Chinese Self-Genocide

Coronavirus originated in PLA lab linked to secret China's biowarfare program
By Bill Gertz
Hospital staff wash the emergency entrance of Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some infected with a new virus are being treated, in Wuhan, China, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020. The number of cases of a new coronavirus from Wuhan has risen to over 400 in China health authorities said Wednesday. 

The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst.
Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Mr. Shoham told The Washington Times.
Work on biological weapons is conducted as part of dual civilian-military research and is “definitely covert,” he said in an email.
Mr. Shoham holds a doctorate in medical microbiology. 

From 1970 to 1991, he was a senior analyst with Israeli military intelligence for biological and chemical warfare in the Middle East and worldwide. 

He held the rank of lieutenant colonel.
China has denied having any offensive biological weapons, but a State Department report last year revealed suspicions of covert biological warfare work.
A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not return an email seeking comment.
Chinese authorities said they do not know the origin of the coronavirus, which has killed at least 80 and infected thousands.
Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-controlled media that initial signs indicated the virus originated from wild animals sold at a seafood market in Wuhan.
One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is that false rumors circulating on the Chinese internet claim the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons. 

That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter any charges that the new coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories.
The World Health Organization is calling the microbe novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. 

At a meeting Thursday in Geneva, the organization stopped short of declaring a public health emergency of international concern.
China has deployed military forces to Wuhan to halt all travel out of the city of 11 million people in an effort to contain the outbreak of the virus, which causes pneumonialike symptoms.
The Wuhan institute has studied coronaviruses including the strain that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis and dengue. 

Researchers at the institute also have studied the germ that causes anthrax, a biological agent once developed in Russia.
“Coronaviruses [particularly SARS] have been studied in the institute and are held therein,” Mr. Shoham said. 

“SARS is included within the Chinese BW program, at large, and is dealt with in several pertinent facilities.”
It is not known whether the institute’s coronaviruses are specifically included in China’s biological weapons program but it is possible, he said.
Asked whether the new coronavirus may have leaked, Mr. Shoham said: “In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
After researchers sequence the genome of the new coronavirus, they might be able to determine or suggest its origin or source.

Biological weapons convention
Mr. Shoham, now with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel, said the Wuhan virology institute is the only declared site in China known as P4 for pathogen level 4. 

That status indicates the institute uses the strictest safety standards to prevent the spread of the most dangerous and exotic microbes being studied.
The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent to China samples of what he described as some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.
In a July article in the journal Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, Mr. Shoham said the Wuhan institute was one of four Chinese laboratories engaged in some aspects of biological weapons development.

He said the secure Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the institute was engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses.
The Wuhan virology institute is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but certain laboratories within it “have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment,” he said.
In 1993, China declared a second facility, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as one of eight biological warfare research facilities covered by the Biological Weapons Convention, which China joined in 1985.The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products is a civilian facility but is linked to the Chinese defense establishment. 

Mr. Shoham said it is thought to be involved in the Chinese Biological Weapons Convention program. 

China’s vaccine against SARS is probably produced there.
“This means the SARS virus is held and propagated there, but it is not a new coronavirus unless the wild type has been modified, which is not known and cannot be speculated at the moment,” he said.
The annual State Department report on arms treaty compliance stated last year that China engaged in activities that could support biological warfare.
“Information indicates that the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC,” said the report, adding that the United States suspects China failed to eliminate its biological warfare program as required by the treaty.
“The United States has compliance concerns with respect to Chinese military medical institutions’ toxin research and development because of the potential dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat,” the report said.
The biosafety lab is about 20 miles from the Hunan Seafood Market, which reports from China say may have been the origin point of the virus.

Friendship of the Willing

Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui Target a Common Enemy: China
By David Barboza

Stephen K. Bannon, the former strategist to President Trump, and Guo Wengui, who is wanted in China, have teamed up.

