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Showing posts with label US President Donald Trump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US President Donald Trump. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

US president’s move to get a cut from TikTok as an ‘extortion threat’ and ‘mafia deal’

Washington robs TikTok by treading upon rules

TikTok for Business: What is TikTok Anyway?
Exclusive: ByteDance investors value TikTok at $50 billion in ... 


Countries mull reducing reliance on US tech in wake of TikTok drama

As the US shocked the free world with its mafia-style forced sale of Chinese-owned short-form video platform TikTok, Chinese experts said that US extortion and looting have left a deep impression on the minds of the nations of the world, and pointed out that many of the countries are already striving to boost self-reliance in terms of security, industrial independence and technological ownership.

Expert slams US president’s move to get a cut from TikTok as an ‘extortion threat’ and ‘mafia deal’


https://youtu.be/cOgQnIJJRZs

https://youtu.be/j7Zi1CCtQIQ

Controversial: Trump has said he would approve TikTok’s sale to Microsoft only if the US government gets a cut from the deal. — Reuters
TikTok's roller-coaster ride in the United States continued on Monday as President Donald Trump said he would approve the video-sharing app's sale to Microsoft only if the US government gets a cut, a condition that one expert called a "mafia" deal.

The president also gave Microsoft and TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, a deadline of Sept 15 to complete the deal, or the app will be banned in the US.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular media briefing in Beijing on Tuesday that the US treatment of TikTok is "outright bullying", and the US only uses a "national security risk" as an excuse to suppress Chinese tech enterprises.

"The relevant enterprises carry out business activities in the US following market principles and international rules and abiding by local laws and regulations," he said. "However, the US has set restrictions and suppressed them with unwarranted charges, which is political manipulation."

Wang said that if the wrongdoing by the US continues, then any country could take similar measures against any American enterprise on the grounds of national security.

"The US side must not open this Pandora's box, otherwise it will suffer its consequences," he said.

The increased scrutiny of TikTok culminated on Friday when Trump threatened to ban the app from operating in the US due to a "national security risk". The negotiations between the two companies were then halted.

But after a weekend phone call with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Trump reversed his stance and reportedly gave the two companies 45 days to close the deal. This was confirmed by Microsoft on Sunday, which said in a statement it "will move quickly to pursue discussions" with ByteDance and complete the talks "no later than" Sept 15.

The president added a condition to the potential purchase on Monday: Microsoft should buy TikTok outright, and the US Treasury Department should be paid because the government made the deal possible.

"It's a little bit like the landlord/tenant; without a lease the tenant has nothing, so they pay what's called 'key money', or they pay something," Trump told reporters in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Monday. "But the United States should be reimbursed or should be paid a substantial amount of money, because, without the United States, they don't have anything."

Investors in privately owned Byte-Dance valued TikTok at $50 billion, according to a Reuters report.

Kai-Fu Lee, former chairman of Google China, said the US treatment of TikTok, including "forced acquisition, plus only 45 days, plus finder's fees", is "incredible".

Lee said that China has set clear rules for internet companies that want to operate in the country, and Google had decided to exit as it didn't want to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.

"The US didn't give any parameters that TikTok could work with, and didn't provide any evidence for their claims that TikTok had caused national security risks to the US," he said.

The legal basis of Trump's requirement that some of the money from the deal go to the US Treasury was immediately questioned by experts.

"This is quite unusual; this is out of the norm," Gene Kimmelman, a former chief counsel for the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, told CNN.

"It's actually quite hard to understand what the president is actually talking about here.... It's not unheard of for transactions to have broader geopolitical implications between countries, but it's quite remarkable to think about some kind of money being on the table in connection with a transaction," said Kimmelman, a senior adviser to the policy group Public Knowledge.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., said Trump's "extortion threat" is a "mafia business model".

"Trump's full explanation of why the Treasury should get a 'cut' of a Microsoft/TikTok deal is, somehow, even more grotesque and shameless than I had anticipated," said Sanchez.

"As with his tariff policy, there doesn't seem to be any consideration of whether this sets a dangerous precedent for other countries to engage in similar pretextual protectionism against us, or how whimsically compelling divestment might affect international investment," he said.

Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, also warned that shutting down the app altogether would set "a dangerous precedent in which the US government can blacklist companies based on country of origin using blanket national security as justification".

