lundi 24 février 2020

On Russia-China Border, Life and Commerce Frozen by Chinese Coronavirus

No one in a Russian city 600 yards from China has been infected as yet, but businesses are shriveling and China’s image as a benign force is being eclipsed by a more anxious vision.
By Andrew Higgins
The Chinese city of Heihe seen from Blagoveschensk, Russia. The lettering on the building reads ”Go Wuhan.”

BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia — With a contagious illness raging in China, just 600 yards away across the frozen Amur River, the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Russian border city of Blagoveshchensk thundered with promises of salvation from the plague.
“A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you,” promised Dmitri Zhang, a Chinese Orthodox priest, reciting a psalm offering deliverance for those of faith from the “pestilence that stalks in darkness.”
The special prayer service on Sunday, featuring pleas for mercy in both Russian and Chinese from the Chinese coronavirus and attended by worshipers from both countries, displayed just how intertwined the fortunes — and now the misfortunes — of the two countries have become.
It showed as well how the destructive effects of the Chinese virus can be felt even in a far-flung outpost like Blagoveshchensk, where it has yet to infect a single person.

Until the Chinese virus started killing people in Wuhan, China, and spreading fear far beyond, Blagoveshchensk had staked its future on ever-closer relations with China, harnessing its economy to burgeoning cross-border commerce and a flood of traffic across the river, by boat in summer and over a pontoon bridge laid on the ice in winter.

At Three Whales, a big market in the center of Blagoveshchensk, only a few customers walked among the stalls.

Chinese language instruction for Russian youngsters at the Blagoveschensk State Pedagogical University. 

With the border now closed on orders from Moscow, this has all ground to a halt, leaving the city frozen in limbo.
Businesses that depend on China are shriveling, hotels once full of Chinese guests stand empty and the local university, once a magnet for paying pupils from China, is struggling to cope as hundreds of its students who went home for the Lunar New Year holiday find themselves stranded.
A road bridge, the first across the Amur River and the 1,140 mile stretch of border it demarcates, was completed last November.
But the huge structure never opened to traffic and now stands marooned in the snow and ice, a monument to hopes suddenly dashed, or at least delayed, by the spread of the disease.
Also suffering is China’s image as a benign force from which Russia can only reap benefit.
This is slowly being eclipsed by anxiety over China’s new, unwelcome role as a source of disease, agonizing uncertainty and frustrated hopes.
“Everything is at a standstill,” said Julia Tavitova, the general director of Amurturist, a Russian company that had depended on visitors from China to fill a hotel it operates on the Russian bank of the Amur.
“It is a chain reaction. One by one, businesses are getting killed by this disease.”
She has let go half her company’s staff.

Li Lihua, second from right, a Russian-speaking Chinese businesswoman, in her restaurant “Omega.” Ms. Li, who has been working in Blagoveshchensk since the 1990s, said this was the worst economic situation she has encountered.

A Chinese-run shop at the central market, where business has fallen off a cliff.

Blagoveshchensk’s biggest hotel, Asia, built to house throngs of visitors from China, is now a ghost ship, its 18 floors mostly empty of guests.
Nearby shops selling jewelry, gold and other products popular with Chinese buyers have lost nearly all their business.
Fearful that the presence of Chinese guests at her company’s own hotel, the Druzhba, or Friendship, might drive away other regular customers, Ms. Tavitova last month decided to bar Chinese from booking rooms.
“We could not risk losing everything,” she explained.
The Kremlin last week made the same calculation, announcing that, starting last Thursday, all Chinese citizens would be barred from entering Russia. 
The decision slammed a lucrative tourism industry driven in a large part by Chinese visitors, more than 1.5 million of whom came to Russia last year.
Heihe, the Chinese city on the other side of the river, has several confirmed coronavirus infections in the district under its jurisdiction, while the surrounding province of Heilongjiang has nearly 500 officially reported cases and possibly many more.
Giant neon signs, clearly visible from the Russian side, flash constant reminders of the crisis, displaying the Chinese Communist Party’s rallying cry: “Go Wuhan, Go China.”
But the party’s message is written in Chinese so few Russians understand it.
In Blagoveshchensk, there is no sign of panic or even mild alarm, just anger at a spike in vegetable prices after deliveries from China stopped.
Virtually nobody wears a face mask, despite an order from the authorities that this be done in schools and many other public places.
But the proximity of so much potential danger has, on social media, stirred a frenzy of fear-mongering and rumors — that the Chinese virus was created in a secret Chinese or, alternatively, American laboratory; that infected Chinese have slipped across the border; and that the Blagoveshchensk airport will soon be closed and the city sealed.

A new road bridge over the Amur River was completed in November but has yet to be opened to traffic.

Chinese students in Blagoveschensk sitting behind a Lenin statue. Hundreds of others have been trapped in China after the border was closed.

