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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
Are you saying what we have is a reliance on superpowerful calculators for basics, thus can’t even function in advanced engineering landscapes?
That the foundational mastery of advanced mathematics allows egineers to use computers as tools to quickly calculate what they know, on the route to creating and implementing new ideas, rather than using computers as idea generators?
Not what I said. Whatever the merits of opening China were, and it did seem like a good idea at the time and had some good results. As a diplomat to his bones, he is very process oriented. In addition, Kissinger is still a globalist of sorts, and his wetting his own beak (sure, that’s how the game is played) later on the fruits of the China diplomacy mean that he benefits personally from the status quo, which should be taken into account when you judge his statements for the last number of years. As you correctly pointed out, later administrations–and legislators at every level in both parties–looked at the pretty shiny Chinese trinkets and sold Manhattan.
This is most certainly true. Thank you for clarifying.
His Diplomacy is a fascinating read. I’m used to reading histories centering around some combination of politics, military affairs, and economics. A history of how diplomacy shaped Europe and then the world, written by a significant scholar who was also a major diplomatic player for years was an eye opener. After the first couple of hundred pages it was a page turner.
Growing up, I was a frequent guest in the home of a Washington Post foreign correspondent. (He had a lovely daughter. Four of them, actually, but one in particular.) They never talked shop in front of me except a time or two when Kissinger had done something. In DC in general, Kissinger’s name reliably produced eye rolls. I have read favorable reviews of Kissinger’s books and always had him on my long, long, long list of people I must read.
Thank you for a starting point. If I have learned anything in a life of trying to learn everything, it is that I know nothing. I wonder if, in the next life, I will just read for the first few billion years to catch up with my ambitions.