The Trump administration has been scrutinizing TikTok for several months, claiming that the platform shares the data of US users with the Chinese government. The company has repeatedly denied the accusations, maintaining that all the users' information is stored in the US.

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Related:

US degrades from innovator to digital rogue

While China is busy innovating, the US is guarding against an innovative China. This twisted behavior has prevented the US from continuing to innovate and reform. The dominant position it acquired, or its hegemony, is becoming a self-inflicted fetter for its progress. 


Hard to say who will surprise you in the future, US or TikTok

In addition to power, there exist rules and morals in this world. Although Trump's power can overwhelm rules and ethics, he has only fewer than three months left before the presidential election. People have a subtle perception of rules and ethics in their minds. Trump could thus lose votes due to any most slightly careless move. 
 

TikTok ban demonstrates barbaric act of rogue US: Global Times editorial

In the most barbaric way, the US is trying to solidify a high-tech world order in which it is the absolute center. Whether it ends up "killing" TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of Bytedance's arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in the high-tech competition
 

Trump wants to kill TikTok


 

 We are not the enemy: TikTok chief


https://youtu.be/4bS5ukQGa_Y

TikTok users take on Trump

https://youtu.be/Jo6LHELhhnM  



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US adopts blinkered view of TikTok

 

Unknown Chinese startup creates the world's most valuable Bytedance


Sunday, March 29, 2020

How China and US can end their rivalry

https://youtu.be/Pucoeb2KKOQ

How China can end US rivalry and realise its vision of a shared future for humanity, as the world struggles with the pandemic

The US-China rivalry only feeds the pandemic, when global cooperation is needed. This is where China’s vision of a shared destiny for humanity can be useful, provided it can be elevated above suspicions of a Beijing power grab


I cannot imagine richer nutrients for the novel coronavirus to reproduce and spread, to flourish globally, than the United States and China continuing to descend into unabashed and undisguised rivalry, with escalating accusations each against the other. Nourish the virus with US-China competition. Or starve the virus with US-China cooperation.

Never has such cooperation been needed more urgently – to battle and contain the pandemic and to sustain and bolster the world economy. Containing the global pandemic, like bolstering the global economy, depends on US-China collaboration.

. If climate change is the world’s most intractable chronic problem, then Covid-19 is the world’s most severe acute problem. My two favourite countries have a choice: either work together to fight the pandemic, developing drugs and vaccines to kill and stop Covid-19, or suffer an out-of-control global pandemic and a chain-reaction cratering of the global economy. Truly, nations will fight the virus and collectively win, or fight each other and collectively lose.

Although China has well-earned respect for curbing its outbreak, there is room for critique, correction and improvement. President Xi Jinping stresses drawing lessons from the outbreak to improve the country's systems for major epidemic control, prevention and public health emergency management.

Apropos of the pandemic, Xi’s repeated call to build “a community with a shared future for all humanity” is a grand vision with multiple applications. For seven years, it has driven foreign policy, especially the Belt and Road Initiative , helping to rectify global imbalances.

https://youtu.be/v34MfJJAZA0

While fighting disease or controlling pandemics have always been a “shared future” benefit, it was always tucked within lists of other benefits, such as climate control, preventing terrorism, interdicting drugs and the like. Few ever imagined that a pandemic could become so grave so fast. But as the pandemic has burst into planetary consciousness, it demonstrates viscerally the global criticality of “shared future” thinking.

The challenge for China is to elevate Xi’s vision above what appears to some as competitive positioning or even as a sprint to assert China’s leadership. China’s experience in containing the contagion, which many countries now desperately need, provides just such an opportunity.

By sending “battle-tested” medical teams to countries under siege, China brings to bear experts with contemporary frontline epidemic experience. What is not well appreciated in the tops-of-trees daily recitations of cases and deaths are China’s evolved know-how and the meticulous work of Chinese health care and logistics professionals.

Exporting coronavirus knowledge, China sends medical teams to countries to help fight pandemic https://youtu.be/jTtqB-zVUAw

There is a problem, though. Emotions worldwide are frayed, rubbed raw by the pandemic’s daily-life disruptions, with economic devastation threatening to exceed that of the 2008 global financial crisis. In this toxic psychological environment, when non-stop news, especially in social media, amplifies fantastical, scurrilous, unsubstantiated rumours by insensitive officials or block-brained conspiracy theorists, attitudes harden and antagonisms ossify. Indigenous nationalism flares in vicious circles.