“People call from Moscow and ask, ‘Are you still alive out there?’” said Andrey V. Druzyaka, an associate professor in history at the Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University.
Li Lihua, a Russian-speaking Chinese businesswoman, has been working in Blagoveshchensk since the 1990s, surviving repeated economic and political crises to build up a small empire of restaurants, factories and real estate projects.
The current paralysis, she said, is far worse than previous trials.
The Chinese laborers she needs to finish building four 10-story apartment blocks on the outskirts of Blagoveshchensk cannot enter Russia, and nobody in Russia, she said, wants to get involved with a venture so dependent on China.
At Three Whales, a big market in the center of Blagoveshchensk, a few customers recently roamed stalls mostly run by Chinese traders.
Wang Wencheng, who sells Chinese-made sports gear, said sales had plummeted.
He wears a face mask to reassure his few remaining customers.
With many fellow traders stuck on the other side of the river, their stalls have been shrouded in blue tarpaulins that make them look like a crime scene.
Tatiana Kapustina, who runs a business with her husband exporting artisanal honey, mostly to China, said sales, which last year reached metric 50 tons, had fallen to “a total of zero” this year.
“China is not going to collapse, but nobody knows when and how this will all end,” Ms. Kapustina said.
“Uncertainty is our biggest problem.”
Just three months ago, Blagoveshchensk and Heihe were celebrating the completion of the bridge connecting the two countries across the Amur, a tangible example of how Russia and China have overcome the suspicion, fear and outright hostility that flowed for decades along the river and even led to a brief war in 1969.

Wang Wencheng, who sells Chinese-made sports gear at the Three Whales market, said sales had plummeted.

The almost empty Three Whales market. The central government in Moscow barred all Chinese citizens from entering Russia.

Suspicion is now creeping back, fanned by strident nationalist voices on social media and gossip on the street.
In Volkovo, a poor village outside Blagoveshchensk, the regional health authorities have turned a two-story clinic into a quarantine center for Chinese who crossed the border after the outbreak.
The head of the village administration, Dzhasur Samandof, said he had no problem with the quarantine center but was tired of fielding angry questions from residents in a panic over untrue rumors — of sick Chinese wandering village streets, and of a school canteen next to the quarantine center sharing cutlery with possibly infected Chinese.
Nikolai Kukharenko, a co-director of Blagoveshchensk’s Confucius Institute, part of a Beijing-funded program to spread the teaching of Chinese abroad, said social media had played a particularly noxious role in spreading fear, noting that a 2003 outbreak of the more lethal SARS virus in China had stirred little concern in Russia.

A painting by Vasili Romanov depicting the signing of the 1858 Aigun Treaty, which established much of the modern border between Russia and China.

Father Dmitry Zhang, a Chinese orthodox priest, celebrating a special service in response to the Chinese coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. Kukharenko was appalled this month by the reaction online to photographs he posted of face masks he had collected for delivery to China.
Russian patriots assailed him as a traitor, who had forgotten that “China is not an ally but our most important potential opponent and enemy.”
Such views don’t represent mainstream opinion in Blagoveshchensk, but a relationship whose momentum had seemed unstoppable is suddenly stuck.
Whether it can start moving again will depend largely on how fast China’s idled economy starts up — and starts consuming the oil and gas that underpin relations between Moscow and Beijing.
Power of Siberia, a new 1,800-mile gas pipeline that opened in December to carry natural gas from Siberia to China, passes under the Amur in Blagoveshchensk.
North of the city, Gazprom is building the world’s biggest gas processing plant, largely to serve China.
A more immediate problem, however, is getting the border open again.
Of the more than 200 Chinese students enrolled at the State Pedagogical University in Blagoveshchensk, only a few are now attending class.
Luan Bohan, a 22-year-old Chinese student who stayed in Russia over the Lunar holiday, said he had encountered no overt discrimination.
But, he added, children who see him on the street with his face mask sometimes point and shout “Chinese virus, Chinese virus” before running away.
Some residents, though, particularly those who see China as Russia’s best hope of resisting the West, blame the United States for the outbreak.
Aleksandr Kozhin, a Russian who lives mostly in Heihe but is now stuck on the Russian side of the river, thinks a secret American laboratory could have created the Chinese coronavirus as a weapon to undermine China’s success and image.
And regardless of where the Chinese virus comes from, he added, Russia has nothing to fear: “Two hundreds grams of vodka will kill any Chinese virus.”

Illuminated skyscrapers in Heihe can be seen from almost everywhere in Blagoveschensk.

