid US goods.

By John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine

May 19, 2020

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” King Lear enjoined, but this we must do to upend the wrath that has emanated from the most powerful foe America has faced. As terrible as the coronavirus crisis is, we must imagine a world ten or 20 years from now, in which the People’s Republic of China’s nominal gross domestic product is 50 percent larger than that of the United States.

What power would an unconstrained China wield? What force of arms would they muster to intimidate and to control?

If China’s actions in the coronavirus catastrophe offer any window into this communist regime’s machinations, deceitfulness, and debasement of human life, it is that the threat they represent is unlike anything America has faced.

At the inception of World War II, many strategists conjectured that both Germany and Japan were destined to lose the war; their populations and economies were too small, and their access to raw materials too tenuous, to be able to wage a protracted war against the Allies. Later, the Soviet Union posed a great challenge.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, CIA analysts predicted the Soviet economy would surpass America’s. This calculus drove many costly American decisions. Today, America’s GDP is at least 12 times Russia’s. China, however, is seemingly destined to outpace the United States in GDP during the next 20 years. Indeed, China has plausibly already overtaken the United States, if GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

It is ironic that four American actions enabled this ascent: first, American scientific aid to end famine in China; second, President Carter’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and his commitment that the U.S. government engage with elements of the PRC; third, President Clinton’s facilitation of the PRC’s ultimate ascension to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and his expansion of Chinese access to dual-use (civilian/military) technology; fourth, President Obama’s embrace of the PRC as a non-adversarial peer state, which completed the PRC’s envelopment of America’s institutions. //

It is logical to assume that after some initial point, Chinese political, military, and intelligence officials realized this outbreak of a new virus could be used to damage the economies of the West and thus facilitate Chinese hegemony. Given China’s history of pandemics, its political establishment must have had planning documents in place to serve the Communist Party of China’s interests, should such a scenario of a novel pandemic unfold. Manipulating data would be central to any such operational plan.

On May 7, the PRC recorded its dead in Hubei Provence, whose capital is Wuhan, at 4,512, out of 4,637 for the entire country. According to Chinese authorities, 125 fatalities occurred in all other provinces, which comprise 1.38 billion people.

If the virus did experience exponential growth, and doubled every day, in 28 days it should have infected 268 million people. A 1 percent mortality rate would thus result in millions of deaths, not fewer than 5,000. Even if the PRC underreported its losses by a factor of ten or twenty, these figures do not make sense.

Are there scenarios that explain these numbers? One explanation would involve an accidental release from the virology lab at Wuhan that was almost immediately recognized, engendering swift and firm containment procedures within China, but denied to the rest of the world by China’s continuance of international travel from the virus’s point of origin.

The second scenario is related, but crueler. Given China’s research into biological warfare, it is conceivable that entities within China may have sought a naturally occurring virus that would be just transmissible and virulent enough to cause massive disruption in Western countries, but could be limited and mitigated, given the regime’s foreknowledge, within China. Allied intelligence must determine if either scenario took place. //

China appropriates national assets worldwide in loaded energy and development deals. The pandemic will only accelerate this unless countervailing action ensues. In Djibouti, China holds 77 percent of debt. Kenya, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia were all on the cusp of asset appropriation before the present crisis.

China has lent African nations $124 billion from 2000 through 2016. The largest portion of each loan is not generally provided to the borrower, but spent in China to finance Chinese-made inputs and trained labor. The recipient country, in effect, finances jobs and manufacturing in China. The reward for targeted countries is to have their assets appropriated, due to loan non-performance.

If the West slides into steep recession, developing nations may sell whatever they can in national riches to China for cents on the dollar. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will thus be realized. This avarice is the PRC’s Achilles’ heel.