It takes no cleverness to inflame feelings with glib rhetoric or political insults. Rational people must work together, not allow fringe invective to erode the capacity to fight a common enemy.

Containment of the polemic will be more challenging than containment of the coronavirus; the latter likely to burn out before the former. If so, Chinese views of America, and American views of China, are only going to deteriorate further, to the detriment of all. Enlightened leadership should temper, not inflame, indigenous nationalism. We cannot allow mutual exhaustion to be our last hope.

Trump stops calling coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’ and says Asian-Americans not to blame for outbreak https://youtu.be/7DbgSMD847Q

China’s vision of “a community with a shared future for mankind”, exhorting all nations to act for the common good, fits our turbulent times. For this reason, China should resist finding this phrase turned into a cliché or satire, catalysed inadvertently by endless repetition or forced conformity into a single expression or translation.

Why not encourage various expressions, enabling officials and experts to use their own words, thereby enriching the vision, keeping it fresh and timely?

Originally, the English translation was “a community of common destiny for mankind”, which is more literal and rather elegant. But then, I was told, “destiny” was deemed to be too passive or fatalistic, not sufficiently proactive and positive, which led to the less literal “shared future”. “Shared future” is an evocative phase, reflecting Chinese tradition and offering hope for a better tomorrow.

Yet with constant repetition, “a community with a shared future for mankind” can begin to sound, paradoxically, like an exclusive Chinese mantra, and thereby can begin to elicit, in some countries or cultures, negative emotions, instead of conveying positive contributions.


Labels carry messages – and some interpret China’s phrase as seeking to get the whole world to march under its national banner. This misreads China, but by triggering resistance, the static phrase undermines China’s capacity to help bring about in reality such a community of common destiny or shared future.

China’s vision is a universal message shared by many cultures and China might reach out for similar ideas. China’s challenge is to express the vision in language with which other cultures can identify and feel comfortable supporting.

To be clear, read literally and without bias, a “community with a shared future for mankind” is a powerful exhortation that should benefit the world. That is why the phrase should be protected and enriched by also allowing other, diverse English phrases to represent the original Chinese.

A third of coronavirus cases may be 'silent carriers', classified Chinese data suggests
https://youtu.be/S31-qL_Ax5E

The objective is to enable the global community to take collective ownership of the grand vision. Given the global pandemic, the global community must take collective ownership.

Here are three other possible expressions, the first more literal, the second and third taking more explanatory licence: humanity is a community of common destiny (a shared future); humanity’s common destiny (shared future) is the guiding principle of our times; and, recognise humanity’s common destiny (shared future) to build a global community.

What China seeks is what humanity needs, especially with the pandemic, and it behooves people of goodwill everywhere to work together to transform rhetoric into reality. - South China Morning Post.

By Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a public intellectual and international corporate strategist, won the China Reform Friendship Medal (2018)


Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual, international corporate strategist and investment banker, and a China political/economics commentator featured on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg. For more than 25 years, he has worked with China’s leaders. He has published over 30 books, including How China’s Leaders Think (featuring President Xi Jinping), and The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin. He is the host of Closer to China with R.L.Kuhn on CCTV News.

Coronavirus outbreak Coronavirus outbreak: All stories | US-China relations | US-China trade war | US-China trade war: Opinion | US-China trade war: All stories | Belt and Road Initiative | Belt and Road: Comment | China leadership

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Read more:

New York State has nearly 60,000 confirmed cases

https://youtu.be/t2Pm4H7nLzE

Chinese experts, netizens offer advice to help US combat coronavirus

The US, the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic with the highest infections of over 100,000 now, should announce stringent lockdowns in the worst-hit regions and accelerate testing and hospitalization to curb the spread of the virus, which might help save time wasted from previous buck-passing, Chinese experts said.

Wuhan's manufacturing back on track as industrial powerhouse lifts lockdown

Wuhan – the industrial city in Central China's Hubei Province where the coronavirus first emerged in the country – is restarting commercial and production activities following a two-month lockdown. The sprawling city is likely to revive its pillar manufacturing industry soon although it faces labor shortages.


