China Origin Virus ID-19

China Detains Activist Who Accused Xi Jinping of Chinese Coronavirus Cover-Up
Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese legal activist, went silent over the weekend. His girlfriend, Li Qiaochu, a social activist, has gone missing.
Javier C. Hernández

Xu Zhiyong in Beijing in 2009.

He portrayed China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, as hungry for power.

He accused Xi of trying to cover up the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in central China. 

In one of his most daring writings, he urged Xi to resign, saying, “You’re just not smart enough.”
Then, over the weekend, Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese legal activist, went silent. 

The authorities in the southern city of Guangzhou detained him on Saturday, according to Mr. Xu’s friends, after he spent nearly two months in hiding. 

His girlfriend, Li Qiaochu, a social activist, went missing on Sunday, Mr. Xu’s friends said.
The activist is the latest critic to be caught up in Xi’s far-reaching efforts to limit dissent in China. 

The crackdown, which has ensnared scores of activists, lawyers, journalists and intellectuals, is likely to intensify as the ruling Communist Party comes under broad attack for its handling of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, one of its biggest political challenges in years.
Mr. Xu, a 46-year-old former university lecturer, has long railed against government corruption and social injustice in China. 

He went into hiding in December as the police began rounding up human rights activists who met with him in the eastern city of Xiamen.
While in hiding, Mr. Xu continued to publish blunt critiques of Xi on social media, accusing him of leading a dictatorship.

He also criticized Xi’s handling of the outbreak in the central province of Hubei that has killed at least 1,770 people in China and sickened more than 70,000. 

In one of his last writings before he was detained, Mr. Xu mourned the death of a doctor in Wuhan whom the police had silenced after he warned about the virus.

“In their hearts,” Mr. Xu said of party leaders, “there is no right and wrong, no conscience, no bottom line, no humanity.”
Mr. Xu, a firebrand who has spent decades pushing for political reforms, has long clashed with the Chinese government.
He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2014 for “gathering a crowd to disturb public order,” a charge that stemmed from his role organizing the New Citizens Movement, a grass-roots effort against corruption and social injustice in Chinese society.
It is unclear what charges the authorities might bring against Mr. Xu. 

The circumstances of the disappearance of his girlfriend, Ms. Li, were also ambiguous. 

The police in Guangzhou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Xu’s friends defended his actions.
“It is within the scope of freedom of speech under the Chinese Constitution,” said Hua Ze, an activist based in New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Xu who confirmed his detention.
Faced with growing public anger over the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, China’s leader has cited a need to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion,” a term that often refers to blocking independent news reporting and censoring critical comments on Chinese social media.
Many free-speech activists worry that the party, which is concerned about maintaining its control, is tightening the reins of public discourse despite a growing perception that the silencing of doctors and others who tried to raise alarms has enabled the Chinese virus to spread more widely.
Two video bloggers who attracted wide attention for their dispatches from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, have gone missing.
Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, said the detention of Mr. Xu showed that the authorities had no intention of loosening restrictions on speech.
“The Chinese government persists in its old ways: silencing its critics rather than listening to people who promote rights-respecting policies that actually solve problems,” she said.

China's Crimes Against Humanity

Chinese coronavirus bioweapon theory spreading
Outbreak had started in Wuhan facility, as first patient never went to wet market identified as source
By FRANK CHEN

A masked passenger walks in front of Wuhan Station before the city is locked down on January 23. 

A Wuhan lab affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences has sought to dispel rumors that it made and leaked the highly infectious pneumonic virus that led to the still-raging global outbreak. While Chinese dictator Xi Jinping was briefed about the public health threat by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in early January, the government decided against sounding the alarm because it did not want to “mar the festive vibe” during the Lunar New Year celebrations.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the provincial capital of Hubei, which is the ground zero of the contagion, has been thrust into the media spotlight by the allegation last week that it leaked bio-hazardous agents.

Posts circulating on WeChat and Weibo claim that a researcher at the institute was the first to be infected by the novel coronavirus, now called China Origin Virus ID-19 (Covid-19) by the World Health Organization.