People's Republic of Coronavirus

Why a Chinese virology lab is unable to quell the Chinese coronavirus theories around it
By Jane Li

A Chinese state-owned virology lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s coronavirus epidemic, is finding it extremely hard to quell theories proliferating around the institution—a sign of the sharply decreased level of public trust in the government since the outbreak of the Chinese virus.
At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a subsidiary of the state-owned research institute the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), scientists carry out virus research at a lab with the highest level of biological containment available on the mainland. 
Its construction was approved in 2003, during China’s last deadly coronavirus outbreak, SARS, and completed five years ago, according to Nature journal. 
The lab came under spotlight in late January, after Chinese scientists said the Chinese virus could have a connection to bats via an intermediary, such as some form of game sold at a seafood market in Wuhan. 
As the lab has researchers who study bat-related viruses, it became a target of online suspicion that coalesced into theories that the Chinese virus could have escaped from the lab, or be a bio-weapon gone wrong.
An unvetted research paper published on Jan. 31 by a group of Indian scientists, in which they claimed similarities between the Chinese virus and the HIV virus, appearing to hint at human engineering, also stirred further controversy surrounding the institute. 
Some journals have appended notes to older stories about the Wuhan lab calling the theories about the lab “unverified.”
However, the rumors have kept spreading widely online, to the extent that Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher on bat-related viruses in the lab, posted on her WeChat account on Feb. 2 that the virus was “a punishment from the nature for humans’ uncivilized life habits,” and said she “guaranteed with her life” it was totally unrelated to the lab. 
But just as Shi’s assurance seemed to have calmed some down, a notice from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology last Saturday (Feb. 15) started a fresh wave of suspicion towards the lab.
The ministry said in the notice that China should enhance its management of viruses and bioagents at all labs and research institutes, without any explanation as to why this is being proposed right now, leaving some to speculate whether this could be a subtle official acknowledgement of a role played by the lab. 
The following day, US senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News to say that the Chinese virus was not far from the wildlife market where many people were infected in December.
There are a number of reasons why these theories keep finding many takers—not just among China hawks but among so many in China. 
One is, there’s still so much that isn’t known about the Chinese virus and its origins.“At this stage, no expert can be absolutely certain about the cause of the outbreak. This uncertainty makes it easier for some people to think all explanations have equal merit,” explained assistant professor Masato Kajimoto, who researches information ecosystems in Asia at the University of Hong Kong’s journalism school.
After Shi’s statement, the lab too has stepped out more than once to try quell the theories. 
The institute first rejected speculation that the first patient to be infected with the Chinese virus was a graduate student who studied at the lab, saying on Sunday (Feb. 16) the student is in "good health". 
Yesterday (Feb. 19), it issued a worded statement (link in Chinese), saying the rumors about it have “hurt the feelings of its frontline researchers hugely” and “severely interfered” with its task to study viruses. 
“We have nothing to hide,” the letter read.
Nonetheless, internet users don’t appear to be convinced by the assurances from the lab. 
“What is the truth? The collapse of trustworthiness of media and government is not only sad for the two parties, but also for us citizens,” said a user on Weibo commenting on the rumors. 
“Some might think the so-called rumors are just a prophecy ahead of our times,” said another.
Some “rumors” from the early days of the epidemic after all turned out not to be far from reality. 
Li Wenliang, a doctor, had told others about a cluster of cases of viral pneumonia before the outbreak had been made public, but was summoned by Wuhan police for “spreading rumors.” 
He later became infected himself, and his death turned him into a vivid symbol of the costs of the government’s opacity—prompting an outpouring of anger and grief, and rare public demands for freedom of speech and transparency from the government.
“With the government’s bungled handling of the epidemic in Wuhan, and the pain and uncertainty the epidemic and the efforts to cope with it have produced, public trust has clearly decreased,” said Professor Dali Yang, a political scientist at University of Chicago via email. 
“The death of Dr. Li was a milestone in shared grief in China.”
What now can be done to contain theories of a rogue lab? 
Probably not a whole lot, says Kajimoto.
“When the authorities and experts have the history of not being transparent, whatever they say could sound as if they are trying to hide something,” said the assistant professor. 
“In this case, publicly denying the link between the lab and Chinese coronavirus could even be construed as ‘evidence’ by people who believe in this conspiracy because denial is the ‘sign’ that the truth is hidden.”

Made In China Pandemic

The Chinese coronavirus had leaked from a Chinese virology lab
The lone microbiology lab in China that handles viruses like the Chinese coronavirus is located in Wuhan
By STEVEN W. MOSHER
Chinese women and a child wear protective masks as they walk through a Beijing park after the official cancellation of celebrations of the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival on Jan. 25.