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Friday, March 20, 2020

China achieved zero domestic infection of COVID-19, Trump ‘Chinese Virus’ backfires!

https://youtu.be/_zElnBGUj-w

https://youtu.be/_mSwlPKFjQM

https://youtu.be/8WkAZ5FzttM

https://youtu.be/biXC8VhJdnA

https://youtu.be/2QVCe22Sqgw

COVID-19 happening in China doesn't mean it originated in China

https://youtu.be/PEycNugHmrU

https://youtu.be/w9_7FyQ9vIg

BEIJING: China on Thursday marked a major milestone in its battle against the coronavirus pandemic as it recorded zero domestic infections for the first time since the outbreak emerged, but a spike in imported cases threatened its progress.

The stark reversal comes as nations across the world have shut down in a desperate effort to contain the pandemic, with more people now infected and having died abroad than in China.

There were no new cases in Wuhan, the central city where the virus first emerged in December for the first time since authorities started publishing figures in January, according to the National Health Commission.

Wuhan and its 11 million people were placed under strict quarantine on Jan 23, with more than 40 million other people in the rest of Hubei province entering lockdown in the following days.

The rest of China also enacted tough measures to limit public gatherings.

There were eight more deaths in China all in Hubei raising the nationwide total to 3,245, according to the commission.

There have been nearly 81,000 infections in China but only 7,263 people remain sick with the Covid-19 disease.

The global number has shot past 200,000, with more than 8,700 deaths.

On March 10, President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan for the first time since the outbreak began and declared that the spread of the disease was “basically curbed”.

On the same day, Hubei officials allowed people to travel within the province for the first time since January, excluding Wuhan.

On Wednesday, Hubei authorities announced they were partially opening its borders to allow healthy people from low-risk areas to leave the province if they have jobs or residences elsewhere. This also excludes Wuhan.

Life has slowly started to return to normal in the rest of the country, with people back at work, factories up and running, and schools in some regions resuming or preparing to go back to class.

Second wave

But there is concern about a second wave of infections due to an influx of cases from abroad, with an average of 20,000 people flying into China every day.

Beijing and other regions are now requiring most international arrivals to go into 14-day quarantine in designated hotels.

The National Health Commission said there were 34 more cases brought in from abroad, the biggest daily increase in two weeks, with 189 in total now.

“We should never allow the hard-won and continuous positive trend to be reversed,“ Xi said at a Communist Party leadership meeting on Wednesday.

The disease is believed to have jumped from an animal to humans at a market that illegally sold wild game in Wuhan late last year.

There have also been questions about China’s official figures, as authorities changed its methodology to count infections, and the government has endured rare public criticism of its handling of the health emergency.

Local officials initially attempted to cover up the outbreak, with police silencing doctors who had raised the alarm about the emergence of the new virus as early as December.

One of the whistleblowers, Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, died from the virus himself in February, sparking an outpouring of grief and anger on social media.

The first case emerged in Wuhan on Dec 1, according to Chinese researchers, but it was not until Jan 9 the country confirmed a “new type of coronavirus”.

Between Jan 5 and 17, China reported no new cases of the virus, even as Japan and Thailand declared first infections a period that coincided with annual political meetings in Wuhan and Hubei province. - AFP

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Trump's ‘Chinese Virus’ backfires!

US President Donald Trump makes a statement for the press after a meeting with nursing industry representatives in the Roosevelt Room of the White House about the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP

  https://youtu.be/_4MTxETPPX8


US President Donald Trump has referred to the novel coronavirus as "Chinese virus" at least eight times in tweets and media briefings within just two days, fueling widespread xenophobia and racist sentiment and even physical and verbal attacks against Asian Americans and undermining global efforts to contain the deadly virus.

Trump's comment, which is completely against science and facts, could also further promote already-growing populism and racism around the world amid the global pandemic that could plunge countries and regions that have been hit severely by the disease into further disarray and dark abyss, observers warned.

After tweeting several times "Chinese virus" to shift the blame to China, Trump insisted on calling it a "Chinese virus" because "it comes from China," in response to a question from an American journalist on Wednesday. Growing numbers of Asian Americans have been frustrated by the labels of "Chinese virus" or "kung flu," which risk turning them into a target of hatred and retaliation as the pandemic unfolds quickly in the country.

Trump started to use the term "Chinese virus" on Monday in six of his tweets, despite Vice President Mike Pence, head of the country's coronavirus task force, still called it "coronavirus" on Wednesday. Trump stressed it is a Chinese virus twice in his opening remarks at a White House meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. The White House even backed it up by tweeting that the "Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, Zika and Ebola were named after places."