The female virologist and a graduate from the institute, referred to as “patient zero,” had never visited the city’s shambolic wet market – also known as the “zoo” – where a range of wild animals were sold. 

The market has been identified by the authorities as the probable source of the deadly pathogen.
In a statement released on Sunday, the lab stressed that the researcher had left the city and was in good health, refusing to release more information about her for privacy reasons.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology had leaked the Chinese coronavirus. 

The institute is said to be the nation’s only Biological Security Level 4-certified lab, the highest level in the hierarchy of biosafety and biocontainment procedures codified by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The Wuhan lab has the equipment and staff to handle the most infectious viruses, including Ebola.
Shi Zhengli, the institute’s lead researcher on bat-related viruses, said on her social media account that she “guaranteed with her own life” that the outbreak had nothing to do with the lab but was a “nemesis for the barbaric habits and lifestyle of some people – like eating wild game including bats.”
Shi’s team said at the end of January, when the acute respiratory disease started to strike down more people in Wuhan and the rest of Hubei, that bats could have been the initial host of the Chinese coronavirus and SARS virus. 

Patients line up in an outpatient department at a hospital in Wuhan. 

A woman wears a face mask as a preventative measure against the Chinese coronavirus, as she watches a race during the Hong Kong Gold Cup at the Sha Tin racecourse on February 16, 2020. 

Richard Ebright, a biology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told the BBC that genomic sequencing of the Chinese coronavirus showed no proof that it had been artificially modified, yet he could not rule out the possibility that the unfolding pandemic could be the result of a lab incident.
Ebright said the Chinese coronavirus was a cousin of one found in bats captured by the institute in caves in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 2003, and that samples had been kept in the Wuhan lab since 2013.
Also, a paper that appeared in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet at the end of last month has lent credibility to speculation about the origins of the Chinese virus. 

The paper quoted seven doctors at Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital as saying that the first patient admitted on December 1 had “never been to the wet market,” nor had there been any epidemiological link between the first patient and subsequent infection cases, based on the data from the first 41 patients treated there.
Furthermore, a note from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology is seen as a tacit admission that some kind of incident may have occurred at the Wuhan lab.
On Saturday, the ministry issued a directive mandating more stringent handling of Chinese viruses and bioagents by all labs and research institutes. 

The document alluded to the slack oversight and management rampant at some facilities, and stressed that protection and decontamination must be beefed up now that more labs across the nation are intensifying their efforts to develop medicines to treat it and a vaccine to prevent it.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao daily reported on Monday that the CCDC had sounded the alarm in a report on the emerging SARS-like outbreak submitted to the top leadership in early January. 

However, curbing the spread was not at the top of the agenda when Xi and other members of the party’s upper echelon sat down for a Politburo meeting on January 7. 

Citing its source, the broadsheet said top leaders were opposed to any contingency measures “that may mar the festive vibe and make the public panic.”
In a move seen as a bid to highlight Xi’s early involvement in combating the outbreak, state media revealed on Sunday that the president “gave specific instructions” to contain the spread in the January 7 meeting, amid people’s simmering exasperation with the state and local cadres’ tardy response to the public health crisis that has made more than 70,000 sick across the country as of Monday afternoon.

Gao Fu, chief of China’s CCDC. 

And even though the CCDC alerted Xi early on, its chief, Gao Fu, is still under fire for his public assurances last month that people were not likely to become infected as a result of normal human contact. 

Calls are being made for Gao, a veterinarian by training, to step down.

WHO accused of being a Beijing puppet

The Chinese coronavirus outbreak shows WHO kowtowing to China's despots

By FRANK CHEN

Questions have been raised over the World Health Organization’s handling of the Chinese coronavirus in China, with one dissident calling the WHO an ‘affiliated organization’ of the Chinese Communist Party.
The comment came from Yu Jie, a scholar-turned-dissident who lives in exile in the US. 

Yu was a close associate of the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and compared the WHO to an ‘affiliated organization’ of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yu noted the WHO’s flawed risk assessment of the spread of the Chinese coronavirus as well as its foot-dragging before declaring the public health emergency as an incident posing global risks.
Another critic was famed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a thorn in Beijing’s side for his politically iconoclastic artwork. 