   
Just months after being pushed out of the White House, Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, met with a Chinese billionaire at a suite in the luxurious Hays-Adams Hotel in Washington.
The billionaire, Guo Wengui, who is also known as Miles Kwok, was living in New York City and had landed on China’s most-wanted list, accused of bribery, fraud and money laundering. 

He was also a dissident and fierce critic of Beijing, seeking political asylum in the United States. And Mr. Bannon — increasingly obsessed with the China threat — was eager to talk about the Communist Party, corruption and American naval operations in the South China Sea.
Since their first discussion in October 2017, they have met dozens of times — in Dallas, on Mr. Guo’s yacht and, more often, at the billionaire’s $67.5 million apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, overlooking New York’s Central Park. 

The two shared a stage two weeks ago in Manhattan, at a news conference they organized to announce plans to set up a $100 million fund to investigate corruption and aid victims of Chinese government persecution.
“We both naturally despise the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Guo said in an interview last week, referring to Mr. Bannon. 

“That’s why we’ve become partners.”
It’s an unusual partnership between two political gadflies with a common, if overly grand, objective: bringing about the demise of the Chinese Communist Party.
One is an exiled businessman who has evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government in China. 

The other is a former Goldman Sachs banker who delights in lobbing political grenades at the “party of Davos,” a band of global "elites" that has undermined America’s interests at home and abroad.
As tensions between the United States and China grow, the two men are hoping to stoke them even further, by effectively calling for the overthrow of Beijing’s leadership. 

Mr. Guo is dipping into his fortune, while Mr. Bannon provides a strategy.
Mr. Bannon is, in effect, reprising the role of political provocateur he played before joining the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. 

Back then, he was running the news site Breitbart, and helping promote books like “Clinton Cash,” which aimed to destroy Hillary Clinton’s White House bid.
In an interview in his hotel room two weeks ago, Mr. Bannon, 65, said the new China-related fund he will head, without pay, will gather evidence, share it with authorities — in the United States and elsewhere — and publish it in the media. 

The fund also targets Wall Street banks and law firms, which are complicit in China’s misdeeds.
The project, he says, is consistent with his populist and nationalist agenda. 

China’s reckless behavior is endangering the global economy, and sapping America’s strength.
“As a populist, this is outrageous,” Mr. Bannon said, noting that American financial institutions have helped back the worrisome global buying sprees of Chinese companies, with cash raised from ordinary people, including government pension funds. 

“The elites in this country have to be held accountable. We have to get the facts on the table.”
Mr. Guo, 50, insists that the fund offers a way to strike back at Beijing. 

China has pressed the Trump administration to extradite him so that he can face a raft of charges in China — allegations he strongly denies. 

Billions of dollars in assets he controlled have been frozen by Beijing. 

And Interpol, the pro-China police organization, has issued a warrant seeking his arrest. 

He now travels with a phalanx of security guards, saying he fears for his life.
The Chinese Embassy could not be reached for comment. 

But the Guo-Bannon alliance has alarmed Chinese "analysts", who view the two men as purveyors of conspiracy theories fueling anti-China sentiment.
For Mr. Bannon, the new effort plays to a longstanding and complicated interest in China. 

As a young naval officer in the 1970s, he patrolled the South China Sea. 

He also lived for a time in Shanghai, where he ran a small online gaming company. 

In recent years, he has come to view China as a military threat to the United States, and a fierce economic rival that refuses to play by the rules.
In helping elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Bannon counseled him to take a tough line on China and step up trade pressure on Beijing. 

Mr. Trump obliged by tapping the Harvard-trained economist Peter Navarro, a longtime China critic known for his book “Death by China,” and Michael Pillsbury, a China expert at the Hudson Institute, as top trade advisers.

The effort has bristled Beijing’s stooges like Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic, right, who met with Xi Jinping in Prague in 2016.

It was during his time at the White House, Mr. Bannon says, that he first heard about Mr. Guo. 

The Chinese billionaire was living in New York, broadcasting accusations of high-level government corruption in China on Twitter and YouTube. 

By then, he had also applied for political asylum.
Alarmed by his social media campaign and his public denunciations of the Communist Party, Beijing began pressing the Trump administration to extradite Mr. Guo. 