The coronavirus pandemic has so far claimed 220,000 infections worldwide,

Apart from Trump, other US officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, GOP lawmakers Tom Cotton, Paul Gosar and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have been using terms like Wuhan virus and Chinese virus in public, intentionally stigmatizing China and Wuhan.

Downplaying his racist rhetoric, Trump argued he wanted to be accurate as he believed the virus comes from China, totally ignoring the impact on the Asian community, according to observers, local residents and some influencers.

Photo: GT  

Offensive and immoral

On Wednesday, Trump dubbed the coronavirus "Chinese virus" three times in an hour, according to media reports, which seriously infuriated not only Chinese people but also many Asian Americans. Given the rising crimes against Asian and Chinese communities, some urged Trump to resign as such blunt incitement of racism is so dangerous that it could tear the world apart.

Some even shared their personal stories on social media about being insulted or attacked because of their skin color, ethnic group or nationality since the outbreak, and some said they don't feel safe and feel severely offended, because racist terms encourage xenophobia and discrimination, which could last longer than the pandemic itself.

Jordan Matsudaira, an Asian-looking professor in New York, said his "children are being called 'coronavirus' in school, and this is racist, vile and intentional," in a tweet.

And Cenk Uygur, a Los Angeles-based online news show host, said as his wife is from Taiwan that his children's classmates are already blaming them "for the virus" and some ask them if they eat bats, because of "racists and a**holes like Senator John Cornyn and Trump."

A New York-based Chinese woman, who preferred not to be named, shared an anecdote with the Global Times on Thursday that when she drove and waited at a traffic light one day, an American originally from Mexico spat at her car window, shouting, "F**king virus Chinese," which "made her really sick," she said.

The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) said in a recent article that continuing calling COVID-19 Chinese virus could be used to denigrate a group and implicitly blame Chinese people for the outbreak, despite the World Health Organization's stepped up efforts to push back against stigmatizing terms that needlessly divide COVID-19 rhetoric.

The WHO came up in 2015 with guidelines on naming diseases, claiming that geographic locations, people's names, animal species or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references and those inciting undue fear should be avoided in disease names, after the organization saw certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, according to its website.

Some American scientists and medical experts also showed their support for WHO's naming of COVID-19, emphasizing that it should not spark any political debates.

Some prominent figures in Chinese science circles also joined in to fight the 'Chinese virus' slander. Rao Yi, president of Capital Medical University in Beijing, said in a WeChat article on Wednesday that according to the US government's logic, the first AIDS case was reported in the US on June 5, 1981, so should AIDS be called an American venereal disease and HIV the "American venereal virus?"

And should the spirochete leading to syphilis, which is widely considered to have originated in North America and transmitted to Europe by the Spanish, be called "North American spirochete?" he asked.

"Those officials who called it 'Chinese virus' are among those who have the lowest moral standards," Lü Xiang, a research fellow on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Take at look at what US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on January 30 said about the deadly virus, that it would help accelerate the return of jobs to the US. That claim reflected their true intention and deeply-rooted wishes that the virus could only spread in China, from which they could take advantage of, Lü said.

However, observers warned that rising hatred toward certain ethnic groups, entangled in the rise of right-wing populism amid the outbreak, would accelerate divisions and confrontations across the globe, which would also be dangerous and harmful following racial animosity and deaths from despair amid the outbreak.

Shift the blame

Eduardo Bolsonaro, Brazilian congressman, said in a tweet that what's happening now is HBO's TV series "Chernobyl," blaming China for the coronavirus outbreak, reflecting some countries' relentless efforts to pass the buck to Beijing and hide their own incompetence in curbing the virus spread across local communities, analysts said.

On Wednesday, a Danish education studio was revealed to have published an insulting song to introduce the novel coronavirus to children that contained lyrics like, "I am a new virus, I come from China," triggering a backlash on Chinese social media. The incident happened about two months after a major Danish newspaper published a cartoon with the five stars on China's national flag replaced by five coronavirus images.

"It's inevitable that populism would be prevalent in the future, and it has become a common practice that specific groups would be targeted by hostility and hatred, which would have severe consequences," Zhang Yiwu, a cultural professor at Peking University, told the Global Times.