He also relayed a petition letter demanding WHO Director-General and famous Beijing puppet Tedros Adhanom’s resignation.
“On January 23rd, 2020, Adhanom declined to declare China virus outbreak as a global health emergency. The number of infected and deaths has risen more than tenfold within only five days since then. Part of it is related to Adhanom’s underestimation of the situation in China.
“We believe the WHO is supposed to be politically neutral … On the other hand, Taiwan should not be excluded from the WHO for any political reasons. Their technologies are far more advanced than some of the countries on the ‘selected WHO list’ and can contribute to the global fight against the virus given its well-rounded medical and public health expertise and geographical proximity to mainland China,” read the petition.
When Chinese dictator Xi Jinping met Adhanom in Beijing at the end of last month, there were three tables separating Xi and Adhanom when the two were seated inside the Great Hall of the People, with no interpreters working behind them.
This unusual arrangement for when Xi receives a foreign dignitary has been interpreted by some observers as Xi’s unease about being infected with the coronavirus.
It was thought Xi wanted to keep a safe distance and take no risks, even though Adhanom was coming from Geneva, which had not been hit by the outbreak that started in Wuhan in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping with his puppet Tedros Adhanom in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

In a long-winded speech during the sit-down, Xi talked up how he had personally orchestrated the response to the pandemic and overseen the deployment of resources, stressing China’s confidence and capabilities to triumph over the virus under the strong and robust leadership of himself and the mighty Communist Party.
It was surely too much to expect Xi to make a personal appearance in the epidemic epicenter of Wuhan, where the acute respiratory disease has, regardless of the rampant under-reporting, struck down 35,991 people and killed more than 1,000, according to the latest official figure as of Friday afternoon.
The WHO, nonetheless, praised China’s “aggressive response” to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets.
Adhanom, who hails from Ethiopia, a country that is a recipient of a large amount of Chinese foreign aid for Africa, was addressed by Xi and the Chinese state media as an “old friend” of China.However, he is now accused of fawning to Xi and putting the WHO under Beijing’s spell, especially after his indecision to announce a global health emergency early on, as well as his “gullible” acceptance of China’s tally of those infected, statistics from a country that are usually met with incredulity internationally.
In a remedial move, the WHO also held a press conference to update the public on the ongoing contagion, but the tone was as optimistic as the theme of many press conferences held by the Chinese government and attended by the deferential state media outlets.

The Beijing stooges: World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme head Michael Ryan, left, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO Chair of Emergency Committee on Ebola Robert Steffen attend a combined news conference after a two-day international conference on Chinese coronavirus vaccine research. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang flew into Wuhan at the end of last month, but it appears Xi Jinping has no plans to inspect the epicenter of the contagion. 

The WHO cited Chinese health officials as noting that the number of new infections of the Chinese coronavirus appeared to be stabilizing outside Wuhan and the rest of Hubei province this week, despite a change in China’s methodology for determining who had the disease, which led to a spike in confirmed cases in Hubei.
Cadres in the Chinese virus-stricken province said on Thursday that “clinically diagnosed” cases would be counted as “confirmed cases” and that the change was made so a broader set of patients could receive the same treatment as those confirmed with the infection.

Obsequious Acquiescence
Sylvie Briand, WHO’s director of infectious hazards, endorsed the changes to diagnosis and treatment, saying it would be "normal" for a government to alter the case definition during the course of an outbreak as the situation would be constantly evolving.

Masked doctors wave a Communist Party flag at a hospital in Wuhan in a ceremony to muster ranks. 

Doctors in protective gear prepare before entering wards for the infected. 

Also, the WHO’s acquiescence when Beijing moved to lock down Wuhan and put its remaining residents – almost 10 million people – into mandatory quarantine regardless of their physical condition contradicts its calls not to curtail the flow of people from China.
It was only after its belated emergency categorization of the disease – seen as being too pliant in the face of Beijing’s concerns over the economy and the country’s image – did the United Nations agency start to mobilize financial and political support to contain the spread.
The WHO has long been seen as under Beijing’s sway.
Adhanom’s predecessor -- also a Beijing puppet -- Margaret Chan, was thrust into her position as the WHO chief with Beijing’s stumping efforts for her during the selection process back in 2007.
Chan, whose catastrophic handling of the SARS crisis once drew hefty flak when she was Hong Kong’s health minister in 2003, in turn did Beijing’s bidding to bar Taiwan’s participation and diverted substantial resources into the WHO’s programs in China, among other things.

China's Organized Crime Syndicate

Huawei Charged With Racketeering, Stealing Trade Secrets

U.S. Prosecutors Hit Huawei With New Federal Charges

By MERRIT KENNEDY

The Chinese technology firm Huawei is facing a raft of U.S. federal charges, including racketeering conspiracy.

Federal prosecutors have added new charges against Chinese telecom giant Huawei, its U.S. subsidiaries and its chief financial officer, including accusing it of racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets from U.S.-based companies.
The company already faced a long list of criminal accusations in the case, which was first filed in August 2018, including bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors filed the expanded indictment in federal court in Brooklyn on Thursday.

"The Trump administration has repeatedly made clear it has national security concerns about Huawei, including economic espionage," NPR's Ryan Lucas reported. 

Recently, President Trump tried to convince the U.K. not to contract with Huawei to provide equipment to build a 5G network, but British leaders did so anyway.

Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a joint statement that the indictment "paints a damning portrait of an illegitimate organization that lacks any regard for the law."

Huawei is also accused of doing business in countries subject to U.S. sanctions such as North Korea and Iran. 

Prosecutors accuse Huawei of helping Iran's government "by installing surveillance equipment, including surveillance equipment used to monitor, identify and detain protesters during the anti-government demonstrations of 2009 in Tehran, Iran."
They say that for decades, Huawei has worked to "misappropriate intellectual property, including from six U.S. technology companies, in an effort to grow and operate Huawei's business."
Huawei pushed its employees to bring in confidential information from competitors, even offering bonuses for the "most valuable stolen information," according to the indictment.
The 56-page indictment is rife with examples of Huawei scheming to obtain trade secrets from U.S. companies. 

They also attempted to recruit employees from rival companies or would use proxies such as professors working at research institutions to access intellectual property.
For example, starting in 2000 the defendants took source code and user manuals for Internet routers from an unnamed northern California-based tech company, and incorporated it into its own routers. 

They then marketed those routers as a lower-cost version of the tech company's devices. 

During a 2003 lawsuit, Huawei claimed that it had removed the source code from the routers and recalled them, but also erased the memories of the recalled devices and sent them to China so they could not be used as evidence.
In an incident that drew headlines last year, a Huawei employee in 2012 and 2013 repeatedly tried to steal technical information about a robot from an unnamed wireless network operator, eventually going as far as making off with the robot's arm. 

The details match those in a separate federal lawsuit in Seattle where the company is accused of targeting T-Mobile.
A subsidiary of the firm also entered into a partnership in 2009 with a New York and California-based company working to improve cellular telephone reception. 

Despite a nondisclosure agreement, Huawei employees stole technology. 

The subsidiary eventually filed a patent that relied on the other company's intellectual property.

The Chinese Coronavirus Story Is Too Big for China to Spin

Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
By Kiki Zhao

A vigil in Hong Kong on Feb. 7, the day that Li Wenliang, a doctor who was reprimanded for warning about the coronavirus, died after being infected with it.

Reactions to Li Wenliang’s death last Friday filled the timelines of my social media accounts almost immediately. 

Post after post on my WeChat. 

Grief, frustration, anger.
A week later, the groundswell of emotions seems unabated.
Dr. Li, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was one of the first doctors to try to warn about the disease, and then to die from it.
The story of how the authorities muzzled Dr. Li became an instant parable for their trampling on the Chinese public’s right to know. 

The authorities’ effort to now muzzle the public’s outrage is a parable of government unaccountability.On Dec. 30, Dr. Li told former classmates from medical school in a WeChat group that several patients displaying SARS-like symptoms were being quarantined. 

He was quickly summoned for questioning by the police.
On Jan. 3, Dr. Li was made to sign a statement declaring that his warning had been incorrect and was “illegal,” and that it had “disturbed social order.” 

Under a typed admonishment that said, “If you continue this illegal activity, you will be dealt with by the law! Do you understand?” he wrote by hand, “I understand.” 

Would he now cooperate with the police? 

“I can.”
In an interview later with Caixin, one of China’s leading investigative news outlets, Dr. Li said, “There shouldn’t be only one voice in a healthy society.” 

After news broke last week that he had died, a picture with his quote ignited the Chinese internet.
Fang Fang, a fiction writer based in Wuhan, has been documenting daily life in the city. 

“Dear internet censors, you should let Wuhan people speak,” she wrote recently. 

“We’ve been locked down here for more than ten days; we’ve seen too many extreme tragedies. If you don’t allow us to express our anguish or complaints or reflections, do you really want us to go mad?”
Allowed or not, the people are expressing their anguish, complaints and reflections.
A post on WeChat with photos of young people wearing surgical masks inscribed with “I cannot” and “I do not understand” quickly spread online. 

So did a letter signed by 10 professors in Wuhan demanding an apology from the officials who silenced Dr. Li and other whistle-blower doctors. 

Both posts were promptly taken down.
On Feb. 11, a group of middle-school teachers in Chengdu, about 700 miles west of Wuhan, posted online an open letter to their students about the outbreak. 

“In ‘The Plague,’ Albert Camus wrote that the only way to fight with the plague is honesty,” the text went. 

“We cannot turn a funeral into a wedding. We cannot use songs of praise to replace questioning.”
The article, which was hugely popular online, was taken down just hours after it was posted.

A news website run by the city authorities of Dongying, in the eastern province of Shandong, published an article late last month praising the online censor Guo Qiqi: She sleeps just four hours a day, and monitors the internet for 20. 

The article included photos of a policewoman whose job was to monitor Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked inside China.
The piece swept Weibo like a storm — but not as the authorities had intended. 

“Trying hard to build a Brave New World,” said one comment.
The article and the comments have since been deleted.
The censors can’t keep up, though: Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.
Which might explain why, in addition to trying to prevent people from openly discussing Dr. Li’s death, the information blackout in the early stages of the outbreak and the government’s handling of the crisis overall, the authorities are also trying to peddle an alternative narrative — and one that co-opts Dr. Li’s story.
As ever, the central government in Beijing is scrambling to project the image that it has everything under control. 

Instead of admitting to any large-scale inefficiencies or errors, it has sent a team to Wuhan to investigate Dr. Li’s death. 

Two senior provincial party officials were sacked on Thursday.
The government is also trying to cast Dr. Li’s death as the nation’s sacrifice — meaning, the Chinese Communist Party’s own.
The veteran epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who is credited with identifying the coronavirus that causes SARS and is widely revered, wept as he spoke about Dr. Li in an interview with Reuters this week. 

“The majority of people think he’s a hero of China,” Dr. Zhong said, in English, tears welling. 

“I’m so proud of him. He told people the truth at the end of December.” 

Many people share that view.
Only, they don’t want the Chinese Communist Party telling them who is a hero or what heroism is.
Xinhua, the party’s official news agency, has called for the population to “turn grief into strength” — and follow Dr. Li’s example to “complete his unfinished undertaking.”
That’s a dangerous invitation. 

The people can see through the government’s ploy, and they are fuming.
On Sunday, I read an article online about Yan Cheng, a teenager with severe cerebral palsy who died on Jan. 29, a week after his father was taken into quarantine. 

The teenager was unable to look after himself and yet he was left on his own. 

I pored over a photo of him smiling, taken not long before he died. 

I thought of how cold and hungry and lonely he must have felt that last night, and I wailed.
The next day I got a notice from Weibo: The platform was banning me from publishing or reposting anything for 30 days. 

But new posts and articles have kept appearing on my timeline, and I keep on upvoting them.

U.S. Faces Tough ‘Great Game’ Against China in Central Asia and Beyond

Former Soviet republics in the heart of Asia are critical battlegrounds in the struggle with China over global influence.
By Edward Wong

The historic town of Khiva, Uzbekistan, has been revitalized with China’s help.

KHIVA, Uzbekistan — Inside the ancient walls of the Silk Road oasis town of Khiva, China has put down a marker of its geopolitical ambitions. 