At an emergency meeting in Beijing held last Friday, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping spoke about the need to contain the Chinese coronavirus and set up a system to prevent similar epidemics in the future.
A national system to control biosecurity risks must be put in place “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.
What Xi didn’t say is that the Chinese coronavirus that has sickened more than 79,000 and claimed more than 2,600 lives escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. 
But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
Read that again.
It sure sounds as if China is conceding there may be a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes, doesn’t it? 
And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?
It turns out that in all of China there is only one. 
And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which, of course, is the epicenter of the epidemic.
That’s right.
China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.
According to the PLA Daily, Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax.
This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.
This suggests to me the Chinese coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Chen’s job is to try and put the genie back in the bottle.
Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. 
Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was being used in experiments. 
Both were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.
And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are believed to sell laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. 
Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash.
One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made the equivalent of a million dollars selling monkeys and rats on the live animal market, whence they likely wound up in someone’s stomach.
Also fueling suspicions about Chinese coronavirus’s origins is the series of excuses offered by the Chinese authorities as people began to be sickened and die.
They first blamed a seafood market not far from the Institute of Virology, even though the first documented cases of Chinese coronavirus (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2) involved people who had never set foot there. 
Then they pointed to snakes, bats and even a scaly anteater called a pangolin as the source of the virus.
I don’t buy any of this.
Snakes don’t carry coronaviruses, and bats aren’t sold at a seafood market. 
Neither are pangolins, for that matter, an endangered species valued for its scales as much as for meat.
The evidence, to me, points to Chinese coronavirus research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Chinese virus may have been carried out of the lab by an infected worker or crossed over into humans who unknowingly consumed a lab animal.
Whatever the vector, Beijing authorities are now clearly scrambling to correct serious problems with the way their labs handle deadly pathogens.
China may have unleashed a plague on its own people.
It’s too early to say how many in China and other countries will ultimately die, but the human cost will be high.
But not to worry.
Xi has assured us that he is controlling biosecurity risks “to protect the people’s health.”
PLA bioweapons experts are in charge.
I doubt the Chinese people will find that very reassuring.
Neither should we.

Putin's Crusade Against Sick Men Of Asia

Moscow targets Chinese with raids amid Chinese virus terror
Russian authorities are going to significant lengths to keep the Chinese virus from surfacing in Moscow
By DARIA LITVINOVA and FRANCESCA EBEL

In this photo taken on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020, medical workers disinfect rooms in the sanatorium after quarantine period has ended in Bogandinsky in the Tyumen region, about 2150 kilometers (1344 miles) east of Moscow, Russia. 144 people who were evacuated from the epicenter of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, and were released from a 14-day quarantine in western Siberia. None of them tested positive for the Chinese virus. Russian authorities are going to great lengths to prevent the Chinese coronavirus from spreading in the capital and elsewhere.

MOSCOW -- Bus drivers in Moscow kept their WhatsApp group chat buzzing with questions this week about what to do if they spotted passengers who might be from China riding with them in the Russian capital.
“Some Asian-looking (people) have just got on. Probably Chinese. Should I call (the police)?” one driver messaged his peers. 
“How do I figure out if they’re Chinese? Should I ask them?” a colleague wondered.
The befuddlement reflected in screenshots of the group exchanges seen by The Associated Press had a common source -- instructions from Moscow's public transit operator Wednesday for drivers to call a dispatcher if Chinese nationals boarded their buses, Russian media reported.
A leaked email that the media reports said was sent by the state-owned transportation company Mosgortrans told dispatchers who took such calls to notify the police. 
The email, which the company immediately described on Twitter as fake, carried a one-word subject line: coronavirus.
Since the outbreak of the Chinese virus that has infected more than 76,000 people and killed more than 2,300 in mainland China, Russia has reported two cases. 
Both patients, Chinese nationals hospitalized in Siberia, recovered quickly. 
Russian authorities nevertheless are going to significant lengths to keep the Chinese virus from resurfacing and spreading.
Moscow officials ordered police raids of hotels, dormitories, apartment buildings and businesses to track down the shrinking number of Chinese remaining in the city. 
They also authorized the use of facial recognition technology to find those suspected of evading a 14-day self-quarantine period upon their arrival in Russia.“Conducting raids is an unpleasant task, but it is necessary, for the potential carriers of the Chinese virus as well,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement outlining various methods to find and track Chinese the city approved as a Chinese virus prevention strategy.
The effort to identify Chinese on public transportation applies not only to buses, but underground trains and street trams in Moscow, Russian media reported Wednesday.
Metro workers were instructed to stop riders from China and ask them to fill out questionnaires asking why they were in Russia and whether they observed the two-week quarantine, the reports said. 
The forms also ask respondents for their health condition and the address of where they are were staying.
In Yekaterinburg, a city located 1,790 kilometers (1,112 miles) away from Moscow in the Urals Mountains, members of the local Chinese community also are under watch. 
Self-styled Cossack patrols in the city hand out medical masks along with strong recommendations to visit a health clinic to Chinese residents.
The containment measures in the capital came as the Russian government instituted an indefinite ban on Chinese entering the country that could block up to 90% of travelers coming to Russia from China.
Weeks before, Russia shut down the country's long land border with China, suspended all trains and most flights between the two countries.
An employee of a Moscow-based company that employs Chinese nationals told the AP on condition of anonymity that police officers came to their office on Thursday and asked a dozen Chinese staffers to stay home for two weeks. 
The visit took place a little more than two weeks after these staffers returned from China and went through health checks at the airport, the employee said.
The employee spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about what had happened.
The Moscow Metro confirmed to The Associated Press that the underground system was “actively monitoring the stations” and has a protocol in place for dealing with people who “have recently returned from China.”
“We ask to see their documents and to show us documents (proving) that if they have recently returned from the People’s Republic of China, they have undergone a two-week quarantine period,” Yulia Temnikova, Moscow Metro’s deputy chief of client and passenger services, said.
If an individual does not show proof of completing the quarantine, Metro workers ask the person to fill out the form and call an ambulance, Temnikova said.
Bus and tram drivers contacted their labor union about the instructions to look for Chinese and report them to the dispatch center. 
The drivers were outraged and didn’t know what to do, Public Transport Workers Union chairman Yuri Dashkov said.
“So he saw a Chinese, and then what?" Dashkov said. 
“How can he ascertain that he saw a Chinese, or a Vietnamese, or a Japanese, or (someone from the Russian region of) Yakutia?”
Dashkov showed the AP a photo of the email that officials at Mosgortrans were said to have sent out. He also showed three photos of on-bus electronic displays reading, “If Chinese nationals are discovered in the carriage, inform the dispatcher.”
The AP was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the email and the photos. 
Dashkov shared screenshots of what appeared to be a genuine bus drivers' group chat in WhatsApp.
While Moscow public transit operator Mosgortrans dismissed the email as phony on its official Twitter account Wednesday, the company told the AP in a statement two days later that it does “conduct monitoring” and “sends data to the medics when necessary.”
Mosgortrans referred additional questions to the detailed statement from Moscow's mayor, who on Friday acknowledged the sharp focus on Chinese in the city's Chinese virus-control plan.
Officials ordered everyone arriving from China to isolate themselves for two weeks, and those who skip the quarantine step will be identified through video surveillance and facial recognition technology, Sobyanin said. 
The systems give authorities the ability to “constantly control compliance with the protocol,” he said in the statement.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the city's containment approach.
Temnikova from the Moscow Metro rejected accusations of racial profiling. 
Subway workers “mainly look at the passenger’s (health) condition," she said, and approach “people who need help.”
Addressing identification questions like the ones that worried the bus drivers, Temnikova said it should be “clear who could have arrived from China” because “it is obvious.”
The Cossacks of Yekaterinburg -- men in conservative, often pro-Kremlin groups claiming to be successors of the proud guards who policed the Russian Empire's frontiers -- took fighting the virus into their own hands three weeks ago. 
They also have a system of sorts for deciding who needs a face mask and advice to see a medical professional.
Mainly we approach people from China because it is from them that the Chinese coronavirus came. They are the main source,” Igor Gorbunov, elder of the Ural Volunteer Cossack Corps, told the AP during one such patrol Friday.
“But not only them," Gorbunov continued. 
“There are different nationalities, there are many people of Asian appearance, and they seem to be vulnerable to this disease, the Chinese coronavirus, because it is them who are most often affected. Europeans are not yet affected much.”