Still, some US politicians, including Democrats like Joe Biden, have publicly criticized such inflammatory coronavirus rhetoric, and Biden was quoted as saying in media reports that "labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace the accountability for the misjudgments that have taken place so far by the Trump administration."

"This is also a tactic that these US politicians use to redirect public attention by shifting suspicions over their incompetence to hatred toward China, but it won't work, and the collapse on Wall Street proves it," Lü said.


Read more:

No new Covid-19 cases in Hubei | The Star Online

Trump puts Asian Americans at risk with racist claim

Trump should stop his blame game and focus on epidemic prevention, because finding scapegoats cannot cover up the fact that he has not responded properly to the epidemic.

China turns corner as West slips up; reports zero Covid-19 ...

China to firmly support its media to safeguard reputation, interests: Chinese FM

China supports its media in safeguarding their reputation and interests, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, adding that China is forced to take relevant countermeasures against American media reporters in China, based on the principle of reciprocity.

 

Why Wuhan is significant to China's high-tech industry 

 

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China achieved zero domestic infection of COVID-19, Trump's ‘Chinese Virus’ backfires!

https://youtu.be/NHKs8clA4GI

https://youtu.be/_zElnBGUj-w

https://youtu.be/_mSwlPKFjQM

https://youtu.be/8WkAZ5FzttM

https://youtu.be/biXC8VhJdnA

https://youtu.be/2QVCe22Sqgw

COVID-19 happening in China doesn't mean it originated in China

https://youtu.be/PEycNugHmrU

https://youtu.be/w9_7FyQ9vIg

BEIJING: China on Thursday marked a major milestone in its battle against the coronavirus pandemic as it recorded zero domestic infections for the first time since the outbreak emerged, but a spike in imported cases threatened its progress.

The stark reversal comes as nations across the world have shut down in a desperate effort to contain the pandemic, with more people now infected and having died abroad than in China.

There were no new cases in Wuhan, the central city where the virus first emerged in December for the first time since authorities started publishing figures in January, according to the National Health Commission.

Wuhan and its 11 million people were placed under strict quarantine on Jan 23, with more than 40 million other people in the rest of Hubei province entering lockdown in the following days.

The rest of China also enacted tough measures to limit public gatherings.

There were eight more deaths in China all in Hubei raising the nationwide total to 3,245, according to the commission.

There have been nearly 81,000 infections in China but only 7,263 people remain sick with the Covid-19 disease.

The global number has shot past 200,000, with more than 8,700 deaths.

On March 10, President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan for the first time since the outbreak began and declared that the spread of the disease was “basically curbed”.

On the same day, Hubei officials allowed people to travel within the province for the first time since January, excluding Wuhan.

On Wednesday, Hubei authorities announced they were partially opening its borders to allow healthy people from low-risk areas to leave the province if they have jobs or residences elsewhere. This also excludes Wuhan.

Life has slowly started to return to normal in the rest of the country, with people back at work, factories up and running, and schools in some regions resuming or preparing to go back to class.

Second wave

But there is concern about a second wave of infections due to an influx of cases from abroad, with an average of 20,000 people flying into China every day.

Beijing and other regions are now requiring most international arrivals to go into 14-day quarantine in designated hotels.

The National Health Commission said there were 34 more cases brought in from abroad, the biggest daily increase in two weeks, with 189 in total now.

“We should never allow the hard-won and continuous positive trend to be reversed,“ Xi said at a Communist Party leadership meeting on Wednesday.

The disease is believed to have jumped from an animal to humans at a market that illegally sold wild game in Wuhan late last year.

There have also been questions about China’s official figures, as authorities changed its methodology to count infections, and the government has endured rare public criticism of its handling of the health emergency.

Local officials initially attempted to cover up the outbreak, with police silencing doctors who had raised the alarm about the emergence of the new virus as early as December.

One of the whistleblowers, Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, died from the virus himself in February, sparking an outpouring of grief and anger on social media.

The first case emerged in Wuhan on Dec 1, according to Chinese researchers, but it was not until Jan 9 the country confirmed a “new type of coronavirus”.

Between Jan 5 and 17, China reported no new cases of the virus, even as Japan and Thailand declared first infections a period that coincided with annual political meetings in Wuhan and Hubei province. - AFP

Source link

Trump's ‘Chinese Virus’ backfires!

US President Donald Trump makes a statement for the press after a meeting with nursing industry representatives in the Roosevelt Room of the White House about the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP


https://youtu.be/41c_VCRamH4

  https://youtu.be/_4MTxETPPX8

https://youtu.be/tRLDPy1A8pI

US President Donald Trump has referred to the novel coronavirus as "Chinese virus" at least eight times in tweets and media briefings within just two days, fueling widespread xenophobia and racist sentiment and even physical and verbal attacks against Asian Americans and undermining global efforts to contain the deadly virus.

Trump's comment, which is completely against science and facts, could also further promote already-growing populism and racism around the world amid the global pandemic that could plunge countries and regions that have been hit severely by the disease into further disarray and dark abyss, observers warned.

After tweeting several times "Chinese virus" to shift the blame to China, Trump insisted on calling it a "Chinese virus" because "it comes from China," in response to a question from an American journalist on Wednesday. Growing numbers of Asian Americans have been frustrated by the labels of "Chinese virus" or "kung flu," which risk turning them into a target of hatred and retaliation as the pandemic unfolds quickly in the country.

Trump started to use the term "Chinese virus" on Monday in six of his tweets, despite Vice President Mike Pence, head of the country's coronavirus task force, still called it "coronavirus" on Wednesday. Trump stressed it is a Chinese virus twice in his opening remarks at a White House meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. The White House even backed it up by tweeting that the "Spanish Flu, West Nile Virus, Zika and Ebola were named after places."

The coronavirus pandemic has so far claimed 220,000 infections worldwide,

Apart from Trump, other US officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, GOP lawmakers Tom Cotton, Paul Gosar and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have been using terms like Wuhan virus and Chinese virus in public, intentionally stigmatizing China and Wuhan.

Downplaying his racist rhetoric, Trump argued he wanted to be accurate as he believed the virus comes from China, totally ignoring the impact on the Asian community, according to observers, local residents and some influencers.

Photo: GT  

Offensive and immoral

On Wednesday, Trump dubbed the coronavirus "Chinese virus" three times in an hour, according to media reports, which seriously infuriated not only Chinese people but also many Asian Americans. Given the rising crimes against Asian and Chinese communities, some urged Trump to resign as such blunt incitement of racism is so dangerous that it could tear the world apart.

Some even shared their personal stories on social media about being insulted or attacked because of their skin color, ethnic group or nationality since the outbreak, and some said they don't feel safe and feel severely offended, because racist terms encourage xenophobia and discrimination, which could last longer than the pandemic itself.

Jordan Matsudaira, an Asian-looking professor in New York, said his "children are being called 'coronavirus' in school, and this is racist, vile and intentional," in a tweet.

And Cenk Uygur, a Los Angeles-based online news show host, said as his wife is from Taiwan that his children's classmates are already blaming them "for the virus" and some ask them if they eat bats, because of "racists and a**holes like Senator John Cornyn and Trump."

A New York-based Chinese woman, who preferred not to be named, shared an anecdote with the Global Times on Thursday that when she drove and waited at a traffic light one day, an American originally from Mexico spat at her car window, shouting, "F**king virus Chinese," which "made her really sick," she said.

The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) said in a recent article that continuing calling COVID-19 Chinese virus could be used to denigrate a group and implicitly blame Chinese people for the outbreak, despite the World Health Organization's stepped up efforts to push back against stigmatizing terms that needlessly divide COVID-19 rhetoric.

The WHO came up in 2015 with guidelines on naming diseases, claiming that geographic locations, people's names, animal species or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references and those inciting undue fear should be avoided in disease names, after the organization saw certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, according to its website.

Some American scientists and medical experts also showed their support for WHO's naming of COVID-19, emphasizing that it should not spark any political debates.

Some prominent figures in Chinese science circles also joined in to fight the 'Chinese virus' slander. Rao Yi, president of Capital Medical University in Beijing, said in a WeChat article on Wednesday that according to the US government's logic, the first AIDS case was reported in the US on June 5, 1981, so should AIDS be called an American venereal disease and HIV the "American venereal virus?"

And should the spirochete leading to syphilis, which is widely considered to have originated in North America and transmitted to Europe by the Spanish, be called "North American spirochete?" he asked.

"Those officials who called it 'Chinese virus' are among those who have the lowest moral standards," Lü Xiang, a research fellow on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Take at look at what US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross on January 30 said about the deadly virus, that it would help accelerate the return of jobs to the US. That claim reflected their true intention and deeply-rooted wishes that the virus could only spread in China, from which they could take advantage of, Lü said.

However, observers warned that rising hatred toward certain ethnic groups, entangled in the rise of right-wing populism amid the outbreak, would accelerate divisions and confrontations across the globe, which would also be dangerous and harmful following racial animosity and deaths from despair amid the outbreak.

Shift the blame

Eduardo Bolsonaro, Brazilian congressman, said in a tweet that what's happening now is HBO's TV series "Chernobyl," blaming China for the coronavirus outbreak, reflecting some countries' relentless efforts to pass the buck to Beijing and hide their own incompetence in curbing the virus spread across local communities, analysts said.

On Wednesday, a Danish education studio was revealed to have published an insulting song to introduce the novel coronavirus to children that contained lyrics like, "I am a new virus, I come from China," triggering a backlash on Chinese social media. The incident happened about two months after a major Danish newspaper published a cartoon with the five stars on China's national flag replaced by five coronavirus images.

"It's inevitable that populism would be prevalent in the future, and it has become a common practice that specific groups would be targeted by hostility and hatred, which would have severe consequences," Zhang Yiwu, a cultural professor at Peking University, told the Global Times.

Still, some US politicians, including Democrats like Joe Biden, have publicly criticized such inflammatory coronavirus rhetoric, and Biden was quoted as saying in media reports that "labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace the accountability for the misjudgments that have taken place so far by the Trump administration."

"This is also a tactic that these US politicians use to redirect public attention by shifting suspicions over their incompetence to hatred toward China, but it won't work, and the collapse on Wall Street proves it," Lü said.

Coronavirus: What's behind Trump's U-turn on China?

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Tuesday, November 12, 2019

US cannot break China’s supply chain


The US has once again disparaged the Chinese economy to entertain itself. US President Donald Trump on Saturday claimed China's supply chain was "all broken, like an egg," and said China wanted a deal more than the US did.

The fact is, however, senior US officials are talking about trade wars and trade deals almost every day, while Chinese officials rarely do this. Anyone who knows a little bit about psychology can figure out that such responses of the US reflect anxiety, rather than calmness.

Is China's supply chain broken like an egg? Chinese telecom giant Huawei has not begged the US to be "magnanimous." It is now US companies that are asking to be excluded from US restrictions.

Being placed in the Entity List has certainly caused difficulties for Huawei, but such hardships are far from delivering vital blows to fling the company down. Some US elites are clamoring for knocking Huawei down, but their indecent acts have only stimulated Huawei's strength and growth. And Chinese people generally believe that this high-tech company will be increasingly strong.

The US cannot even defeat one Chinese enterprise by making full use of its whole country's power. Now it is claiming it will break the supply chain of all of China as an egg. Is such bragging too exaggerated? We wonder how the public opinion and voters in the US can tolerate such a boast. The voters are seemingly quite gullible.

The US is suffering an economic downturn, and many indicators demonstrate that its good days are coming to an end. US state leaders and senior officials are like cheerleaders, taking turns to cheer up the stock index.

In terms of economic situations, Chinese officials' description is absolutely more objective and calm than the US side. China recognizes that the trade war has brought negative impacts, and our efforts to eliminate such effects are open and timely. The US, however, is trying to cover up the effects of the trade war it has launched.

China has already focused its efforts on solving its own problems. We will not bet on the idea that reaching a deal will fundamentally change China-US economic relations. Most Chinese believe that whether there is an agreement or not, turmoil between the two countries will not end. Chinese society is in favor of reaching a trade deal, but it is also patient.

Including Chinese companies such as Huawei in the Entity List will cause long-term damages to US business community's reputation. Foreign companies may be on guard against US enterprises in the future while building their own supply chains, which will certainly offer more opportunities for US competitors.

The US is so keen on imposing sanctions, and is fond of applying sanctions on related third-parties. Betting on US companies may work in a short term, but cannot serve as a long-term strategy. The US has trodden business ethics under foot in this round of China-US games. It is even pleased with itself for overtly destroying China's supply chain. At the strategic planning in the US, there are no such concepts like honesty and morality. The Chinese society has clearly observed this, as has the entire world.

Fortunately, China has the widest range of manufacturing sectors in the world, which has given the country a special strength in the global supply chain. China is not afraid of any game against the supply chain. Producers without China's supply chain will certainly feel more pain than China.

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