A sign promotes a Chinese aid project to renovate a once-crumbling mosque and a faded madrasa.
Outside the town’s northern gate, a billboard-size video screen shows clips of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan meeting with world leaders. 

Xi Jinping features prominently, but there are no shots of President Trump.
That China is advertising its aid efforts so boldly in this remote outpost linking Asia and Europe — where camel caravans once arrived after crossing the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts — is the kind of action these days that sets off alarm bells among American officials. 

The Trump administration is trying with greater force to insert itself into the political and economic life of Central Asia to counter China’s presence. 

American officials see the countries in the heart of the continent’s vast, arid steppe as critical battlegrounds in the struggle with China over global influence.
“Whenever we speak to countries around the world, we want to make sure that we’re doing what the people of those countries want,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week at a news conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
The Uzbeks want a “good, balanced relationship,” he said.
“They have long borders,” he added. 

“They sit in a region where China and Russia are both present.”
Leaders of the five Central Asian nations that became independent republics after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — are used to walking a regional tightrope. 

The area was contested during the so-called Great Game of the 19th century, when the British and Russian empires competed to establish influence and control.
Now a new game is underway. 

And officials in Central Asia, like many of their counterparts around the world, are hedging their bets when it comes to aligning with Washington or Beijing.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, left, with Xi Jinping last year in Beijing.

“I’d like to once again note that we want to see Central Asia as a region of stable development, prosperity and cooperation,” said Abdulaziz Kamilov, the foreign minister of Uzbekistan. 

“And we would really not like to feel on ourselves unfavorable political consequences in relation to some competition in our region between large powers.”
The State Department released a Central Asia strategy document on Feb. 5 that said the top priority was to “support and strengthen the sovereignty and independence of the Central Asian states” — a reference to warding off the influence of China and Russia.
It is a tough mission for the United States. 

The nations are in China’s and Russia’s backyards, and there have been decades of close interactions among them. 

Xi has made multiple state visits to the countries since he took power in 2012, most recently last year.
The Trump administration has hit major setbacks in its attempts to build a global coalition against projects by the Chinese government and by Chinese companies. 

In fact, Britain said on Jan. 28 that it would not ban technology made by Huawei, a Chinese telecom giant, from its high-speed 5G wireless network, despite intense pressure from American officials.
Mr. Pompeo made London his first stop on a recent six-day trip to Europe and Central Asia, and he said there on Jan. 30 that the Chinese Communist Party was “the central threat of our times.” 

The next day, he spoke about China with leaders in Ukraine.
But words go only so far. 

The Americans fail to present an economical alternative to Huawei. 

And the Trump administration is discovering that its belligerent approach toward allies has a cost when it comes to China strategy. 

Withdrawing from the global Paris climate agreement, starting trade conflicts with friendly governments make those nations less likely to listen to Washington’s entreaties on China.
A recent policy report on China by the Center for a New American Security said “critical areas of U.S. policy remain inconsistent, uncoordinated, underresourced and — to be blunt — uncompetitive and counterproductive to advancing U.S. values and interests.”

Muslims praying at a mosque in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the Central Asian nations, which are predominantly Muslim, to speak out about China’s Uighur concentration camps.

Some analysts say the hawkish talk on China by Mr. Pompeo and other American officials paradoxically could make the United States look weak.
“And that last point is just the core of it for me. A central problem of US foreign policy today, not just in Central Asia, is that it feels increasingly reactive to me — back footed and on defense, not least in the face of Chinese initiatives,” Evan A. Feigenbaum, a deputy assistant secretary of state on Central Asia and South Asia in the George W. Bush administration who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on Twitter.
“To wit, the secretary of state just made the first visit by America’s top diplomat to Central Asia in five years — five! — but spent a hefty chunk of it talking about China,” he wrote.
“The challenge for the US is to get off its reactive back foot and be proactive and on offense.”
The United States did not pursue serious partnerships in Central Asia until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Pentagon needed regional bases for the war in Afghanistan.
China has taken a different approach.
Beijing says it will help build up the region under what it calls the Silk Road Economic Belt, which is part of the larger Belt and Road Initiative, a blanket term for global infrastructure projects that, according to Beijing, amount to $1 trillion of investment.
The projects are potential debt traps, but many countries have embraced them.
The economic liberalization of Uzbekistan under Mirziyoyev, who took power in 2016 after the death of a longtime dictator, has resulted in greater trade with China.
China is Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, and trade totaled almost $6.3 billion in 2018, a nearly 50 percent increase from 2017, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Chinese goods, including Huawei devices, are everywhere in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and other Uzbek cities.