Sick Statistics of Asia

Chinese Coronavirus Figures Are Not Reliable
China reports that Chinese virus cases are declining, but the data are surely tied to party propaganda.
BY JAMES PALMER

Members of a neighborhood committee wear protective masks as they control the entrance to a narrow street on Feb. 19 in Beijing. 

Pathological Lying: China Reports Decline in Virus Cases
In China, the death toll from the Chinese coronavirus has now topped 2,000, with over 70,000 cases confirmed
But if you follow Chinese state media, the tone is increasingly optimistic: Victory in the people’s war against the virus, led by President Xi Jinping, is coming! 
The official figures seem to bear this out: New infections outside of Hubei province, the Chinese virus epicenter, have dropped for more than 10 days straight, and the number of new cases inside Hubei has slowed to under 2,000 per day.


Most of Hubei remains under lockdown, with residents unable to leave their homes without special permission. 
Travel restrictions of varying severity have been imposed across China, from monitored movement to total quarantine. 
Taken at face value, the government’s containment strategy appears to be working. 
But that raises the question: How reliable are China’s official numbers?

Party politics
One suspicious element is how consistent the drop in new virus cases has been. 
While there was a jump in numbers last Thursday, it was the result of changes in testing standards in Hubei—moving nearly 15,000 cases from “suspected” to “confirmed.” 
The announcement came as Hubei’s top officials were removed from their jobs—and Xi’s close ally Ying Yong, the former mayor of Shanghai, installed as the province’s party boss. 
As often happens, the new boss wanted to blame the bad news on the old one.
Meanwhile, the central government is pushing for reopening businesses, but there is a conflict emerging. 
Local officials don’t want to be scapegoated if an outbreak emerges in their domain, and their fear is outweighing the economic damage of the virus. 
But there are reports from Zhejiang and Guangdong of lockdowns being lifted, with a monitored surveillance system that allows people to leave the house in areas previously under heavy restrictions.