America must exploit this weakness by offering African and developing nations an alternative to the BRI. Facilitating opposition to Chinese aims among these nations must be a central component of a new U.S. strategy. America must exploit China’s susceptibility to client-state erosion. We must innovatively marshal hard and soft power to unseat the PRC from its footholds in Africa and elsewhere. //

10 Actions the United States Must Take

The problem is not the Chinese people, nor their proud heritage that stretches back thousands of years. It is communism. We must challenge China:

1. Return all production of our medicines, medical supplies, and equipment to the United States or to countries that are our allies;
2. Enact severe limits on Chinese graduate students in all scientific subjects; shutter all Confucius Institutes at American universities until they be stripped of their propagandistic mission;
3. Entrench principles and restrictions so that China can buy no more of our corporations, universities, or national assets;
4. Help deny, across the world, the ability for China’s Huawei to deploy its 5G networks, systems, phones, and devices, as tools for espionage, industrial and otherwise, could be implanted in these systems;
5. Threaten to extend tariffs substantially if the PRC does not make all virus data and sites available to our scientists, so that we may understand fully the genesis and the spread of the present pandemic; the PRC must also release any COVID-19 whistleblowers and eliminate all wet markets;
6. Put into law criminal penalties for any American company or individual who shares proprietary or sensitive information with China, when such information has application to our defense, high-technology, or energy-related industrial base;
7. Accelerate Freedom of Navigation passages and exercises through waters that China falsely claims, with maximum U.S. naval power expressed; in this, we should include, when possible, ships of the British, the Australian, and the Japanese Navies;
8. Undertake determined efforts to deny China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially in Africa; extend alternative terms to key nations on the brink of asset appropriation due to China’s predatory lending practices;
9. Announce a new military package to reinforce Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. To this end, we should consider the sale of the F-35 due to the deployment of the advanced Chengdu J-20 fighter by China. This sale would either be as a replacement for the pending transfer of less-advanced F-16Vs to Taiwan or as a supplement to this force;
10. Radically reduce IP theft. Explicate that China’s economic expansion would have been impossible without their theft of American technology; produce and distribute lists of American technologies and products stolen or copied by China; urge other free countries to do the same, so that the world will recognize this danger. //

During the present pandemic, China’s most abhorrent exports may be fear and disinformation. Twice before this crisis, and in the living memory of many Americans, our nation has experienced pandemics. According to the CDC’s website, during the 1957 Asian Flu, “The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.”

The U.S. population in 1957 was 172 million; thus, adjusted for our present population, the Asian Flu would have killed 222,000 Americans. Of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the CDC has written, “The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.” America’s population in 1968 was 201 million; adjusting for today, the Hong Kong Flu would have killed 164,000 Americans. Neither pandemic altered American economic life. //

The way we have answered this pandemic is not repeatable: our array of actions cannot be mounted if another wave or pandemic strikes. This is our gravest sin: we have shown China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist actors, that our nation may be brought low if faced with a new pathogen.

To establish deterrence so a future malevolent actor sees our capacities both to endure and to respond, America must exact a high price from the People’s Republic of China. In this cause, we must seek the support of all the free nations of the world.

If America had done a tenth of what China has done to the world, even given the most charitable view of their acts, the PRC would do anything to make us pay. If we are not willing to act, and decisively, we are leaving the field to an unhindered, unremorseful, and ravenous state with a degree of relative economic power that we have not faced since the War of 1812.

At nearly 20 tons, the Long March 5B is the largest space vehicle to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled since Soviet Salyut in 1991. //

The Chinese communist regime is a box of surprises — bad ones. We have not yet recovered from the coronavirus pandemic they caused, and they have already exposed us to another huge risk. At 11:33 a.m. on May 11, a gigantic, out-of-control space object crossed the atmosphere and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, showering debris over several villages on the Ivory Coast.

It even crashed into a family’s house, not causing casualties but spreading panic throughout the area. Just 15 minutes earlier, it had flown over New York, threatening the country’s most populated city with a space massacre.

It was not a mistake, nor a mission failure. Quite simply, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to completely disregard human lives. In fact, it considers the mission to have been “a great success.”