The subway in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

Uzbekistan is also committing to being part of rail and road networks that China is building across Central Asia.
Since 2001, China has worked with Central and South Asian nations as well as Russia in a multilateral group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to address security issues.

China’s People’s Liberation Army has gained a new foothold in the region, in the form of a base in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains.
For at least three years, Chinese troops have quietly kept watch from two dozen buildings and lookout towers near the Tajik-Chinese border and the remote Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
The Afghan corridor is a strategic strip of land whose borders were drawn by Britain and Russia during the original Great Game as a buffer zone.
The United States had hundreds of troops at an air base in Uzbekistan that it operated with the Uzbeks.
But it wants to move the relationship well beyond the military.
“We want private investment, American private investment sector, to flow between our two nations,” Mr. Pompeo said.
He added that the United States had committed $100 million to programs in Uzbekistan last year, and that it would give $1 million to help develop financial markets and another $1 million to increase trade and “connectivity” between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
On his trip, Mr. Pompeo also made a demand regarding human rights in China as he met with officials in Tashkent and Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan.
He raised the issue of China’s internment camps that hold one million or more Muslims and urged the Central Asian nations, which are predominantly Muslim, to speak out against the camps.
In Nur-Sultan, he met with Kazakhs who have had family members detained in the camps.

This month in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, Mr. Pompeo met with Kazakhs whose family members have been detained in Chinese camps.

Yet, as in other predominantly Muslim nations, Central Asian leaders have remained silent on this. (Mr. Trump himself has said nothing, and Mr. Pompeo has been accused of hypocrisy by excluding Taiwan, the democratic island that China threatens, from a religious freedom alliance.)
Trump administration policies perceived as anti-Muslim undermine trust in Washington.
On Jan. 31, Mr. Trump added Kyrgyzstan and five other nations, all with substantial Muslim populations, to a list of countries whose citizens are restricted in traveling to the United States.
In an interview in Nur-Sultan, a Kazakh television journalist, Lyazzat Shatayeva, asked Mr. Pompeo, “What do you think that signals to the other countries and other governments in Central Asia on why it happened?”
Mr. Pompeo said Kyrgyzstan must “fix” certain things: “passport issues, visa issues, visa overstays.”
“When the country fixes those things,” he said, “we’ll get them right back in where they can come travel to America.”

Chinese coronavirus: senior US official accuses China of lack of transparency

Top White House official Larry Kudlow questions approach of Politburo as China brings in ‘wartime’ measures in more cities
By Lily Kuo and agencies

A senior White House official has called on Beijing to be more transparent over its handling of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak as Chinese authorities expanded “wartime” measures to limit its spread.
“We are a little disappointed that we haven’t been invited in and we’re a little disappointed in the lack of transparency coming from the Chinese,” said Larry Kudlow, the director of the US National Economic Council.
His comments came after Chinese authorities said they had altered how they count cases, resulting in confusion amid dramatic changes to the reported figures for two days in a row, and dampening hopes that the outbreak may peak later this month.
On Thursday, Hubei officials reported a large spike in cases after including those confirmed by CT scans, not just lab tests.

The revision added 254 deaths to the overall Chinese toll.
Then on Friday, China added 121 new deaths – but also removed 108 fatalities from the total, due to what China’s National Health Commission said were “duplicate statistics”.
In its latest update, the commission reported 121 new deaths and 5,090 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of people infected to more than 64,000 worldwide, with 63,851 of the cases in China.
The death toll stands at 1,383 – with three of those deaths outside of mainland China, one in Hong Kong, one in Japan and one in the Philippines.
The commission did not give further explanation of the double-counted cases on Friday.
“Based on the current trend in confirmed cases, this appears to be a clear indication that the fairly drastic measures Chinese have implemented to date would appear to have been too little, too late,” said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an infectious diseases expert at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

Chinese authorities also announced that 1,716 health workers had been infected as of 11 February. Six had died. 