Downward trend
The straight decline in new cases of the virus could be good news, or it could be statistical manipulation. 
Outside of Hubei, diagnostic test kits are in short supply, and other provinces haven’t switched to using the symptomatic diagnosis now accepted in Hubei. 
The kits are only being used to test people who came from Hubei and not for cases of transmission, so it’s unsurprising the numbers are dropping. 
Chinese doctors report that dozens of other hospital patients are being quarantined and treated but not officially diagnosed.

U.S.-China media wars. 
The United States made a strong move against China yesterday, reclassifying five state-run media outlets—Xinhua News Agency, the China Global Television Network, China Daily, China Radio, and People’s Daily—as operatives of Beijing. 
The designation makes their operations inside the United States subject to tighter control. 
Chinese reporters at home and abroad have always been tasked with producing neican—internal reports for the party—and effectively used for espionage on an ad hoc basis.
, the outlets’ reporters could be subject to the same travel restrictions the United States has imposed on Chinese diplomats. 
In China, Western reporters already face a system of monitoring and control that limits their visas, sees them harassed by police, and prevents them from living outside certain cities.
The U.S. move prompted immediate retaliation from Beijing, which expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters on Wednesday. (The excuse was an opinion headline that described China as “the real sick man of Asia,” a phrase that prompted state-backed outrage from the Chinese.) 
Notably, all of the expelled reporters were of Chinese descent, part of a pattern of China treating nonwhite foreign reporters—and especially those with Chinese ancestry—with more suspicion.

Missing coronavirus cases
While most of China’s southern and eastern neighbors have reported coronavirus cases, the countries along its northern border such as Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have seen minimal numbers, with Russia only just reporting its first two cases. 
The pattern of cases may just represent the direction of travel before the Lunar New Year holiday at the start of the outbreak: Migrant workers would be returning to China from the north, while middle-class vacationers headed south.

What about North Korea? 
Meanwhile, North Korea says it doesn’t have any coronavirus cases, but the country has gone under total lockdown and cut off all transport ties to the outside world. 
North Korean state media, meanwhile, has broadcasted information about hygiene methods and protective masks. 
If the nation was suffering an outbreak, would we know?

Restaurant crisis. 
The restaurant business has been devastated by the coronavirus outbreak, despite the hardworking delivery people doing their best to keep the sector alive. 
The loss of Lunar New Year business and the closure of public spaces has devastated an industry already teetering on the edge. 
In Beijing, which is not fully locked down, only 13 percent of restaurants have stayed open throughout the outbreak. 
Jim Boyce, a longtime food and wine correspondent, has written about how badly the global wine trade will be hit. 

Back to work? 
The government is trying to encourage people to return to work, but between travel restrictions and local lockdowns it is proving effectively impossible. 
In China’s north, factory owners say they are still paying above-average wages to get staff and that the vast majority of workers still haven’t returned to the job. 
Companies that can are allowing remote work. 
Chinese schools, which look unlikely to reopen before April, have switched to online classes.

Pension burden. 
With business hurting from both the shutdowns and the government-mandated requirement to keep paying employees, 
Chinese authorities have announced that companies won’t have to pay some pension contributions and insurance fees to state-run funds for several months. 
That’s a smart move, but it raises the threat of the oncoming pension crisis.

A Moment in History: The Asian flu, 1957 and 1968The first post-World War II pandemic—the result of the mixing of avian and human influenza strains—was first detected in Singapore in 1957 but may have originated in China. 
While less lethal than the 1918 Spanish flu, the “Asian flu” pandemic killed perhaps 1 million to 2 million people worldwide. 
A decade later, it mutated into the “Hong Kong” flu: Again, it was first detected in the British colony but possibly originated in China.
Maoist China had high levels of deforestation and food insecurity, which caused people to eat previously untouched species, as well as a dire lack of medical resources. 
It was perhaps only the country’s isolation and limited freedom of movement that prevented outbreaks on the scale of SARS in 2003 or the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. 
It’s also possible that such outbreaks did occur and went unnoticed among the deaths of the era.

mardi 18 février 2020

China's state terrorism uproots Uighur families, leaked data shows

Newly revealed database exposes methods the Chinese government employed to crack down on Muslim minorities in East Turkestan.
Al Jazeera
For decades, a Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China's far west.
On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. 
On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. 
In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.
But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer's native East Turkestan colony three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.
Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.
The database obtained by The Associated Press news agency profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and contains information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbours and friends.

Each entry includes the detainee's name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighbourhood background, the reason for the detention and a decision on whether or not to release them.
Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom.
Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials picked who was put into and who was let out of concentration camps, as part of a significant crackdown that has locked away more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims.
The database emphasises that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention -- not just political violence, as authorities claim, but everyday activities such as praying, attending a mosque, or even growing a long beard.

Religious practice targeted
It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and giving entire families like Emer's a criminal record in the process.
Similarly, family background and attitude is a bigger factor than detainee behaviour in whether they are released.
"It's very clear that religious practice is being targeted," said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in East Turkestan.
"They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and re-education."
The East Turkestan colonial government did not respond to faxes requesting comment.

