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The China Has Been Broken. Now We Have to Clean Up the Mess.
The Democratic Party pro-Chinese propaganda line is now:
The reason that we are in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, not because of anything the WHO did, it’s because of what this president did: Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) said Tuesday.
Here is the truth:
There is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.
This may be the “costliest government cover-up of all time,” one of the sources said.
The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus – a naturally occurring strain that was being studied there – was bat-to-human and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.
…What all of the sources agree about is the extensive cover-up of data and information about COVID-19 orchestrated by the Chinese government.
Documents detail early efforts by doctors at the lab and early efforts at containment. The Wuhan wet market initially identified as a possible point of origin never sold bats, and the sources tell Fox News that blaming the wet market was an effort by China to deflect blame from the laboratory …
U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
..Sources point to the structure of the virus, in saying the genome mapping specifically shows it was not genetically altered.
…On Thursday, China’s foreign ministry pushed back on the suspicion that the virus escaped from the facility, by citing statements from the World Health Organization that there is no evidence the coronavirus came from a laboratory.
…China “100 percent” suppressed data and changed data, the sources tell Fox News. Samples were destroyed, contaminated areas scrubbed, some early reports erased, and academic articles stifled.
There were doctors and journalists who were “disappeared” warning of the spread of the virus and its contagious nature and human to human transmission. China moved quickly to shut down travel domestically from Wuhan to the rest of China, but did not stop international flights from Wuhan.
Additionally, the sources tell Fox News the World Health Organization (WHO) was complicit from the beginning in helping China cover its tracks.
We have done this to ourselves:
New Chinese export restrictions are exacerbating the chronic shortage of protective gear in the U.S. Face masks, test kits and other medical equipment bound for the U.S. are sitting in warehouses across China unable to receive necessary official clearances, some suppliers and brokers told The Wall Street Journal.
Chinese officials have said the policies, instituted this month, are intended to ensure the quality of exported medical products and to make sure needed goods aren’t being shipped out of China. They have created bottlenecks at a time of urgent need, according to the suppliers, brokers and the State Department memos.
I don’t want you to think that my conclusion about the Chinese Communist Regime is driven solely by their misbehavior about releasing COVID-19 into human populations and then lying about what happened. No, it is dozens of items. Here are just a few:
1. Espionage against the United States: Dozens of incidents such as the hacking of US government confidential personnel records. Suborning employees of US defense contractors to steal plans for US weapons systems. Spying on Chinese students at American universities. Stealing trade secrets of American businesses.
2. Leveraging US investments in China to mute criticisms of China by Americans. Most famously, pressuring the NBA to silence an executive of the Houston Rockets who had posted on social media his support for protestors in Hong Kong. Systematically expelling American journalists from China when the wrote stories the regime did not like.
3. Suborning freedom of expression and the rule of law in Hong Kong in violation of the treaty under which Hong Kong was surrendered to the Regime. And violently suppressing protestors against those actions.
4. Systematically destroying the culture and religion of Tibet. And attempting to displace the Tibetan people with Han Chinese. Going so far as to claim that regime has the power to appoint the next Dalai Lama. A task heretofore performed by Buddha.
5. Using gulags and systematic deprivations of human rights to destroy the religion and culture of the Uyghur people. Using them as slave labor in gulags.
6. Claiming that the South China Sea is Chinese territory. A claim that was decisively rejected by the World Court. A judgment that the Regime has simply thumbed its nose at. (Consider this when you listen to their protestations of support for WHO), And threatening US Navy ships exercising the right of innocent passage through those waters.
7. China has caused drought and the destruction of fisheries in the Mekong river valley by damming its headwaters. This has caused poverty and environmental damage in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. China has also caused flooding by unannounced releases of massive quantities of water from its dams. Nice.
8. Backed by armed Chinese Coast Guard ships, Chinese fishing fleets have been raiding Indonesia’s territorial fishing grounds. Chinese trawlers scrape the bottom of the sea, destroying other marine life. So not only does the Chinese trawling breach maritime borders, it also leaves a lifeless seascape in its wake. Indonesian officials have played down incursions by Chinese fishing boats, trying to avoid conflict with Beijing over China’s sprawling claims in these waters.
9. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and refuses to respect the right of Taiwan’s people to determine their own future. China threatens Taiwan with violence if it continues to behave like an independent nation. “The world has entered an eventful period, during which Taiwan is ineligible to play an active role,” China’s state-run Global Times thundered in its anti-Taiwan editorial on Friday, 10 Apr. 2020. “Rash moves made by Taiwan will likely turn the Taiwan Straits into a flashpoint that will severely impact the world order in the post-pandemic era,” … “The island will face real danger at that time.”
10. China has used its “Belt and Road” plan to reduce recipients of its aid like Sri Lanka and Djibouti into debt peonage.
The bill of particulars could go on and on. The conclusion is clear China is imperialistic, arrogant, racist, oppressive, violent, bullying, and the enemy of freedom and the liberal international order. It is time we started treating China the way we treated Russia in the 1950s, as an aggressor and enemy. They are conducting a cold war against us. We need to fight back.
Published in Foreign Policy
11. Systematic industrial espionage.
The DNC like the corporate media like a lot of academia is bought off. The guys at South Park nailed it last fall. (very foul language)
If China can be shown to be the villain, and not Trump, the DNC loses the ability to pin the country’s misery on him. So, what’s worse – kowtowing to the hostile Chinese, or not being able to blame Trump? For Democrats, the choice is easy!
It would be easier to pull that off if this was simply a domestic problem. That fact that it’s not, and that China has antagonized people with their failure to provide forewarning about the virus, their attempt to downplay their infection rates and puff up their recovery rates, their sending test kits and masks to Europe with 50-70 percent failure rates, their targeting of African residents in China for scapegoating of a viral outbreak they’re responsible for, and their attempt to use shipments of generic drugs and other items as a weapon to mute criticism of the regime by blackmailing counties to remain quiet means the Democrats have a lot of leaks to plug.
They can’t simply demonize Trump and his supporters by throwing race cards and spinning blame shifting to the White House and/or Red state governors, if the Europeans, African nations, and other nations in Asia are also going after China’s leadership. That’s would leave the Dems pretty much saying all those other nations are tools of Trump and his minions, while the DNC would be left to partner with Xi and the WHO leadership to try and claim they’re the moral and the aggrieved ones here. Which might work for some Hollywood and other pop culture types, but no swing voters are going to buy that.
Plus the Democrats have to be able to memory-hole the fact that Trump has been saying we have to stand up to China before it’s too late since the Republican debates. And they all of course called him a racist. All of this must not be remembered.
I have read several analyses like this lately. (Well, I guess we must all have, since I read them here.)
One of them – it might have been a General with experience in China interviewed on the Dennis Miller program – said that it is and has always been the CCP’s goal to restore China to its former (500 years ago?) glory as the center of the universe. Dominant in the entire world. Then things will be as they should be, forever.
In this pursuit, our continued existence is not necessary. Only the land and buildings – much of which they already own. When we fought the Cold War, the Soviets wanted to dominate, and be strongest, and complete the glorious revolution by converting all of us into workers for the great socialist state. They had no interest in our extermination, just our conversion.
But it sounds like the CCP has a different set of priorities. They want to dominate the world, but return it to the Chinese. It’s more of a racial thing. We are not Chinese, and never can be – conversion isn’t in the picture. So we don’t figure in the plan. So if many or most of us die in the process of restoration, oh well, not important. Probably better, in fact. The West is defined as being made up of individuals, and a Communist Party has no use for individuals.
If something like this is true, we’d better figure it out quick, because this is going to be a war like nobody has ever imagined.
I once lived in Connecticut. Murphy is the biggest fan of Iran and China in the senate. It would not shock me in the slightest if I learned he’s a paid agent.
It has been 245 years. The battle was fought on 19 April 1775. The ride began late in the evening, on 18 April.
Some one needs to summon his ghost to ride through the streets of our cities calling to the citizens: “The Chinese are out”.
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was the closest thing we got to a declaration of Cold War I. What is the moment that people accept that Cold War II is underway? From the speech —
Substitute China for Russia and acknowledge the influence they have already gained in dividing the interests of the West. If COVID-19 is not a rallying point for push back on China, nothing is.
Lee Smith’s Tablet Magazine piece looks at the origins:
The delusion was the the US could make China over in its own image. But the PRC has its own ideas.
SARS-CoV-2 has shown that Feinstein’s party and the establishment typified by Kissinger are eager to spread China’s central control and social credit viruses in the USA.
I can see how Kissinger’s actions at that time might be interpreted that way by some people, but most people, including me, believe his intention was to put an American wedge between the USSR and Chinese Communists. That he succeeded is to his everlasting credit.
I read a couple of books three years ago on the history of education in postwar China. The books were written by Zhu Yongxin, the secretary of education in China during that entire 50-year time period. The Chinese Communists looked to the USSR Communists for instruction on, for example, how to interpret Marx and how to implement communism in the “right way,” as if there were such a thing and as if Marx wrote sacred texts.
I came away from reading these books with a new respect for Henry Kissinger’s wisdom in inserting us between the Russian and Chinese Communists.
Kissinger’s life story shaped him as a conservative anti-socialist:
Kissinger’s action to push Nixon into rapprochement with China came after the Sino-Soviet border clashes in 1969, and as the U.S. was still in the Vietnam conflict. Different times. Our mistake was in thinking, after the Gang of Four was beaten and Deng Xiaoping began the period of economic liberalization, that the change would eventually cause China’s leadership to also allow more political freedom. That got beaten back at Tienanmen Square, and the current Chinese leadership under Xi comes with the belief they can micro-manage the Chinese economy and use it even more towards political ends than the regimes immediately before it.
The fact that the COVID outbreak came immediately after the initial protests in Hong Kong over Xi’s regime trying to curb the island’s freedom set the stage for the current actions, to where you have to be willfully blind and/or paid off by China not to realize what’s going on.
So I understand from reading this and/or that about the cultural roots of Xi’s goals, but . . . how can they expect to get something they never had? “Returning” the world to the Chinese suggests they possessed it once, but lost it. Occasional regional domination is one thing, but it’s hardly the world.
I agree with this characterization, but I am still confident that the overarching issue was to put us between the USSR and the Chinese Communists.
It is their myth. However far the world extends, they should dominate. Xi thinks he is on the path. Inevitable, to coin a phrase. This is going to be a tough transition but flights to and from China? History. Travel to and from China? Sorry, that will be a month quarantine at a government facility. If it’s permitted at all.
The pandemic didn’t break during the climax of the impeachment by accident. It was already bubbling when Trump got his trade deal with the Chinese he was so proud of.
The media and politicians have managed the public so hamhandedly into the crisis Trump won. Pelosi and Xi have been trying to buffalo Trump since the day he was elected. But the stupidity has spilled over and the threat is obvious. Biden isn’t going to help the Dems on this with his history.
Let’s see how long it takes Apple to reposition their manufacturing operations. Given the PR hits they’ve taken for their operations there, I’ll bet they have plans ready to go.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes Big Pharma to remember how to make drugs again. Snowflakes are going to need to toughen up.
Yes. Mao’s actions had weakened China to the point that while they were a threat to their immediate neighbors, they weren’t a global danger in the late 1960s as the Soviet Union was. The Nixon-Kissinger overture was meant to lock in the Russian-Chinese hostility, after U.S. officials in the first 20 years after Mao’s takeover feared a Sino-Soviet alliance.
There has been a lot of consolidation of drug companies. I used to joke to the people who worked there that the one near us was a Work-Free Drug-Place. But it was actually a good company and came up with a number of good products. Most of the people I knew who worked there were in the research division. But it was bought out by a bigger company, which was still a good company and still researched new products. Then that company was bought out by an even bigger company that had a reputation for being able to schmooze the regulators, even if it didn’t have any new drugs in the pipeline other than the ones it got when it gobbled up smaller companies. Research was discontinued in our community, and the researchers had to move elsewhere if they wanted to stay with the company. Some of them are still with it, to judge by my seldom-used LinkedIn account, but it’s not a company known for coming up with new products. Some people who stayed with it a number of years said it has an arrogant management that doesn’t think it has anything to learn from the companies it swallowed up. (Yes, there is some bitterness about what happened. Use your own salt as seasoning.)
Sounds like a sterling market opportunity to me. And I’ve seen the ravages of “creative destruction” up close, I am not an unconditional fan. Externalities matter. So who is going to undertake the manufacture of low return generics long past their patents? And how far will the FDA unclinch to streamline the transition in the name of national security?
Yes, separating the PRC and the USSR was a worthwhile thing to do. But Smith is pointing out unintended consequences. First, Kissinger is not a neutral third party:
But mainly Smith thinks that Kissinger holds fantasies about China; Western fantasies that predate Mao. I think he’s on to something.
And:
Because Kissinger has wet dreams of collecting massive funds from CCP sources at Buddhist Temples. Oh, wait, sorry, that was Vice President Al Gore.
Or of using federal defense contractor Loral to sell US strategic missile secrets to the CCP. Oh, oops, that was President Bill Clinton.
Or of leasing strategic container port facilities at Long Beach for forty years to the CCP, also giving CCP agents total surveillance capability over the Port of Los Angeles and nearby naval bases. Wait, no, that was champion of the oppressed President Barack Obama.
Yes, Kissinger supported the initial terms. Terms that could have worked if American administrations had applied steady pressure for Chinese political reform. It was homegrown American corruption out of places like Tennessee, Arkansas, and Illinois that allowed the miserable outcome over decades of beak wetting.
But, yeah, Kissinger is the real villain. Thanks for clearing that up for us.
Yes, I was wondering about that too. That’s why I inserted that “500 years ago?” question – I also don’t know what they’re talking about. But I guess if they believe it, and can convince their subjects that it is true, we have just as big a problem.
I am so glad the Kissenger family escaped Nazi Germany and persecution.
Virus are part of life, the same as evil people. We should fight both.
That includes the destructive cadre of people who lead the CCP.
In the same way Hitler demanded loyalty to party, the same for the people of China.
How can Americans find a way to connect with the humans in China, and empower them to embrace freedom, and conquer the slavery of the CCP?
Is there a remnant of freedom loving Chinese? Our biggest mistake seems to be in permitting the CCP wholesale freedom to send their representatives here.
How many Chinese immigrants DEFECT from the CCP? Embracing the principles of Freedom?
And how can we empower those that do convert to Freedom to influence, support, and bring hope to the Chinese left behind, enslaved by the CCP?
Is there no 21st Century Underground Railroad. That would be a globalist effort I could support.
can you elaborate? I am not blind, but I seem to have lost my glasses regarding this.
But if they successfully gain dominance through globalism, would that not be the 21st Century version of “regional” dominance?
I’ve heard it said the Chinese play the long game. Im certain we need to change or thinking and play the linger game. Otherwise, they will gain supremacy.
Isn’t our biggest mistake in letting China (and other companies) operate in our markets outside the stringent rules, taxation, and obligations forced on our American companies?
Sadly, it may be our political leaders sold us out to line their pockets.
What is the long path to regaining control and becoming self-sufficient?
It was. Permanent Normal Trade Relations was later, and has Republican fingerprints all over it.
BILL TITLE: To Authorize Extension of Nondiscriminatory Treatment (Normal Trade Relations Treatment) to the People’s Republic of China
The Senate was 83-15 with two abstentions.
The objections were about China’s belligerent attitude, job protection, human rights, and trade rule violations.
Newt: “We thought getting them into a rules-based system would gradually permeate their culture and that’d be a big step in the right direction…”
How’s that been working out for us?
The big corporations don’t want to leave China. We also have serious technology and manufacturing deficits, including STEM education (now poisoned by the SJWs) and lack of skills.
David Goldman at Asia Times:
And:
And:
If education in the US were fixed today (killing the administrative bloat and purging the SJWs; that has to happen in business and industry, too,) it’s at least a generation. Since those are major Democrat power centers and indoctrination operations, it’s not going to happen fast. That parasitic drain on the US economy will continue.
I can’t think of anything that would provoke me to invest in a pharma startup. If you have an idea for a Tesla and some of the necessary charisma and experience, you can round up some serious startup cash. But there is an idea at the start of it. What idea is anyone going to use to start up pharmaceutical company? The ideas for new drugs are not the brainchildren of lone entrepreneurs, as far as I know.
The huge costs for FDA approval are an obstacle, but even if that process were to be reformed, it would still be an expensive business.
As for fostering the manufacture of low return generics, I don’t have any ideas.
J.D. Vance:
It was conceivable to think that could have been an outcome, alas it is not so.
We can manage relations with China in the same way we learn to treat Coronavirus, by observing, acting and adapting, to get the result we can live with.
The foundational principles are important. I think that is where there is disagreement on both China, and Coronavirus.