Officials on Friday, responding to questions about how those cases are counted, said that when asymptomatic patients show symptoms during quarantine they would be included as confirmed.
While public health experts have greeted the change in reporting – in order to capture more cases and get more patients needed treatment – positively, others say it raises more questions about the data. The change in diagnostic criteria has been applied only to Hubei province.
“Is the politburo really being honest with us?” Kudlow asked, referring to communist China’s top leadership body. 

Kudlow said Xi Jinping had assured Donald Trump that Beijing would accept US help, but “they won’t let us”.
“I don’t know what their motives are. I do know that apparently more and more people are suffering over there,” he said.
At a meeting of senior leaders in Beijing on Thursday, officials called for other areas to “adopt quarantine and rescue measures equal to that of Wuhan”, which has been under lockdown for the past three weeks. 

The meeting, chaired by the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, called on Wuhan to speed up classifying and quarantining residents suspected or confirmed of contracting the virus.
In Huanggang, one of the worst-hit areas outside of Wuhan with more than 2,000 cases and at least 59 deaths, authorities issued an emergency measures for 14 days, “fully sealing” all residential areas and banning vehicles, except for those for emergency, medical or official purposes.
Checkpoints would be set up and public security deployed to enforce the measures. 

Local district committees are to organise residents’ food and supplies. 

“All residents must not enter or leave their communities without authorisation,” the notice said.

In Dawu county in central Hubei, home to more than 600,000 people, officials also issued an emergency notice on Thursday afternoon that residential areas and buildings would be sealed and vehicles banned. 

Those who violate the rules “will be detained, according to wartime regulations”. 

“In extraordinary times, extraordinary actions are needed,” the notice said.
In Zhangwan district in Shiyan city, authorities placed similar restrictions and said public security would help enforce the measures. 

Gucheng county and Yunmeng county also implemented the same measures for a period of 14 days.
On Friday, China’s ministry of finance said the country was earmarking 80.5bn yuan (£8.5bn) for fighting the epidemic. 

So far, about half of that has been spent.
Researchers at China National Biotech, a state-owned company, said that human antibodies from survivors had helped patients who were critically ill, prompting calls for recovered patients to donate blood plasma.


Michael Smith
✔@MikeSmithAFR
I have been put under Home quarantine for 14 days after returning to Shanghai. For my neighbours, only 1 person per household is allowed out once a day. Some renters are being denied access to their homes. This is a city increasingly in lockdown. #coronavirus
566
5:35 AM - Feb 14, 2020

The next few weeks are critical for judging whether quarantine measures have worked, and as residents return to work in major cities. 

Officials said this year would not see a “peak” in return journeys after the lunar new year holiday and that all parts of the country should “continue protection and control measures”.
Containing the coronavirus in Wuhan, where the virus emerged in December, is still of “utmost importance” in order to achieve “economic and societal development” this year, officials said.
Outside China, one person died in Japan from the virus on Thursday night. 

Japan’s health ministry said a woman in her 80s living in Kanagawa prefecture, west of Tokyo, had died. 

She had been transferred between hospitals as her condition worsened and she was confirmed to have had the coronavirus after her death.
Her death was the third fatality from the virus outside mainland China.
Meanwhile, the US state department expressed deep concern about North Korea’s vulnerability to the outbreak. 

The statement comes as Pyongyang scrambles to strengthen quarantine and preventive measures.
North Korea has yet to report a case of the virus, but state media reports have hinted that an uncertain number of people have been quarantined after showing symptoms. 

Experts say an epidemic in North Korea could be dire because of its chronic lack of medical supplies and poor healthcare infrastructure.
Passengers on a cruise ship that spent two weeks at sea after being turned away by five countries over coronavirus fears started disembarking in Cambodia on Friday.
The MS Westerdam, carrying 1,455 passengers and 802 crew, docked in the Cambodian port town of Sihanoukville on Thursday.