Heavy-handed rule
China has struggled for decades to control East Turkestan, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing's heavy-handed rule. 
With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, officials began using the spectre of "terrorism" to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying young Uighurs were susceptible to violence "extremism".
After armed groups set off bombs at a train station in East Turkestan's capital in 2014, Xi Jinping launched a so-called "People's War on Terror", transforming East Turkestan into a digital police state.
The leak of the database from sources in the Uighur exile community follows the release in November of a classified blueprint on how the mass detention system really works.

Uighur women use carts to transport cement for home renovations at the Unity New Village in Hotan, in western China's East Turkestan colony in 2018.

The blueprint obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes the AP, showed that the centres are in fact forced ideological and behavioural re-education camps run in secret.
Another set of documents leaked to the New York Times newspaper revealed the historical lead-up to the mass detention.
The latest set of documents came from sources in the Uighur exile community, dating most recently to March 2019.
The detainees listed come from Karakax County, a traditional settlement of about 650,000 on the edge of East Turkestan's Taklamakan Desert where more than 97 percent of residents are Uighur.
The list was corroborated through interviews with former Karakax residents, Chinese identity verification tools and other lists and documents seen by the AP.

'Witch-hunt mindset'
Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. 
Households are designated as "trustworthy" or "not trustworthy" and their attitudes are graded as "ordinary" or "good." 
Families have "light" or "heavy" religious atmospheres and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a "training centre."
Officials used these categories to determine how suspicious a person was -- even if they had not committed any crimes.
"It underscores the witch-hunt mindset of the government and how the government criminalises everything," said Adrian Zenz, an expert on the detention centres and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC.
Reasons listed for internment include "minor religious infection," "disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons," "relatives abroad," "thinking is hard to grasp" and "untrustworthy person born in a certain decade." 
The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 percent of people considered "untrustworthy" were in the age bracket of 25 to 29 years, according to an analysis of the data by Zenz.
When former student Abdullah Muhammad spotted Emer's name on the list of the imprisoned, he was distraught.
"He didn't deserve this," Muhammad said. 
"Everyone liked and respected him. He was the kind of person who couldn't stay silent against injustice."

Renowned teacher
Even in Karakax county, famed for its intellectuals and scholars, Emer stood out as one of the most renowned teachers in the region.
Muhammad studied the Quran under Emer for six years as a kid, following him from house to house in an effort to dodge the authorities.
Muhammad said Emer was so respected that the police would phone him with warnings ahead of time before raiding classes at his modest, single-story home of brick and mud.

Under heavy surveillance
Though Emer gave Party-approved sermons, he refused to preach Communist propaganda, Muhammad said, eventually running into trouble with the authorities. 
He was stripped of his position as an imam and barred from teaching in 1997 amid unrest roiling the region.
When Muhammad left China for Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 2009, Emer was making his living as a doctor of traditional medicine. 
Emer was growing old and under heavy surveillance, he had stopped attending religious gatherings.
That did not stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his eighties and sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison over 2017 and 2018.
The database cites four charges in various entries: "stirring up terrorism," acting as an unauthorised "wild" imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.
Muhammad called the charges false. 
Emer had stopped his preaching, practised a moderate Central Asian sect of Islam rather than Wahhabism and had never dreamed of hurting others, let alone stirring up "terrorism," Muhammad said.
"He used to always preach against violence," Muhammad said. 
"Anyone who knew him can testify that he wasn't a religious extremist."
None of Emer's three sons had been convicted of a crime. 
But the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into the detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being "untrustworthy" or "infected with religious extremism," or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

'He never bowed down to them'
It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials they were too dangerous to let out from the concentration camps."His father taught him how to pray," notes one entry for his eldest, Ablikim Memtimin.
"His family's religious atmosphere is thick. We recommend he (Emer) continue training," says another entry for his youngest son, Emer Memtimin.
Even a neighbour was tainted by living near him with Emer's alleged crimes and prison sentence recorded in the neighbour's dossier.
The database indicates much of this information is collected by teams of cadres stationed at mosques, sent to visit homes and posted in communities. 
This information is then compiled in a dossier called the "three circles", encompassing their relatives, community, and religious background.
It was not just the religious who were detained. 
The database shows that Karakax officials also explicitly targeted people for activities that included going abroad, getting a passport or installing foreign software.
Pharmacist Tohti Himit was detained in a camp for having gone multiple times to one of 26 "key" countries, mostly Muslim, according to the database. 
Former employee Habibullah, who is now in Turkey, recalled Himit as a secular, kind and wealthy man who kept his face free of a beard.
"He wasn't very pious, he didn't go to the mosque," said Habibullah, who declined to give his first name out of fear of retribution against family still in China. 
"I was shocked by how absurd the reasons for detention were."
The database says cadres found Himit had attended his grandfather's funeral at a local mosque on March 10, 2008. 
Later that year, the cadres found, he had gone to the same mosque again, once to worship and once to celebrate a festival. 
In 2014 he had gone to Anhui province, in inner China, to get a passport and go abroad.
That, the government concluded, was enough to show that Himit was "certainly dangerous." 
They ordered Himit to stay in the centre and "continue training."
Emer is now under house arrest due to health issues, his former student, Muhammad, has heard. 
It is unclear where Emer's sons are.
It was the imam's courage and stubbornness that did him in, Muhammad said. 
Though deprived of his mosque and his right to teach, Emer quietly defied the authorities for two decades by staying true to his faith.
"Unlike some other scholars, he never cared about money or anything else the Communist Party could give him," Muhammad said. 
"He never bowed down to them -- and that's why they wanted to eliminate him."