Chinese investigators said he has ties to Ma Jian, a former spy chief now imprisoned in China on charges of bribery and abuse of power.
Inside the White House, there were disagreements over how to deal with Mr. Guo. 

Western businessmen, eager to cozy up to Beijing, lobbied President Trump to accede to China’s demands.
Mr. Bannon said he sided with those in the administration who opposed any handover, viewing Mr. Guo as a potentially valuable “intelligence asset.”
They met only after Mr. Bannon was forced out of the White House. 

Mr. Bannon says he received a call from Bill Gertz, a Washington journalist who has long been critical of China. 

Mr. Gertz told him that Mr. Guo was scheduled to give a talk in Washington at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. 

The talk was canceled at the last minute.
Over lunch, Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon discussed China’s military capabilities, as well as the financial implications of Beijing’s rule, including what impact the country’s mounting corporate debt might have on its economy. 

A friendship emerged.
“It was fantastic. He really impressed me,” Mr. Bannon said of his first meeting with Mr. Guo. 

“We talked about President Trump’s approach to China, and he went into corruption in the Chinese Communist Party.”
Mr. Bannon later introduced Mr. Guo to people in the hedge fund community, including J. Kyle Bass, who has soured on China and sought to profit by short-selling the Chinese currency.
As Mr. Bannon sharpened his critique of China’s rise, he also began meeting privately with some of America’s leading experts on China, to seek their counsel and outline his agenda. 

Few welcomed his remarks, according to people who attended some of the sessions. 

But more recently, his positions have gotten a warmer reception.
“The tectonic plates are shifting,” says Orville H. Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. 

“Many analysts would have totally rejected him two years ago. But people are more sympathetic now that engagement with China has been defrocked.”

Mr. Schell adds, “On the China question, he’s no longer the skunk at the party.”
But Mr. Bannon is getting blowback from many Beijing’s stooges. 

On a trip abroad this year to drum up support for nationalist and populist leaders in Eastern and Central Europe, Mr. Bannon says, he was scolded for his positions on China by Milos Zeman, president of the Czech Republic and one of Beijing’s most zealous stooges in the region.
“He threw down on me hard,” Mr. Bannon says. 

“He said: ‘Tell Trump you didn’t learn from Hitler. You can’t fight on two fronts. You can’t take on radical Islam and China. You will end up in the bunker, like Hitler.”
A spokesman for Zeman said that he had challenged Mr. Bannon on American tariffs against China, and that the two men had parted ways in a very “cold atmosphere.”
Mr. Bannon is unbowed. 

He has agreed to serve as chairman of the Rule of Law Fund, the $100 million effort that Mr. Guo is financing. 

The fund plans to publicize its findings and offer financial support to businessmen, government officials and others who run afoul of the Chinese authorities — including those who flee overseas, like Mr. Guo himself.
Mr. Bannon has also joined Mr. Guo in targeting the HNA Group, the huge Chinese conglomerate that borrowed heavily and spent billions around the world, before debt and regulatory pressures forced the company to curb its global ambitions.
Until Twitter suspended his account late last year, Mr. Guo was waging an online war against HNA and its top executives. 

He claimed that the company was engaged in bribing top officials and their relatives, and has even spun theories about the death of the company’s co-chairman Wang Jian in an "accident" in France last summer. 

At their joint news conference last week, Mr. Bannon took the stage at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to say, “Literally thousands of the best and brightest” in China have disappeared, been imprisoned or committed suicide under unusual circumstances and without due process.
“Today is about recklessness and accountability,” he added, noting that American financial institutions have close ties to political elites in Beijing. 

“Who profited off this? Who looked the other way?”

China’s Targeting of Filipino Chinese for Intelligence, Influence and Drug Trafficking

By Anders Corr, Ph.D.

Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte (L), son of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the president’s son-in-law, Manases Carpio (R), take an oath as they attend a senate hearing in Manila on September 7, 2017. Paolo Duterte and Manases Carpio appeared before the inquiry to deny as “baseless” and “hearsay” allegations linking them to large-scale illegal drugs smuggling. 

On June 12, Philippine protesters staged coordinated protests against China in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver. 

Protest organizer Ago Pedalizo said, “Duterte’s government pursues the ‘sell, sell, sell’ approach to sovereignty as a trade-off to all kickbacks he’ll get from the ‘build, build, build’ economic push of China.” 

His protest group, Filipino American Human Rights Advocates (FAHRA), charged that “Duterte is beholden to the $15-billion loan with monstrous interest rate and China’s investments in Boracay and Marawi, at the expense of Philippine sovereignty. This is not to mention that China remains to be the premier supplier of illegal drugs to the country through traders that include the son, Paolo Duterte, with his P6 billion shabu [methamphetamine] shipment to Davao.”
Paolo Duterte has denied the allegations. 

Philippine and Chinese government offices did not reply to requests for comment.
But, experts have confirmed that kickbacks and drug shipments come through Filipino Chinese networks. 

Current Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte himself has self-identified as Chinese in the course of affirming his sincerity to an accommodating position on the South China Sea conflict. 

He said this to a correspondent on CCTV, a Chinese state television network.
Asked about Duterte and influential Special Assistant to the President Mr. Bong Go, one expert replied, “Duterte has been given money by the Chinese as early as when he was mayor [of Davao City, Mindanao]. The Chinese will not give it to him directly, but through the Filipino Chinese. Bong Go is a Filipino Chinese.”
Another source with knowledge of elite networks in the Philippines confirmed that Chinese intelligence services focus on Filipinos of Chinese ancestry in their attempts to infiltrate the Philippines, including Mr. Bong Go and other Filipino Chinese in Duterte’s inner circle. 

He added that some Chinese networks in the Philippines specialize in the illegal drug trade and business more generally, and serve a dual intelligence function. 

He said that China currently has “unprecedented access” to Duterte.
Chinese state targeting of overseas Chinese for intelligence, drugs and influence operations is well documented in a growing field of study on Chinese influence operations globally. 

The contemporary literature has been developed by an impressive number of scholars and journalists, including Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Anne-Marie Brady, Kerry Brown, Kevin Carrico, J. Michael Cole, John Garnaut, Bill Gertz, Gerry Groot, Clive Hamilton, Alex Joske, Shanthi Kalathil, Peter Mattis, Jonas Parello-Plesner, Josh Rogin, Mark Stokes, Glenn Tiffert, and James To. 

A comedian, Chris Chappell, is even covering the issue and making it accessible beyond audiences for relatively dry scholarship and foreign policy analysis.
Ethnicities other than Chinese are also targeted, of course, but Chinese authorities single out those of their own ethnicity, putting them into particular danger. 

This is arguably a racist or discriminatory practice by China’s intelligence services, which victimizes and endangers overseas Chinese. 

A former attaché in the United States’ embassy in Beijing, for example, explained that China’s intelligence services target those of Chinese ancestry who work in foreign missions. 
“Ethnic Chinese serving in Western embassies in China bear special risks. Chinese intelligence services vigorously target them for compromise. The CCP treats them like race-traitors when they aren’t compromised, and their American countrymen are sometimes insensitive to the pressure they are under. I’ve known ethnic Chinese Americans that finished their service in China embittered by the experience.”

Another former attaché, this one defense attaché in the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, wrote that China’s strategy of targeting those of Chinese ancestry extends back decades. 

“Targeting the diaspora has long been the practice,” he said.
“In the 1980’s, when ethnic Chinese were still a rarity in the foreign service, it was the ethnic Chinese wives who were targeted. I know of a case of an American official in the Embassy in Thailand who had an ethnic Chinese-Thai wife, and he was being induced through his wife, who was dangled with tempting business propositions and offers of cash.”
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, tasked with assisting counterintelligence at U.S. embassies abroad, declined to comment.
Four sources of information in this article asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the subject, or because they feared reprisals.