What plummeted to Earth was the wreckage of the Long March 5B rocket, launched May 5 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center. According to the calculations of Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has followed this event in detail, it weighed about 20 tons and is the largest space vehicle to fall out of control to Earth since the Soviet space station Salyut, which crashed in Argentina in 1991.

The crash of Long March 5B was closely followed by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which monitors space debris from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The official Chinese story rambles on about the mission’s success and the extraordinary separation between the rocket and its cargo 488 seconds after takeoff, but does not say a word about what happened next. //

Despite its enormous size, however, the rocket did not have a second stage to control of the central part of the vehicle after launch. In other words, China had planned only for the launch. It hadn’t provided any information about the craft’s re-entry to Earth, nor did it have a plan to bring it down safely.

If the Long March were a small rocket, it would have disintegrated when it passed through the atmosphere, but a 176-foot-tall rocket with 10 engines does not completely disintegrate on re-entry. For the sake of comparison, the impending fall of the Chinese space station Tiangong-1 rocked the world in 2018, and it weighed only eight tons. Long March 5B weighs more than double that. Even if atmospheric shock broke it into a million pieces, it would still pose a serious danger if it fell into populated areas.

Following the first reports received from the Ivory Coast last Tuesday night about engine parts falling over several villages in the country, it has been confirmed they are remnants of the Chinese rocket. Local media say it is a miracle that the shower of pipes and engine parts has not caused any casualties, as far as we know. //

China repeatedly fails to comply with rocket-launch regulations, as it sends the crafts off from populated areas. Last year, during the launch of Long March 3B, its first stage fell in the vicinity, destroying several houses and contaminating the area with highly toxic fuel residues. Although the Chinese government veils any technological failures in absolute secrecy, Western sources consider that hundreds of people could have died.

As usual, the CCP’s propaganda machine littered social networks with two surprising statements impossible to prove: that the people were evacuated before the crash and that the owners of the destroyed houses were happy because the regime would give them new houses.

Jonathan McDowell
@planet4589
·
May 12
Reports of a 12-m-long object crashing into the village of Mahounou in Cote d'Ivoire. It's directly on the CZ-5B reentry track, 2100 km downrange from the Space-Track reentry location. Possible that part of the stage could have sliced through the atmo that far (photo: Aminata24)

This should worry us. //

Appearing on Fox News with host Maria Bartiromo, Navarro gave us a quick timeline of China’s actions beginning with patient zero in November //

We know that patient zero in China was about mid-November. It was in Wuhan. We know that ground zero had the P-4 weapons lab, where the virus likely came from. For the next two months, we know that China hid the virus from the world behind the shield of the World Health Organization.

And, as they did that, they sent gleaming passenger jets from China, not into the rest of China from Wuhan, but to places like New York and Milan, seeding the world with what would become a pandemic.

As they did that, we also know, Maria, from their own customs data that they vacuumed up virtually all of the world’s personal protective equipment, including over two billion masks.

And we also know that, today, what China is doing, sitting on that stockpile of what we call PPE, is, they are selling it at profiteering prices to some. And, to other countries, they are actually putting pressure on those countries to deny the virus came from China or to talk about Taiwan or to do other things.

So, that’s it in a nutshell. And what that means for us here is, this morning, Americans won’t go to church because of the China virus. Sons and daughters of America won’t be taking their mothers to brunch. Tomorrow, 33 million Americans won’t be going to work, and millions of children in America will be home climbing the walls, instead of learning, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

So, that’s the China problem that we face. President Trump built the most powerful and beautiful economy in the world in three years.

The Chinese Communist Party took it down in 60 days.

"Mistakes" that always go in one direction. //

the U.S. “took the lead” in infections and deaths only because we are actually honest about our numbers. This is especially true of infections, in which we lead the world in total testing by far. The more you test, the more positives you get. That does not mean we actually lead the world in infections. There’s a reason our death rate is so much lower than other countries. It’s not because we have a magic serum (although our care is better and more prevalent). It’s because we are more accurately reporting infections, which lowers the mortality numbers.

By framing the U.S. as uniquely failing, 60 Minutes is doing China’s bidding, something CBS and others have been more than willing to do over the course of this pandemic. Does anyone really think China, with no therapeutic, was suddenly able to cut their domestic cases to zero? //

The biggest lie told here wasn’t that, though. It was that Pompeo pushed a “debunked” theory that the virus was man-made. In fact, Pompeo did the opposite, proposing it was an accident, something there is plenty of evidence for. The bat in question was not proven to have been sold in any of the markets in Wuhan because the closest native habit was over 600 miles away. Meanwhile, the Wuhan lab was studying coronaviruses in bats at the time. Incompetence and bad lab practices seem far more likely than speculation about wet markets at this point. //

Morgan Ortagus
✔
@statedeptspox
.@CBSNews intentionally misled its viewers with a report Sunday evening that failed to accurately portray the clear intent of Secretary Pompeo's remarks to Martha Raddatz on ABC News regarding the origin of the virus in Wuhan, China.

Morgan Ortagus
✔
@statedeptspox
This reporting — intending to deceive — seeks to obfuscate the Secretary’s core point: the Chinese Communist Party continues to refuse calls for transparency, thereby compounding its cover-up, and further risking American lives. //

CBS lied here, and it wasn’t an accident. One of the chief pieces of Chinese propaganda going around is to claim the U.S. is falsely blaming the communists for the spread of the virus. By propagating the notion that Pompeo claimed the virus was man-made, something we haven’t seen evidence of yet, they might as well be taking orders directly from Chinese dictator Xi.

Our media are disgraceful, and these “mistakes” always go in one direction. That’s not a coincidence.

It seems a number of major US media outlets have financial ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and it shows in their coverage.

Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) record of oppression, corporate media outlets are parroting the authoritarian government’s propaganda, even in the midst of an outbreak the CCP worsened through a cover-up. Many of those media outlets have financial ties to Chinese companies with intense oversight from the CCP.

“You often see representatives from American companies with financial ties to China naturally become defenders of the CCP’s policies and spreading the CCP’s propaganda,” said Helen Raleigh, an author and senior contributor at The Federalist who emigrated from China. “The financial tie means these Americans will be much less likely to challenge China’s human rights record or unacceptable demand such as technology transfer.”

We do not know the extent of editorial oversight from corporations and individuals with financial incentives to placate the CCP, if any. But we know the incentives exist, and that’s worth understanding. Below is a breakdown of financial ties between major U.S. media organizations and the CCP. //

According to a new Department of Homeland Security report obtained by the Associated Press, Beijing hid the severity of the coronavirus to hoard protective medical supplies in early January and February. Yet, corporate media are bending over backwards to avoid negative press coverage of China during the coronavirus pandemic.

Examining these financial ties may explain why China is receiving such glowing coverage during a pandemic of their own making.

On Wednesday, Fox News’ Bret Baier reported the stunning news that officials have “increasingly high confidence” the COVID-19 pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Level 4 biological testing lab located in Wuhan, China. My colleague, Bonchie, posted about this last night here.

Baier appeared on “Hannity” last night to discuss the information he has learned. His sources believe the virus was accidentally transferred from a bat to an intern working at the lab (patient zero) who unknowingly began spreading the virus into the population of Wuhan.

During Sean Hannity’s opening, he said, according to multiple sources, in their efforts to cover up the origins of the virus, “the Chinese erased data, destroyed samples, doctors and journalists disappeared, and China shut down domestic travel to and from Wuhan, but they did not stop international flights to and from Wuhan. In other words, they protected their own country, but were willing to expose the rest of the world knowing the risks.”

The sources also told Baier that the World Health Organization (WHO) assisted China in their cover-up efforts. Both China and the WHO deny these allegations. //

If it is proven that the CCP stopped air traffic to and from Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, but continued to allow travel from Wuhan to foreign countries, it would be a game-changer. China will truly become a pariah on the global stage. I can’t imagine anything President Xi could say or do to redeem himself.

The other major takeaway from this story, if true, is it would become clear that China’s attempts to accuse the U.S. of bringing the virus to Wuhan were an outright lie. We know that, of course, but this would prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. Maybe Democrats would finally believe it too.

U.S. officials warned in January 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work on “SARS-like coronaviruses in bats,” combined with “a serious shortage” of proper safety procedures, could result in human transmission and the possibility of a “future emerging coronavirus outbreak.” //

While China has stated the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, U.S. officials are skeptical of the claim, with National Review detailing how the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted jobs in November and December of last year to show how they had been working on “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses,” which had “confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases” in December. //

“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” a U.S. official told Rogin.

Game, set, match. //

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the New York Times allowed Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, premium op/ed space to deceptively call for peace and harmony between China and the United States as the battle against the Wuhan coronavirus rages on. //

Morgan Ortagus
✔
@statedeptspox
The U.S. welcomes China’s call to combat the #COVID19 pandemic together. We urge Beijing to share all virus data, let intl teams investigate how the outbreak began in China, & allow citizens free speech. True cooperation requires transparency & real actions, not just rhetoric. //

Hua Chunying 华春莹
✔
@SpokespersonCHN
Welcome to China anytime and talk to anyone in the streets to enjoy the freedom. BTW Where is freedom & transparency when Captain Crozier was dismissed for a letter to save thousands of lives and medical workers fired for talking about working conditions?
//

Brendan Carr
✔
@BrendanCarrFCC
Replying to @BrendanCarrFCC

5. They’re not available for comment? That’s odd.

Then let me speak with Ren Zhiqiang.

He committed the high crime of writing an article criticizing your regime’s attempt to cover up the Covid outbreak.

Could you un-disappear him so we could speak?https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3075256/chinese-tycoon-ren-zhiqiang-goes-missing-after-criticising …
//

Brendan Carr
✔
@BrendanCarrFCC
Replying to @BrendanCarrFCC

9. @SpokespersonCHN does your offer still stand? Or has it suddenly disappeared as things tend to do over there?

From the Golden Globes to 'Mulan,' the foreshocks of a fight over Hollywood's cozy relationship with China are trembling beneath our feet.

Sometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby.

Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large.

They knew and they did it anyway... //

Why did China cut off travel from Hubei, the province with Wuhan in it, to the rest of China — on Jan. 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world? //

To quote Ferguson, “And so long as a fifth of humanity are subject to the will of an unaccountable, corrupt and power-hungry organization with a long history of crimes against its own people, the rest of humanity will not be safe.”

We said this when the media and business connections to the China were all exposed over the Hong Kong protests. But now it’s clear that we need to disconnect, for the safety of our nation and our very lives.

As reported by the Epoch Times, a Harris Poll that was released on Wednesday showed that a whopping 77 percent of Americans are ready to point the finger at China for the situation the globe currently finds itself in, regardless of party:

A survey from Harris Poll on Wednesday shows that 77 percent of Americans nationally blame the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the spread of the virus.

The belief was echoed across the political spectrum (pdf), with 67 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Republicans attributing the CCP virus to the Chinese regime.

What’s more, it would appear that an overwhelming majority believe it’s time to pull our industry from China and get tougher on trade:

Another 71 percent said Americans companies should pull back from manufacturing their products in China, 69 percent said they believe President Donald Trump should persist in his tough trade stance against the regime, and 54 percent said the CCP needs to pay reparations to other countries due to the pandemic.

The million-dollar trade in trafficked rosewood trees

The Rosewood tree is one of the most trafficked species on earth.

When it's cut it bleeds a blood red sap.

Having exhausted stocks elsewhere, Chinese traders have turned to West Africa.

BBC Africa Eye are in Senegal where it is illegal to fell or export a Rosewood tree. And yet, we can reveal they are been logged and smuggled at an alarming rate.

From the forests of Casamance, through the port of neighbouring Gambia and all the way onto China.

For a year BBC Africa Eye with Umaru Fofana has been investigating the million-dollar trade in trafficked rosewood.