Pompeo the Great (Michael Pompeius Magnus)

‘The West Is Winning,’ U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Tells Nations at Munich Security Conference
BY ELLA KIETLINSKA
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany on Feb. 15, 2020. 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the strength and sustainability of the Western world despite misgivings in Europe when speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15.
More than 500 high-level decision-makers from all over the world convene annually at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, to discuss international security policies and address current security challenges. 
Among the attendees are heads of states, ministers, members of parliament, business leaders, scientists, and high-ranking members of civil society.
The central theme of this year’s conference was fading of the West, and “the Western project,” a phenomenon called “Westlessness” by the Munich Security Report 2020, an official primer for this year’s conference. 
In today’s world, what has been understood as the basis of the West: liberal democracy, human rights, market-based economy, and the rule of law, “is increasingly contested,” which in turn poses security challenges, according to the report.
“The world is becoming less Western … the West itself may become less Western, too,” the report says.
The main theme of Pompeo’s speech was “The West Is Winning.”
“Free nations are simply more successful than any other model that’s been tried in the history of civilization. Our governments respect basic human rights, they foster economic prosperity, and they keep us all secure,” Pompeo said. 
The West is not just limited to geographical location, as “any nation that adopts a model of respect for individual freedom, free enterprise, national sovereignty … [is] part of this idea of the West,” he explained.
To illustrate his point, Pompeo talked about the many refugees who risk their lives to escape in droves across the sea to Greece or Italy, but not to Iran or Cuba. 
On the other hand, some Asian countries were able to get out of poverty and emerge as world-leading economies by embracing Western principles, like South Korea, which is in stark contrast with Communist-ruled North Korea.
Pompeo emphasized the strength of the U.S. economy, citing low unemployment rates, rising wages, as well as the resilience of the country’s political system.
Respect for sovereignty, freedom, and democracy are critical values of the West that allow it to win, Pompeo said.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Japan’s Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi pose during a trilateral meeting during the 56th Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Munich, southern Germany on Feb. 15, 2020.

US Commitment to Protection of Freedom and SovereigntyThere are, however, countries that do not respect sovereignty and can pose threats to the West, Pompeo said. 
He listed Russia, which “seized Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine,” Iran, which attacked Saudi oil facilities and has troops in several Middle East countries, and China, which ”encroaches on the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia,” and uses “unfair trade practices.”
He strongly disagreed with remarks made in recent years by Western leaders, “questioning America’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance and America’s leadership in the world.” 
He also quoted a Western leader who said the day before that “the United States rejects the international community.”
In response, Pompeo provided examples of U.S. involvement in fighting and countering all kinds of attacks on sovereignty and freedom of Western countries. 
The United States has worked to confront and counter these threats through sanctions and military actions.
The United States also arms threatened or attacked nations—e.g., Ukraine and provides them with financial aid, and training
The United States has led the global fight to defeat ISIS, Pompeo said.
The United States urged NATO Allies to increase their defense spending to “$400 billion in new pledges,” and actively participates in NATO’s military exercises in Europe, he said.
“We support independent nations. … Our signature military project together is a defensive alliance,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo announced a new U.S. commitment to “provide up to $1 billion in financing to Central and Eastern European countries of the Three Seas Initiative.” 
The goal is “to galvanize private sector investment in the energy sector to protect freedom and democracy around the world,” said Pompeo.
U.S. President Donald Trump and other leaders attend the Three Seas Initiative Summit of Eastern European countries at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland, on July 6, 2017. 

The Three Seas Initiative is a political platform at the presidential level that unites 12 Central and Eastern European countries, located between the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Black seas, in an endeavor to build a North-South infrastructure corridor connecting countries of this region.
Most of the Three Seas participants used to be a part of the former Eastern Communist Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union. 
Therefore their infrastructure was not only underdeveloped in comparison with Western Europe but also focused mainly on interconnections along the East-West axis. 
This was a major impediment to economic growth in the region. 
In terms of energy, the region remained dependent on a single supplier of gas and oil—Russia.
Included in the Three Seas Initiatives are projects to create an energy market that will provide diversification of energy sources and suppliers, and one of the new energy suppliers to countries participating in the initiative is an American producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG).