The Official Chinese 🇨🇳 Espionage & Cold War Thread
Press release: Experts say Chinese government COVID-19 cover-up is a Chernobyl Moment
14.4.2020 European Values
One hundred China experts and senior political figures have signed an open letter describing the Chinese Communist Party government’s cover up of COVID-19 as “China’s Chernobyl moment”. The group of signatories, who include some of the world’s leading authorities on Chinese politics, law, and modern history, say that the Chinese government’s rule by fear endangers Chinese citizens—and the world.
The open letter by these leading China watchers and concerned political leaders responds to another open letter released by a group of China-based establishment academics who accused critical voices of “politicizing” the COVID-19 pandemic. This narrative has also been frequently repeated by CCP government official spokespeople, and also recently, by the head of the WHO. The CCP government has launched a crackdown on Chinese journalists reporting critically on the COVID-19 crisis and it is now censoring scientific research on the origins of the pandemic.
The co-signed international public figures, analysts, and China watchers argue that:
- „The roots of the pandemic stem from the initial cover-up and mishandling of the spread of COVID-19 by CCP authorities in Wuhan.“
- „Under the influence of the CCP government, the World Health Organisation initially downplayed the pandemic. Taiwanese health officials allege that WHO ignored their alerts of human-to-human transmission in late December. Under pressure from the CCP, democratic Taiwan—which has coped with the pandemic in exemplary fashion—is currently excluded from the WHO.“
- The China watchers and other signatories say that “China’s Chernobyl moment is a self-inflicted wound. The CCP silenced Chinese doctors who wanted to warn other health professionals during the early stage of the outbreak.“
- The experts urge foreign governments to “engage in a critical evaluation of the impact of CCP policies on the lives of Chinese citizens and citizens around the world“.
theguardian.com
China may have conducted low-level nuclear test, US claims
Julian Borger
5-6 minutes
The US state department has claimed China may have secretly conducted a low-yield underground nuclear test, in an accusation likely to further inflame already poor relations between Washington and Beijing.
A report on arms control compliance does not offer proof, but points to circumstantial evidence, of excavations and other stepped-up activity at China’s Lop Nur test site.
“China’s possible preparation to operate its Lop Nur test site year-round, its use of explosive containment chambers, extensive excavation activities at Lop Nur and a lack of transparency on its nuclear testing activities ... raise concerns regarding its adherence to the zero yield standard,” the state department report, first revealed by the Wall Street Journal, said.
Both the US and China signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), concluded in 1996, but neither country has ratified it, and – partly as a result – the agreement has not come into force. However, China has sworn to adhere to CTBT terms and the US has been observing a moratorium on nuclear testing.
If the treaty were in force, it would include a mechanism for on-site inspections of suspect sites.
The US defence intelligence agency leveled similar accusations against Russia in May last year, which were never confirmed. US hawks have been urging the Trump administration to formally break from the CTBT, leaving it free to conduct new nuclear tests of its own.
“Beijing is modernising its nuclear arsenal while the United States handcuffs itself with one-sided arms-control,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton said on Twitter. “China has proven it can’t work with us honestly.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said that the available evidence was possibly consistent with a low-yield tests or with “sub-critical tests”, which do not involve nuclear fission, and which are allowed by the CTBT.
“It is worth noting how thin the evidence is for these claims,” Lewis wrote. “US, Russia and China all conduct subcritical tests…From satellites and seismic stations, subcritical tests are indistinguishable from low yield nuclear tests.”
The finding may worsen ties already strained by US charges that the global Covid-19 pandemic resulted from Beijing’s mishandling of a 2019 outbreak of the coronavirus in the city of Wuhan.
The evidence cited by the state department report claimed Beijing’s included blocking data transmissions from sensors linked to an international monitoring center. However, a spokeswoman for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which verifies compliance with the pact, told the Journal there had been no interruptions in data transmissions from China’s five sensor stations since September 2019. Before that, there were interruptions as a result of the negotiating process between the CTBTO and China on arrangements for putting the stations in operation.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a daily briefing in Beijing that China was committed to a moratorium on nuclear tests and said the United States was making false accusations.
“China has always adopted a responsible attitude, earnestly fulfilling the international obligations and promises it has assumed,” he said. “The US criticism of China is entirely groundless, without foundation, and not worth refuting.”
A senior US official said the concerns about China’s testing activities buttressed President Donald Trump’s case for getting China to join the US and Russia in talks on an arms control accord to replace the 2010 New Start treaty between Washington and Moscow that expires in February next year.
New Start restricted the US and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads, the lowest level in decades, and limited the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers that deliver them.
“The pace and manner by which the Chinese government is modernising its stockpile is worrying, destabilising, and illustrates why China should be brought into the global arms control framework,” said the senior US official on condition of anonymity.
China, estimated to have about 300 nuclear weapons, has repeatedly rejected Trump’s proposal, arguing its nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat.
Russia, France and Britain – three of the world’s five internationally recognised nuclear powers – signed and ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still requires ratification by 44 countries to become international law.
China may have conducted low-level nuclear test, US claims
Julian Borger
5-6 minutes
The US state department has claimed China may have secretly conducted a low-yield underground nuclear test, in an accusation likely to further inflame already poor relations between Washington and Beijing.
A report on arms control compliance does not offer proof, but points to circumstantial evidence, of excavations and other stepped-up activity at China’s Lop Nur test site.
“China’s possible preparation to operate its Lop Nur test site year-round, its use of explosive containment chambers, extensive excavation activities at Lop Nur and a lack of transparency on its nuclear testing activities ... raise concerns regarding its adherence to the zero yield standard,” the state department report, first revealed by the Wall Street Journal, said.
Both the US and China signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), concluded in 1996, but neither country has ratified it, and – partly as a result – the agreement has not come into force. However, China has sworn to adhere to CTBT terms and the US has been observing a moratorium on nuclear testing.
If the treaty were in force, it would include a mechanism for on-site inspections of suspect sites.
The US defence intelligence agency leveled similar accusations against Russia in May last year, which were never confirmed. US hawks have been urging the Trump administration to formally break from the CTBT, leaving it free to conduct new nuclear tests of its own.
“Beijing is modernising its nuclear arsenal while the United States handcuffs itself with one-sided arms-control,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton said on Twitter. “China has proven it can’t work with us honestly.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said that the available evidence was possibly consistent with a low-yield tests or with “sub-critical tests”, which do not involve nuclear fission, and which are allowed by the CTBT.
“It is worth noting how thin the evidence is for these claims,” Lewis wrote. “US, Russia and China all conduct subcritical tests…From satellites and seismic stations, subcritical tests are indistinguishable from low yield nuclear tests.”
The finding may worsen ties already strained by US charges that the global Covid-19 pandemic resulted from Beijing’s mishandling of a 2019 outbreak of the coronavirus in the city of Wuhan.
The evidence cited by the state department report claimed Beijing’s included blocking data transmissions from sensors linked to an international monitoring center. However, a spokeswoman for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which verifies compliance with the pact, told the Journal there had been no interruptions in data transmissions from China’s five sensor stations since September 2019. Before that, there were interruptions as a result of the negotiating process between the CTBTO and China on arrangements for putting the stations in operation.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a daily briefing in Beijing that China was committed to a moratorium on nuclear tests and said the United States was making false accusations.
“China has always adopted a responsible attitude, earnestly fulfilling the international obligations and promises it has assumed,” he said. “The US criticism of China is entirely groundless, without foundation, and not worth refuting.”
A senior US official said the concerns about China’s testing activities buttressed President Donald Trump’s case for getting China to join the US and Russia in talks on an arms control accord to replace the 2010 New Start treaty between Washington and Moscow that expires in February next year.
New Start restricted the US and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads, the lowest level in decades, and limited the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers that deliver them.
“The pace and manner by which the Chinese government is modernising its stockpile is worrying, destabilising, and illustrates why China should be brought into the global arms control framework,” said the senior US official on condition of anonymity.
China, estimated to have about 300 nuclear weapons, has repeatedly rejected Trump’s proposal, arguing its nuclear force is defensive and poses no threat.
Russia, France and Britain – three of the world’s five internationally recognised nuclear powers – signed and ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still requires ratification by 44 countries to become international law.
Chinese Agents Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say
Chinese Agents Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say
By Edward Wong, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes
21-26 minutes
American officials were alarmed by fake text messages and social media posts that said President Trump was locking down the country. Experts see a convergence with Russian tactics.
Credit...Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
- April 22, 2020Updated 10:21 a.m. ET
Spread the word, the messages said: The Trump administration was about to lock down the entire country.
“They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters,” warned one of the messages, which cited a source in the Department of Homeland Security. “He said he got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the call today with his dispatch orders.”
The messages became so widespread over 48 hours that the White House’s National Security Council issued an announcement via Twitter that they were “FAKE.”
Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters. The amplification techniques are alarming to officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before.
That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic, they said.
The origin of the messages remains murky. American officials declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese agents to the dissemination of the disinformation, citing the need to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing’s activities.
The officials interviewed for this article work in six different agencies. They included both career civil servants and political appointees, and some have spent many years analyzing China. Their broader warnings about China’s spread of disinformation are supported by recent findings from outside bipartisan research groups, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the Center for a New American Security, which is expected to release a report on the topic next month.
Two American officials stressed they did not believe Chinese operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified existing ones. Those efforts enabled the messages to catch the attention of enough people that they then spread on their own, with little need for further work by foreign agents. The messages appeared to gain significant traction on Facebook as they were also proliferating through texts, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake social media accounts to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who in turn unwittingly help spread them.
The officials say the Chinese agents also appear to be using texts and encrypted messaging apps, including WhatsApp, as part of their campaigns. It is much harder for researchers and law enforcement officers to track disinformation spread through text messages and encrypted apps than on social media platforms.
American intelligence officers are also examining whether spies in China’s diplomatic missions in the United States helped spread the fake lockdown messages, a senior American official said. American agencies have recently increased their scrutiny of Chinese diplomats and employees of state-run media organizations. In September, the State Department secretly expelled two employees of the Chinese Embassy in Washington suspected of spying.
Other rival powers might have been involved in the dissemination, too. And Americans with prominent online or news media platforms unknowingly helped amplify the messages. Misinformation has proliferated during the pandemic — in recent weeks, some pro-Trump news outlets have promoted anti-American conspiracy theories, including one that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory in the United States.
American officials said China, borrowing from Russia’s strategies, has been trying to widen political divisions in the United States. As public dissent simmers over lockdown policies in several states, officials worry it will be easy for China and Russia to amplify the partisan disagreements.
“It is part of the playbook of spreading division,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, adding that private individuals have identified some social media bots that helped promote the recent lockdown protests that some fringe conservative groups have nurtured.
The propaganda efforts go beyond text messages and social media posts directed at Americans. In China, top officials have issued directives to agencies to engage in a global disinformation campaign around the virus, the American officials said.
Some American intelligence officers are especially concerned about disinformation aimed at Europeans that pro-China actors appear to have helped spread. The messages stress the idea of disunity among European nations during the crisis and praise China’s “donation diplomacy,” American officials said. Left unmentioned are reports of Chinese companies delivering shoddy equipment and European leaders expressing skepticism over China’s handling of its outbreak.
Mr. Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions. He has consistently praised the handling of the pandemic by Chinese leaders — “Much respect!” he wrote on Twitter on March 27. Three days later, he dismissed worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News.
“They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”
Asked about the new accusations, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a statement on Tuesday that said, “The relevant statements are complete nonsense and not worth refuting.” Zhao Lijian, a ministry spokesman, has separately rebutted persistent accusations by American officials that China has supplied bad information and exhibited a broader lack of transparency during the pandemic. “We urge the U.S. to stop political manipulation, get its own house in order and focus more on fighting the epidemic and boosting the economy,” Mr. Zhao said at a news conference on Friday.
President Trump and his aides are trying to put the spotlight on China as they face intense criticism over the federal government’s widespread failures in responding to the pandemic, which has killed more than 40,000 Americans. President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are trying to shore up domestic and international support after earlier cover-ups that allowed the virus to spread.
As diplomatic tensions rose and Beijing scrambled to control the narrative, the Chinese government last month expelled American journalists for three U.S. news organizations, including The Times.
The extent to which the United States might be engaging in its own covert information warfare in China is not clear. While the C.I.A. in recent decades has tried to support pro-democracy opposition figures in some countries, Chinese counterintelligence officers eviscerated the agency’s network of informants in China about a decade ago, hurting its ability to conduct operations there.
Chinese officials accuse Mr. Trump and his allies of overtly peddling malicious or bad information, pointing to the president’s repeatedly calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus” or the suggestion by some Republicans that the virus may have originated as a Chinese bioweapon, a theory that U.S. intelligence agencies have since ruled out. (Many Americans have also criticized Mr. Trump’s language as racist.)
Republican strategists have decided that bashing China over the virus will shore up support for Mr. Trump and other conservative politicians before the November elections.
Given the toxic information environment, foreign policy analysts are worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative. Those concerns hover around the speculation over the origin of the virus. American officials in the past have selectively passed intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape; the most notable instance was under President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Credit...Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
But it has been clear for more than a month that the Chinese government is pushing disinformation and anti-American conspiracy theories related to the pandemic. Mr. Zhao, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote on Twitter in March that the U.S. Army might have taken the virus to the Chinese city of Wuhan. That message was then amplified by the official Twitter accounts of Chinese embassies and consulates.
The state-run China Global Television Network produced a video targeting viewers in the Middle East in which a presenter speaking Arabic asserted that “some new facts” indicated that the pandemic might have originated from American participants in a military sports competition in October in Wuhan. The network has an audience of millions, and the video has had more than 365,000 views on YouTube.
“What we’ve seen is the C.C.P. mobilizing its global messaging apparatus, which includes state media as well as Chinese diplomats, to push out selected and localized versions of the same overarching false narratives,” Lea Gabrielle, coordinator of the Global Engagement Center in the State Department, said in late March, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts say it is core to China’s new, aggressive “‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy,” a term that refers to a patriotic Chinese military action film series.
But Chinese diplomats and operators of official media accounts recently began moving away from overt disinformation, Ms. Gabrielle said. That dovetailed with a tentative truce Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi reached over publicly sniping about the virus.
American officials said Chinese agencies are most likely embracing covert propagation of disinformation in its place. Current and former American officials have said they are seeing Chinese operatives adopt online strategies long used by Russian agents — a phenomenon that also occurred during the Hong Kong protests last year. Some Chinese operatives have promoted disinformation that originated on Russia-aligned websites, they said.
And the apparent aim of spreading the fake lockdown messages last month is consistent with a type of disinformation favored by Russian actors — namely sowing chaos and undermining confidence among Americans in the U.S. government, the officials said.
“As Beijing and Moscow move to shape the global information environment both independently and jointly through a wide range of digital tools, they have established several diplomatic channels and forums through which they can exchange best practices,” said Kristine Lee, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who researches disinformation from China and Russia.
“I’d anticipate, as we have seen in recent months, that their mutual learning around these tools will migrate to increasingly cutting-edge capabilities that are difficult to detect but yield maximal payoff in eroding American influence and democratic institutions globally,” she added.
‘There Is No National Lockdown’
The amplification of the fake lockdown messages was a notable instance of China’s use of covert disinformation messaging, American officials said.
A couple of versions of the message circulated widely, according to The Times analysis. The first instance tracked by The Times appeared on March 13, as many state officials were enacting social distancing policies. This version said Mr. Trump was about to invoke the Stafford Act to shut down the country.
The messages generally attributed their contents to a friend in a federal agency — the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and so on. Over days, hundreds of identical posts appeared on Facebook and the online message board *****, among other places, and spread through texts.
Another version appeared on March 15, The Times found. This one said Mr. Trump was about to deploy the National Guard, military units and emergency responders across the United States while imposing a one-week nationwide quarantine.
That same day, the National Security Council announced on Twitter that the messages were fake.
“There is no national lockdown,” it said, adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “has and will continue to post the latest guidance.”
Samantha Vinograd, who was a staff employee at the National Security Council during the Obama administration, replied to the council’s tweet, recounting her experience with the disinformation.
“I received several texts from loved ones about content they received containing various rumors — they were explicitly asked to share it with their networks,” she wrote. “I advised them to do the opposite. Misinfo is not what we need right now — from any source foreign or domestic.”
Since January, Americans have shared many other messages that included disinformation: that the virus originated in a U.S. Army laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, that it can be killed with garlic water, vitamin C or colloidal silver, that it thrives on ibuprofen. Often the posts are attributed to an unnamed source in the U.S. government or an institution such as Johns Hopkins University or Stanford University.
As the messages have sown confusion, it has been difficult to trace their true origins or pin down all the ways in which they have been amplified.
wsj.com
WSJ News Exclusive | U.S. Probes University oaf Texas Links to Chinese Lab Scrutinized Over Coronavirus
Kate O’Keeffe
11-13 minutes
The Education Department has asked the University of Texas System to provide documentation of its dealings with the Chinese laboratory U.S. officials are investigating as a potential source of the coronavirus pandemic.
The request for records of gifts or contracts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its researcher Shi Zhengli, known for her work on bats, is part of a broader department investigation into possible faulty financial disclosures of foreign money by the Texas group of universities.
The Education Department’s letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, also asks the UT System to share documents regarding potential ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and some two dozen Chinese universities and companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. and a unit of China National Petroleum Corp.
The department is also seeking documents related to any university system contracts or gifts from Eric Yuan, a U.S. citizen who is the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc.
An official at the University of Texas System said it plans to respond to the department in a timely manner and declined to provide information about any potential links to the entities mentioned in the letter.
Huawei and CNPC didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Zoom said Mr. Yuan has “not given any gifts to the University of Texas.”
Neither the Wuhan lab nor Dr. Shi—dubbed “Bat Woman” by Chinese media—responded to requests for comment.
The Wuhan lab has come under scrutiny from U.S. officials who accuse Beijing of withholding information about the origins of the outbreak, which was first detected in Wuhan.
Dr. Shi and the Chinese government have said the lab isn’t the source of the pandemic. There is no concrete public evidence to confirm the theory that the outbreak resulted from an accident at the lab, which studied ways to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
Some scientists say a lab accident remains a possibility, but the current dominant theory is that bats passed the virus to humans either directly, or more likely, through another animal.
The Education Department’s investigation into the UT System’s disclosures is part of a continuing national review begun in 2019 that the department says has prompted universities to report more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funding. Officials have sent letters to at least eight other schools, including Harvard and Yale Universities, who have said they are responding to the inquiries.
Universities are required to disclose to the Education Department all contracts and gifts from a foreign source that, alone or combined, are worth $250,000 or more in a calendar year. Though the statute is decades old, the department only recently began to enforce it rigorously.
The Education Department has accused schools of actively soliciting money from foreign governments, companies and nationals hostile to the U.S. One goal of the new enforcement campaign, according to department officials, is to better enable the public to see where schools get their money.
U.S. universities have defended their international collaborations and said the Education Department’s reporting requirements remain unclear. Department officials dispute that claim.
In its letter dated April 24, the department asked the chancellor of the University of Texas System to provide records related to its dealings with the Wuhan lab, citing UT’s Galveston National Laboratory’s relationship with the Chinese government-run lab.
The Education Department asked for records related to dealings between the Wuhan lab and UT’s Galveston National Laboratory, located on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Photo: Kevin M. Cox/Associated Press
The letter cites a November 2018 article in Science magazine cosigned by officials at the Galveston and Wuhan labs stating: “We engaged in short- and long-term personnel exchanges focused on biosafety training, building operations and maintenance, and collaborative scientific investigations in biocontainment. We succeeded in transferring proven best practices to the new Wuhan facility.”
The magazine article, also available on the Galveston lab’s site, adds that the Wuhan and Texas labs recently signed formal cooperative agreements but that “funding for research and the logistics of exchanging specimens are challenges that we have yet to solve.”
The university system previously reported to Education Department officials a series of contracts with Chinese universities and Huawei, purportedly collectively worth nearly $13 million, according to the letter. But it questioned whether the UT schools had reported all relevant foreign gifts and contracts.
The Education Department is seeking documents related to any University of Texas System contracts or gifts from Eric Yuan, chief executive officer of Zoom, pictured in April 2019.
Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News
The request for information about the American chief executive of U.S. videoconferencing firm Zoom stands out on a list of otherwise Chinese entities.
The department has said its statutory authority enables it to seek information on gifts or contracts from any entity, including a U.S. person, who could be acting as an agent of a foreign source. Department officials believe the broad statute provides the basis for many lines of inquiry at universities, according to a person familiar with the department’s thinking.
U.S. national security officials and independent cybersecurity researchers have raised concerns about Zoom and its reliance on China-based engineering, especially as more people turn to the service amid the pandemic to discuss company and government business as well as private health information.
Mr. Yuan has said the Chinese government has never asked for information on traffic from foreign users. “Zoom is no different than any other U.S. technology company with operations in China, including many of our videoconferencing peers,“ the company said in a statement. “Zoom is an American company, publicly traded on the Nasdaq, with headquarters in California and a founder and CEO who is an American citizen,” the statement said, adding that his inclusion in a letter focused on UT’s ties to China indicates the letter’s authors “did not do their homework.”
The Education Department’s scrutiny of money that could have flowed from the China-based lab to the U.S. comes after other U.S. officials criticized money that went in the opposite direction. In an April 21 letter to House and Senate leadership, members of Congress led by Sen. Martha McSally (R., Ariz.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.) criticized a grant by the National Institutes of Health that supported global research on coronaviruses, including at the Wuhan lab.
“We’re sure you agree that taxpayers’ money should not be sent to a dangerous Chinese state-run bio-agent laboratory that lacks any meaningful oversight from U.S. authorities,” the members wrote. “We hope to ensure that WIV will not receive federal funds in any future spending packages,” they wrote.
Less than a week later, EcoHealth Alliance Inc., a New York-based grantee working on the project with the Wuhan lab, said the NIH had terminated coronavirus research funding.
“International collaboration with countries where viruses emerge is absolutely vital to our own public health and national security here in the USA,” the group said in a statement, declining to comment further.
The NIH confirmed in a statement that the six-year, $3.4 million grant had been terminated. It said the money was distributed among both the primary awardee, EcoHealth Alliance, and sub-awardees including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, East China Normal University in Shanghai, the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing, and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.
The NIH added: “Please note, scientific research indicates that there is no evidence that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory.”
We’re for Sydney | Daily Telegraph
Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program
Sharri MarksonMay 2, 2020 3:15pm
- Criticism of China’s virus response does not equal support for Trump
- COVID-19 sets a stage for biological warfare
- Will Australia’s great COVID-19 experiment work?
The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.
It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province. Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP
It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is not the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.
As intelligence agencies investigate whether the virus inadvertently leaked from a Wuhan laboratory, the team and its research led by scientist Shi Zhengli feature in the dossier prepared by Western governments that points to several studies they conducted as areas of concern.
It cites their work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave in the Yunnan province with striking genetic similarity to COVID-19, along with their research synthesising a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated.
Its major themes include the “deadly denial of human-to-human transmission”, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and “bleaching of wildlife market stalls”, along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.
Key figures of the Wuhan Institute of Virology team, who feature in the government dossier, were either trained or employed in the CSIRO’s Australian Animal Health Laboratory where they conducted foundational research on deadly pathogens in live bats, including SARS, as part of an ongoing partnership between the CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This partnership continues to this day, according to the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite concerns the research is too risky.
Politicians in the Morrison government are speaking out about the national security and biosecurity concerns of this relationship as the controversial research into bat-related viruses now comes into sharp focus amid the investigation by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies of the United States, Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is speaking out in the interests of national security and biosecurity. Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP
RISKY BAT RESEARCH
In Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, not far from the now infamous Wuhan wet market, Dr Shi and her team work in high-protective gear in level-three and level-four bio-containment laboratories studying deadly bat-derived coronaviruses.
At least one of the estimated 50 virus samples Dr Shi has in her laboratory is a 96 per cent genetic match to COVID-19. When Dr Shi heard the news about the outbreak of a new pneumonia-like virus, she spoke about the sleepless nights she suffered worrying whether it was her lab that was responsible for the outbreak.
As she told Scientific American magazine in an article published this week: “Could they have come from our lab?” Since her initial fears, Dr Shi has satisfied herself the genetic sequence of COVID-19 did not match any her lab was studying.
Yet, given the extent of the People’s Republic of China’s lies, obfuscations and angry refusal to allow any investigation into the origin of the outbreak, her laboratory is now being closely looked at by international intelligence agencies.
The Australian government’s position is that the virus most likely originated in the Wuhan wet market but that there is a remote possibility — a 5 per cent chance — it accidentally leaked from a laboratory.
The US’s position, according to reports this week, is that it is more likely the virus leaked from a laboratory but it could also have come from a wet market that trades and slaughters wild animals, where other diseases including the H5N1 avian flu and SARS originated.
CREATING MORE DEADLY VIRUSES
The Western governments’ research paper confirms this.
It notes a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers, including Dr Shi, who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19.
The research dossier also references work done by the team to synthesise SARS-like coronaviruses, to analyse whether they could be transmissible from bats to mammals. This means they were altering parts of the virus to test whether it was transmissible to different species.
Their November 2015 study, done in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, concluded that the SARS-like virus could jump directly from bats to humans and there was no treatment that could help.
The study acknowledges the incredible danger of the work they were conducting.
“The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” they wrote.
You have to be a scientist to understand it, but below is the line that the governments’ research paper references from the study.
“To examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein — from the RsSHCO14-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats — in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone,” the study states.
One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with Science Daily at the time: “This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.”
President Xi Jinping waves to a coronavirus patient and medical staff via a video link at the Huoshenshan hospital in Wuhan on March 10. Picture: Xie Huanchi/XINHUA/AFP
A few years later, in March 2019, Dr Shi and her team, including Peng Zhou, who worked in Australia for five years, published a review titled Bat Coronaviruses in China in the medical journal Viruses, where they wrote that they “aim to predict virus hot spots and their cross-species transmission potential”, describing it as a matter of “urgency to study bat coronaviruses in China to understand their potential of causing another outbreak. Their review stated: “It is highly likely that future SARS or MERS like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”
It examined which proteins were “important for interspecies transmission”.
Despite intelligence probes into whether her laboratory may have been responsible for the outbreak, Dr Shi is not hitting pause on her research, which she argues is more important than ever in preventing a pandemic. She plans to head a national project to systemically sample viruses in bat caves, with estimates that there are more than 5000 coronavirus strains “waiting to be discovered in bats globally”.
“Bat-borne coronaviruses will cause more outbreaks,” she told Scientific American. “We must find them before they find us.”
AUSTRALIA’S INVOLVEMENT
Dr Shi, the director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, spent time in Australia as a visiting scientist for three months from February 22 to May 21, 2006, where she worked at the CSIRO’s top-level Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which has recently been renamed.
The CSIRO would not comment on what work she undertook during her time here, but an archived and translated biography on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website states that she was working with the SARS virus.
“The SARS virus antibodies and genes were tested in the State Key Laboratory of Virology in Wuhan and the Animal Health Research Laboratory in Geelong, Australia,” it states.
The Telegraph has obtained two photographs of her working at the CSIRO laboratories, including in the level-four lab, in 2006.
Shi Zhengli, director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, who working in Australia in 2006.
Dr Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou — now the head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — spent three years at the bio-containment facility Australian Animal Health Laboratory between 2011 and 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO from 2009-2010.
During this time, Dr Zhou arranged for wild-caught bats to be transported alive by air from Queensland to the lab in Victoria where they were euthanised for dissection and studied for deadly viruses.
Dr Linfa Wang, while an Honorary Professor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2005 and 2011, also worked in the CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader in Virology between 2008 and 2011.
Federal Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson said it was “very concerning” that Chinese scientists had been conducting research into bat viruses at the CSIRO in Geelong, Victoria, in jointly funded projects between the Australian and Chinese governments.
“We need to exercise extreme care with any research projects involving foreign nationals which may compromise our national security or biosecurity,” she said.
While the US has cut all funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the CSIRO would not respond to questions about whether it is still collaborating with it, saying only that it collaborates with research organisations from around the world to prevent diseases.
“As with all partners, CSIRO undertakes due diligence and takes security very seriously,” a spokesman said. “CSIRO undertakes all research in accordance with strict biosecurity and legislative requirements.”
IS THE RESEARCH WORTH THE RISK?
The US withdrew funding from controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses in October 2014, concerned it could lead to a global pandemic.
The pause on funding for 21 “gain of function” studies was then lifted in December 2017.
Despite the concerns, the CSIRO continued to partner and fund research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The CSIRO refused to respond to questions from The Saturday Telegraph about how much money went into joint research collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Science and its Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute still lists the CSIRO as a partner while the US has cut ties since the coronavirus outbreak.
The argument is whether it is worth developing these viruses to anticipate and prevent a pandemic when a leak of the virus could also cause one. Debate in the scientific community is heated.
There have also been serious concerns about a lack of adequate safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when dealing with deadly viruses.
A ‘‘Sensitive but Unclassified’’ cable, dated January 19, 2018, obtained by The Washington Post, revealed that US embassy scientists and diplomats in Beijing visited the laboratory and sent warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety practices and management weaknesses as it conducted research on coronaviruses from bats.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated.
Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in East Geelong, is part of the CSIRO. Picture: Andy Rogers
UNLIKELY CLAIMS VIRUS CREATED IN LAB
Scientific consensus is that the virus came from a wetmarket. But the US’s top spy agency confirmed on the record for the first time yesterday that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident at a Wuhan laboratory.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acting director Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in a laboratory.
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” he said.
“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to US national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Despite Mr Grenell’s statement and scientific consensus that the virus was not created in a laboratory, based on its genome sequence the governments’ research paper obtained by The Telegraph notes a study that claims it was created.
South China University of Technology researchers published a study on February 6 that concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazards laboratories”.
“The paper is soon withdrawn because it ‘was not supported by direct proofs’, according to author Botao Xiano,” the dossier noted, continuing to point out that: ‘“No scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings’, scholar Yanzhong Huang wrote on March 5.”
The Saturday Telegraph does not claim that the South China University of Technology study is credible, only that it has been included in this government research paper produced as part of the case against China.
CHINA’S COVER-UP OF EARLY SAMPLES
The paper obtained by The Saturday Telegraph speaks about “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and points to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”.
It paints a picture of how the Chinese government deliberately covered up the coronavirus by silencing doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.
The US, along with other countries, has repeatedly demanded a live virus sample from the first batch of coronavirus cases. This is understood to have not been forthcoming despite its vital importance in developing a vaccine while potentially providing an indication of where the virus originated.
THE LAB WORKER WHO DISAPPEARED
Out of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who have reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticising the response of Chinese authorities, no case is more intriguing and worrying than that of Huang Yan Ling.
A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the South China Morning Post reported rumours swirling on Chinese social media that she was the first to be diagnosed with the disease and was “patient zero”.
Then came her reported disappearance, with her biography and image deleted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.
On February 16 the institute denied she was patient zero and said she was alive and well, but there has been no proof of life since then, fanning speculation.
US President Donald Trump has been urging China to be transparent about how the virus spread. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP
DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.”
On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected.
It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease.
Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”
A tweet from the Global Times on January 2 states: “Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumours about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS.” This had the intended effect of silencing other doctors who may have been inclined to speak out.
So the truth about the outbreak in China has remained shrouded in secrecy, with President Xi Jinping aggressively rejecting global calls for an inquiry.
The dossier is damning of China’s constant denials about the outbreak.
“Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,” it states.
“The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”
The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” In the paper, the Western governments are pushing back at what they call an “assault on international transparency”.
“As EU diplomats prepare a report on the pandemic, PRC successfully presses Brussels to strike language on PRC disinformation,” it states.
“As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.”
Chair of Australia’s Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security Andrew Hastie said after the cover-up and disinformation campaign from China, the world needed transparency and an inquiry.
“So many Australians have been damaged by the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Chinese government, and if we truly are as close as Beijing suggests we are then we need answers about how this all started,” he said.
KEY DATES IN COVID COVER-UP
November 9, 2015:
Wuhan Institute of Virology publish a study revealing they created a new virus in the lab from SARS-CoV.
December 6, 2019
Five days after a man linked to Wuhan’s seafood market presented pneumonia-like symptoms, his wife contracts it, suggesting human to human transmission.
December 27
China’s health authorities told a novel disease, then affecting some 180 patients, was caused by a new coronavirus.
December 26-30
Evidence of new virus emerges from Wuhan patient data.
December 31
Chinese internet authorities begin censoring terms from social media such as Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.
January 1, 2020
Eight Wuhan doctors who warned about new virus are detained and condemned.
January 3
China’s top health authority issues a gag order.
January 5
Wuhan Municipal Health Commission stops releasing daily updates on new cases. Continues until January 18.
January 10
PRC official Wang Guangfa says outbreak “under control” and mostly a “mild condition”.
January 12
Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s lab in Shanghai is closed by authorities for “rectification”, one day after it shares genomic sequence data with the world for the first time.
January 14
PRC National Health Commission chief Ma Xiaowei privately warns colleagues the virus is likely to develop into a major public health event.
January 24
Officials in Beijing prevent the Wuhan Institute of Virology from sharing sample isolates with the University of Texas.
February 6
China’s internet watchdog tightens controls on social media platforms.
February 9
Citizen-journalist and local businessman Fang Bin disappears.
April 17
Wuhan belatedly raises its official fatalities by 1290.
Dr Shi, the director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, spent time in Australia as a visiting scientist for three months from February 22 to May 21, 2006, where she worked at the CSIRO’s top-level Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which has recently been renamed.
The CSIRO would not comment on what work she undertook during her time here, but an archived and translated biography on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website states that she was working with the SARS virus.
“The SARS virus antibodies and genes were tested in the State Key Laboratory of Virology in Wuhan and the Animal Health Research Laboratory in Geelong, Australia,” it states.
The Telegraph has obtained two photographs of her working at the CSIRO laboratories, including in the level-four lab, in 2006.
Shi Zhengli, director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology, who working in Australia in 2006.
Dr Shi’s protégé, Peng Zhou — now the head of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunity Project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — spent three years at the bio-containment facility Australian Animal Health Laboratory between 2011 and 2014. He was sent by China to complete his doctorate at the CSIRO from 2009-2010.
During this time, Dr Zhou arranged for wild-caught bats to be transported alive by air from Queensland to the lab in Victoria where they were euthanised for dissection and studied for deadly viruses.
Dr Linfa Wang, while an Honorary Professor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2005 and 2011, also worked in the CSIRO Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader in Virology between 2008 and 2011.
Federal Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson said it was “very concerning” that Chinese scientists had been conducting research into bat viruses at the CSIRO in Geelong, Victoria, in jointly funded projects between the Australian and Chinese governments.
“We need to exercise extreme care with any research projects involving foreign nationals which may compromise our national security or biosecurity,” she said.
While the US has cut all funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the CSIRO would not respond to questions about whether it is still collaborating with it, saying only that it collaborates with research organisations from around the world to prevent diseases.
“As with all partners, CSIRO undertakes due diligence and takes security very seriously,” a spokesman said. “CSIRO undertakes all research in accordance with strict biosecurity and legislative requirements.”
IS THE RESEARCH WORTH THE RISK?
The US withdrew funding from controversial experiments that make pathogens more potent or likely to spread dangerous viruses in October 2014, concerned it could lead to a global pandemic.
The pause on funding for 21 “gain of function” studies was then lifted in December 2017.
Despite the concerns, the CSIRO continued to partner and fund research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The CSIRO refused to respond to questions from The Saturday Telegraph about how much money went into joint research collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Science and its Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute still lists the CSIRO as a partner while the US has cut ties since the coronavirus outbreak.
The argument is whether it is worth developing these viruses to anticipate and prevent a pandemic when a leak of the virus could also cause one. Debate in the scientific community is heated.
There have also been serious concerns about a lack of adequate safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when dealing with deadly viruses.
A ‘‘Sensitive but Unclassified’’ cable, dated January 19, 2018, obtained by The Washington Post, revealed that US embassy scientists and diplomats in Beijing visited the laboratory and sent warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety practices and management weaknesses as it conducted research on coronaviruses from bats.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated.
Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in East Geelong, is part of the CSIRO. Picture: Andy Rogers
UNLIKELY CLAIMS VIRUS CREATED IN LAB
Scientific consensus is that the virus came from a wetmarket. But the US’s top spy agency confirmed on the record for the first time yesterday that the US intelligence committee is investigating whether COVID-19 was the result of an accident at a Wuhan laboratory.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acting director Richard Grenell said the virus was not created in a laboratory.
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” he said.
“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to US national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Despite Mr Grenell’s statement and scientific consensus that the virus was not created in a laboratory, based on its genome sequence the governments’ research paper obtained by The Telegraph notes a study that claims it was created.
South China University of Technology researchers published a study on February 6 that concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk biohazards laboratories”.
“The paper is soon withdrawn because it ‘was not supported by direct proofs’, according to author Botao Xiano,” the dossier noted, continuing to point out that: ‘“No scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings’, scholar Yanzhong Huang wrote on March 5.”
The Saturday Telegraph does not claim that the South China University of Technology study is credible, only that it has been included in this government research paper produced as part of the case against China.
CHINA’S COVER-UP OF EARLY SAMPLES
The paper obtained by The Saturday Telegraph speaks about “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and points to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”.
It paints a picture of how the Chinese government deliberately covered up the coronavirus by silencing doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence from the Wuhan laboratory and refusing to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.
The US, along with other countries, has repeatedly demanded a live virus sample from the first batch of coronavirus cases. This is understood to have not been forthcoming despite its vital importance in developing a vaccine while potentially providing an indication of where the virus originated.
THE LAB WORKER WHO DISAPPEARED
Out of all the doctors, activists, journalists and scientists who have reportedly disappeared after speaking out about the coronavirus or criticising the response of Chinese authorities, no case is more intriguing and worrying than that of Huang Yan Ling.
A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the South China Morning Post reported rumours swirling on Chinese social media that she was the first to be diagnosed with the disease and was “patient zero”.
Then came her reported disappearance, with her biography and image deleted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.
On February 16 the institute denied she was patient zero and said she was alive and well, but there has been no proof of life since then, fanning speculation.
US President Donald Trump has been urging China to be transparent about how the virus spread. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP
DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
On December 31, Chinese authorities started censoring news of the virus from search engines, deleting terms including “SARS variation, “Wuhan Seafood market” and “Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.”
On January 1 without any investigation into where the virus originated from, the Wuhan seafood market was closed and disinfected.
It has been reported in the New York Times that individual animals and cages were not swabbed “eliminating evidence of what animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived”. The Hubei health commission ordered genomics companies to stop testing for the new virus and to destroy all samples. A day later, on January 3, China’s leading health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered Wuhan pneumonia samples be moved to designated testing facilities or destroyed, while instructing a no-publication order related to the unknown disease.
Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”
A tweet from the Global Times on January 2 states: “Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumours about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS.” This had the intended effect of silencing other doctors who may have been inclined to speak out.
So the truth about the outbreak in China has remained shrouded in secrecy, with President Xi Jinping aggressively rejecting global calls for an inquiry.
The dossier is damning of China’s constant denials about the outbreak.
“Despite evidence of human-human transmission from early December, PRC authorities deny it until January 20,” it states.
“The World Health Organisation does the same. Yet officials in Taiwan raised concerns as early as December 31, as did experts in Hong Kong on January 4.”
The paper exposes the hypocrisy of China’s self-imposed travel bans while condemning those of Australia and the United States, declaring: “Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23.” “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.” In the paper, the Western governments are pushing back at what they call an “assault on international transparency”.
“As EU diplomats prepare a report on the pandemic, PRC successfully presses Brussels to strike language on PRC disinformation,” it states.
“As Australia calls for an independent inquiry into the pandemic, PRC threatens to cut off trade with Australia. PRC has likewise responded furiously to US calls for transparency.”
Chair of Australia’s Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security Andrew Hastie said after the cover-up and disinformation campaign from China, the world needed transparency and an inquiry.
“So many Australians have been damaged by the mismanagement of COVID-19 by the Chinese government, and if we truly are as close as Beijing suggests we are then we need answers about how this all started,” he said.
KEY DATES IN COVID COVER-UP
November 9, 2015:
Wuhan Institute of Virology publish a study revealing they created a new virus in the lab from SARS-CoV.
December 6, 2019
Five days after a man linked to Wuhan’s seafood market presented pneumonia-like symptoms, his wife contracts it, suggesting human to human transmission.
December 27
China’s health authorities told a novel disease, then affecting some 180 patients, was caused by a new coronavirus.
December 26-30
Evidence of new virus emerges from Wuhan patient data.
December 31
Chinese internet authorities begin censoring terms from social media such as Wuhan Unknown Pneumonia.
January 1, 2020
Eight Wuhan doctors who warned about new virus are detained and condemned.
January 3
China’s top health authority issues a gag order.
January 5
Wuhan Municipal Health Commission stops releasing daily updates on new cases. Continues until January 18.
January 10
PRC official Wang Guangfa says outbreak “under control” and mostly a “mild condition”.
January 12
Professor Zhang Yongzhen’s lab in Shanghai is closed by authorities for “rectification”, one day after it shares genomic sequence data with the world for the first time.
January 14
PRC National Health Commission chief Ma Xiaowei privately warns colleagues the virus is likely to develop into a major public health event.
January 24
Officials in Beijing prevent the Wuhan Institute of Virology from sharing sample isolates with the University of Texas.
February 6
China’s internet watchdog tightens controls on social media platforms.
February 9
Citizen-journalist and local businessman Fang Bin disappears.
April 17
Wuhan belatedly raises its official fatalities by 1290.
Mike Pompeo's intelligence basis for his Wuhan lab claims
by Tom Rogan
| May 06, 2020 04:19 PM
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has an unhelpfully antagonistic relationship with the media. Still, Pompeo has a legitimate Intelligence Community foundation for his assertions that a quarantine control failure at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.
That bears noting in light of the media criticism Pompeo is receiving for his comment that there is "enormous evidence" to suggest that the Wuhan lab is the outbreak's source. Pompeo reaffirmed that sentiment on Wednesday, stating that "people share data sets and come to different levels of confidence," adding that there is "significant evidence" a lab control failure is responsible.
Pompeo is correct on the top line here: There is significant evidence of a lab-related failure.
Driven by National Security Agency collection efforts, the U.S. Intelligence Community has excellent "big data" and other discipline analysis offering high confidence of Beijing's significant effort to hide evidence of the lab's research activity, personnel movement, and general operation prior to, during, and after the immediate aftermath of the virus outbreak in December 2019. Big data analysis focuses on identifying behavior on the basis of data patterns, however, is not yet sufficient to offer a multi-agency intelligence community high confidence assessment that the lab is the source of the outbreak.
There's another important point to note here: evidence of covering up lab-related activity does not necessarily evince that the lab was the outbreak site per se. Pompeo is leaning on the former as the foundation for his statements on the latter. Still, that the Chinese have tried to cover up and are continuing to cover up the lab's operations in a very significant way is striking. It strongly suggests they have something important to hide.
Others disagree. CNN reported on Tuesday that the U.S.-led "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — disagree with Pompeo's assessment. An unnamed "Western diplomat" told CNN, "We think it's highly unlikely" that a lab "accident" was responsible. They believe the virus occurred by animal-to-human interaction at a Wuhan wet market. That diplomat says the Five Eyes "are coalescing around this assessment." CNN reports that a Five Eyes diplomat agrees with the first diplomat's statement.
My sourcing suggests that this is not entirely accurate.
While it is true that Pompeo is going further than others, certain Five Eye allies agree that the evidence for a lab cover is very compelling. Even, that is, if they're not jumping to Pompeo's secondary conclusion that this proves the lab is the coronavirus source. Equally important here is that the United States has not shared the entirety of its lab-related intelligence with its allies, or, possibly, even with all executive branch policymakers. That is to protect keystone sources and to gather more corroborating intelligence that can earn allied confidence in a way that protects the source concern.
In short, Pompeo is leaning forward but not without a legitimate intelligence foundation. The intelligence process is continuing to work this issue, and this story is far from over.
nytimes.com
U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students With Ties to China’s Military Schools
By Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes
11-14 minutes
The move is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to impose limits on Chinese students. But university officials say the government is paranoid, and that the United States will lose out.
Credit...Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to American officials with knowledge of the discussions.
The plan would be the first designed to bar the access of a category of Chinese students, who, over all, form the single largest foreign student population in the United States.
It portends possible further educational restrictions, and the Chinese government could retaliate by imposing its own visa or educational bans on Americans. The two nations have already engaged in rounds of retribution over policies involving trade, technology and media access, and relations are at their worst point in decades.
American officials are discussing ways to punish China for its passage of a new national security law intended to enable crackdowns in Hong Kong, but the plans to cancel student visas were under consideration before the crisis over the law, which was announced last week by Chinese officials. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed the visa plans with President Trump on Tuesday in a White House meeting.
American universities are expected to push back against the administration’s move. While international educational exchange is prized for its intellectual value, many schools also rely on full tuition payments from foreign students to help cover costs, especially the large group of students from China.
Administrators and teachers have been briefed in recent years by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department on potential national security threats posed by Chinese students, especially ones working in the sciences. But the university employees are wary of a possible new “red scare” that targets students of a specific national background and that could contribute to anti-Asian racism.
Many of them argue that they have effective security protocols in place, and that having Chinese students be exposed to the liberalizing effects of Western institutions outweighs the risks. Moreover, they say, the Chinese students are experts in their subject fields and bolster American research efforts.
Chinese students and researchers say growing scrutiny from the American government and new official limits on visas would create biases against them, including when they apply for jobs or grants.
The visa cancellation could affect at least 3,000 students, according to some official estimates. That is a tiny percentage of the approximately 360,000 Chinese students in the United States. But some of those affected might be working on important research projects.
The move is certain to ignite public debate. Officials acknowledged there was no direct evidence that pointed to wrongdoing by the students who are about to lose their visas. Instead, suspicions by American officials center on the Chinese universities at which the students trained as undergraduates.
“In China, much more of society is government-controlled or government-affiliated,” said Frank Wu, a law professor who is the incoming president of Queens College. “You can’t function there or have partners from there if you aren’t comfortable with how the system is set up.”
“Targeting only some potential professors, scholars, students and visitors from China is a lower level of stereotyping than banning all,” he added. “But it is still selective, based on national origin.”
The State Department and the National Security Council both declined to comment.
American officials who defend the visa cancellation said the ties to the Chinese military at those schools go far deeper than mere campus recruiting. Instead, in many cases, the Chinese government plays a role in selecting which students from the schools with ties to the military can study abroad, one official said. In some cases, students who are allowed to go overseas are expected to collect information as a condition of having their tuition paid, the official said, declining to reveal specific intelligence on the matter.
Officials did not provide the list of affected schools, but the People’s Liberation Army has ties to military institutions and defense research schools, as well as to seven more traditional universities, many of them prestigious colleges in China with well-funded science and technology programs.
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department have long viewed the military-affiliated schools as a particular problem, believing military officials train some of the graduates in basic espionage techniques and compel them to gather and transmit information to Chinese officers.
While some government officials emphasize the intelligence threat posed by students from military-affiliated universities, others see those Chinese citizens as potential recruits for American spy agencies. Preventing the students from coming to the United States may make it more difficult for the agencies to recruit assets inside the Chinese military.
After completing their graduate work, some students land jobs at prominent technology companies in the United States. That has made some current and former American officials wary that the employees could engage in industrial espionage.
Last year, Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, who was then the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, predicted the administration would cut the number of visas going to Chinese students, citing the threat of technology theft.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who now leads the committee, has sent letters to universities in his state warning about ties to the Chinese government.
Mr. Rubio has been pushing schools to cut relations with China’s Thousand Talents program, which has provided funding for American researchers — including Charles M. Lieber, the chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry and chemical biology department, who was arrested by the F.B.I. in January on charges of concealing his financial relationship with the Chinese government.
Asked about the Trump administration’s move to cancel the visas of some Chinese students studying in the United States, Mr. Rubio said he supported “a targeted approach” to make it more difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit the openness of American schools to advance their own military and intelligence abilities.
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“The Chinese government too often entraps its own people into service” to the Communist Party and its objectives “in exchange for an education in the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said, adding that “higher education institutions in America need to be fully aware of this counterintelligence threat.”
Other Republican lawmakers proposed legislation on Wednesday to bar any Chinese citizen from getting a visa for graduate or postgraduate study in science or technology.
Trump administration officials have discussed restricting Chinese student visas over the past three years, current and former officials said.
In 2018, the State Department began limiting the length of visas to one year, with an option for renewal, for Chinese graduate students working in fields deemed sensitive. Two officials said targeting graduates of the military-linked schools gathered steam after the F.B.I. announced in January that it was seeking a Boston University student who had hidden her affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army when applying for a visa.
F.B.I. officials said the student, Yanqing Ye, had studied at the National University of Defense Technology in China and was commissioned as a lieutenant before enrolling in Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering from October 2017 to April 2019.
While in Boston, Lieutenant Ye continued to get assignments from the Chinese military, including “conducting research, assessing United States military websites and sending United States documents and information to China,” according to the F.B.I. wanted poster.
The Justice Department charged Lieutenant Ye, who is believed to be in China, with acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud and false statements.
The vigorous interagency debate over the move to cancel visas has lasted about six months, with science and technology officials generally opposing the action and national security officials supporting it.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank, has researched the Chinese military-affiliated universities, and that has influenced thinking in the American government. A 2018 report called “Picking Flowers, Making Honey” said China was sending students from those universities to Western universities to try to build up its own military technology.
The study suggested that the graduates were targeting the so-called Five Eyes countries that share intelligence: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia. In many cases, the report said, students hid their military affiliations while seeking work in fields with defense applications, like hypersonics.
Under the current Chinese government, Beijing has aggressively tried to combine military and civilian work on important technology, said American officials and outside researchers. That often includes tapping the expertise of civilian companies and universities.
“To some degree, U.S. concerns are driven by the assessment that Chinese companies and universities seem unlikely to refuse outright or could be compelled to work with the military, whereas their American counterparts often appear more resistant to working on military research,” Elsa B. Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote in a report last August.
“It is also striking at the same time that some of China’s leading technology companies appear to be less directly engaged in supporting defense initiatives than might be expected relative to their American counterparts,” she added.
United States officials said the fusion policy also entailed sending military-trained students to American universities to try to gain access to technological know-how that would be valuable to China and its defense industry.
The Chinese military has strong ties to a number of schools with an overt military bent, according to the Australian think tank.
Less obvious to the casual observer are the more traditional universities with longstanding ties to the military.
According to the policy institute and American officials, those are Northwestern Polytechnical University, Harbin Engineering University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Beihang University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing.
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2020, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Chinese Graduate Students and Researchers to Lose U.S. Visas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students With Ties to China’s Military Schools
By Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes
11-14 minutes
The move is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to impose limits on Chinese students. But university officials say the government is paranoid, and that the United States will lose out.
Credit...Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to American officials with knowledge of the discussions.
The plan would be the first designed to bar the access of a category of Chinese students, who, over all, form the single largest foreign student population in the United States.
It portends possible further educational restrictions, and the Chinese government could retaliate by imposing its own visa or educational bans on Americans. The two nations have already engaged in rounds of retribution over policies involving trade, technology and media access, and relations are at their worst point in decades.
American officials are discussing ways to punish China for its passage of a new national security law intended to enable crackdowns in Hong Kong, but the plans to cancel student visas were under consideration before the crisis over the law, which was announced last week by Chinese officials. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed the visa plans with President Trump on Tuesday in a White House meeting.
American universities are expected to push back against the administration’s move. While international educational exchange is prized for its intellectual value, many schools also rely on full tuition payments from foreign students to help cover costs, especially the large group of students from China.
Administrators and teachers have been briefed in recent years by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department on potential national security threats posed by Chinese students, especially ones working in the sciences. But the university employees are wary of a possible new “red scare” that targets students of a specific national background and that could contribute to anti-Asian racism.
Many of them argue that they have effective security protocols in place, and that having Chinese students be exposed to the liberalizing effects of Western institutions outweighs the risks. Moreover, they say, the Chinese students are experts in their subject fields and bolster American research efforts.
Chinese students and researchers say growing scrutiny from the American government and new official limits on visas would create biases against them, including when they apply for jobs or grants.
The visa cancellation could affect at least 3,000 students, according to some official estimates. That is a tiny percentage of the approximately 360,000 Chinese students in the United States. But some of those affected might be working on important research projects.
The move is certain to ignite public debate. Officials acknowledged there was no direct evidence that pointed to wrongdoing by the students who are about to lose their visas. Instead, suspicions by American officials center on the Chinese universities at which the students trained as undergraduates.
“In China, much more of society is government-controlled or government-affiliated,” said Frank Wu, a law professor who is the incoming president of Queens College. “You can’t function there or have partners from there if you aren’t comfortable with how the system is set up.”
“Targeting only some potential professors, scholars, students and visitors from China is a lower level of stereotyping than banning all,” he added. “But it is still selective, based on national origin.”
The State Department and the National Security Council both declined to comment.
American officials who defend the visa cancellation said the ties to the Chinese military at those schools go far deeper than mere campus recruiting. Instead, in many cases, the Chinese government plays a role in selecting which students from the schools with ties to the military can study abroad, one official said. In some cases, students who are allowed to go overseas are expected to collect information as a condition of having their tuition paid, the official said, declining to reveal specific intelligence on the matter.
Officials did not provide the list of affected schools, but the People’s Liberation Army has ties to military institutions and defense research schools, as well as to seven more traditional universities, many of them prestigious colleges in China with well-funded science and technology programs.
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department have long viewed the military-affiliated schools as a particular problem, believing military officials train some of the graduates in basic espionage techniques and compel them to gather and transmit information to Chinese officers.
While some government officials emphasize the intelligence threat posed by students from military-affiliated universities, others see those Chinese citizens as potential recruits for American spy agencies. Preventing the students from coming to the United States may make it more difficult for the agencies to recruit assets inside the Chinese military.
After completing their graduate work, some students land jobs at prominent technology companies in the United States. That has made some current and former American officials wary that the employees could engage in industrial espionage.
Last year, Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, who was then the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, predicted the administration would cut the number of visas going to Chinese students, citing the threat of technology theft.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who now leads the committee, has sent letters to universities in his state warning about ties to the Chinese government.
Mr. Rubio has been pushing schools to cut relations with China’s Thousand Talents program, which has provided funding for American researchers — including Charles M. Lieber, the chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry and chemical biology department, who was arrested by the F.B.I. in January on charges of concealing his financial relationship with the Chinese government.
Asked about the Trump administration’s move to cancel the visas of some Chinese students studying in the United States, Mr. Rubio said he supported “a targeted approach” to make it more difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit the openness of American schools to advance their own military and intelligence abilities.
Would you like recommendations for more stories like this?
“The Chinese government too often entraps its own people into service” to the Communist Party and its objectives “in exchange for an education in the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said, adding that “higher education institutions in America need to be fully aware of this counterintelligence threat.”
Other Republican lawmakers proposed legislation on Wednesday to bar any Chinese citizen from getting a visa for graduate or postgraduate study in science or technology.
Trump administration officials have discussed restricting Chinese student visas over the past three years, current and former officials said.
In 2018, the State Department began limiting the length of visas to one year, with an option for renewal, for Chinese graduate students working in fields deemed sensitive. Two officials said targeting graduates of the military-linked schools gathered steam after the F.B.I. announced in January that it was seeking a Boston University student who had hidden her affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army when applying for a visa.
F.B.I. officials said the student, Yanqing Ye, had studied at the National University of Defense Technology in China and was commissioned as a lieutenant before enrolling in Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering from October 2017 to April 2019.
While in Boston, Lieutenant Ye continued to get assignments from the Chinese military, including “conducting research, assessing United States military websites and sending United States documents and information to China,” according to the F.B.I. wanted poster.
The Justice Department charged Lieutenant Ye, who is believed to be in China, with acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud and false statements.
The vigorous interagency debate over the move to cancel visas has lasted about six months, with science and technology officials generally opposing the action and national security officials supporting it.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank, has researched the Chinese military-affiliated universities, and that has influenced thinking in the American government. A 2018 report called “Picking Flowers, Making Honey” said China was sending students from those universities to Western universities to try to build up its own military technology.
The study suggested that the graduates were targeting the so-called Five Eyes countries that share intelligence: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia. In many cases, the report said, students hid their military affiliations while seeking work in fields with defense applications, like hypersonics.
Under the current Chinese government, Beijing has aggressively tried to combine military and civilian work on important technology, said American officials and outside researchers. That often includes tapping the expertise of civilian companies and universities.
“To some degree, U.S. concerns are driven by the assessment that Chinese companies and universities seem unlikely to refuse outright or could be compelled to work with the military, whereas their American counterparts often appear more resistant to working on military research,” Elsa B. Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote in a report last August.
“It is also striking at the same time that some of China’s leading technology companies appear to be less directly engaged in supporting defense initiatives than might be expected relative to their American counterparts,” she added.
United States officials said the fusion policy also entailed sending military-trained students to American universities to try to gain access to technological know-how that would be valuable to China and its defense industry.
The Chinese military has strong ties to a number of schools with an overt military bent, according to the Australian think tank.
Less obvious to the casual observer are the more traditional universities with longstanding ties to the military.
According to the policy institute and American officials, those are Northwestern Polytechnical University, Harbin Engineering University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Beihang University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Nanjing University of Science and Technology.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing.
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on May 29, 2020, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Chinese Graduate Students and Researchers to Lose U.S. Visas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Refer friends and family to The Times for $1 a week.
Wuhdunnit? We have only suspicions, not proof | Spectator USA
Wuhdunnit? We have only suspicions, not proof
The idea that the virus is man-made is not just a crazy theory that Trump got from one of his golf buddies
Paul Wood
China’s Solzhenitsyn: Author Ma Jian, who now lives in exile in London
Paul Wood
May 31, 2020
4:55 PM
This article is in The Spectator’s June 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours.
We don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Even so, it already has a tragic hero: Dr Li Wenliang. His name is known around the world now, but the details of what happened to him are telling.
On December 30 last year, Li warned fellow medics on a WeChat group that seven patients had been quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan. They had some kind of coronavirus. A few days later, after screenshots of his messages were posted to the wider internet, he was summoned by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. The secret police presented him with a typed confession stating he had lied. He signed it. He had to. The police document was sententious but chilling: ‘Your behavior severely disrupted social order… We advise you to calm down and reflect carefully. We sternly warn you: if you are stubborn, do not show repentance, and continue to conduct illegal activities, you will be punished… Do you understand?’
I spoke about Dr Li to Ma Jian, the author known as China’s Solzhenitsyn. All his books are banned in China and he lives in exile in London. In any normal society, he tells me, Dr Li would have reported his concerns directly to the hospital’s managers. ‘But China is not a normal society. Dr Li was silenced.’ Ma is in no doubt that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist party are ‘the primary culprits for this global catastrophe’. That is because, he believes, Beijing’s stamp was on events in Wuhan from the start. State television announced that eight medics were being investigated for ‘rumor-mongering’. The national news agency carried a statement from the Wuhan police instructing citizens to ‘jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace’. Ma says that while the authorities were busy pretending nothing was wrong, the number of infected grew exponentially. They missed the chance to stop the virus.
Dr Li went back to work, having promised to respect the law on public security and social harmony. He caught the virus he’d warned others about. By the end of January, he was in an intensive-care bed in his own hospital, wearing an oxygen mask and drenched in sweat. He decided to speak to the New York Times, an extraordinarily brave thing to do after his previous trouble with the police. He said: ‘There should be more openness and transparency.’ He also spoke to the Chinese news site Caixin: ‘I think a healthy society should not have just one voice.’ This was open defiance.
He died from the virus days later. He was 34 and left behind a five-year-old son and a pregnant wife. There were millions of angry posts on Chinese social media — despite rigorous censorship, with certain words blocked automatically. By overreacting to Li’s small act of kindness in warning his fellow doctors, the authorities had managed to turn him into a symbol. They rushed to undo the damage. Beijing sent anti-corruption investigators to Wuhan; they found the local police in error. Li was declared a martyr, the state’s highest honor (one instituted by Mao, who said: ‘All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.’) The state was trying to reclaim Li as its own. Official media parroted the line that ‘certain hostile forces’ had tried to exploit what was called the ‘Li Wenliang incident’ — but he had remained a loyal member of the Communist party. He was a hero fighting under the ‘strong leadership’ of the party’s Central Committee, ‘with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core’.
The party functionary newly put in charge of Wuhan said citizens should get ‘gratitude education’ to encourage them to properly thank Xi. This reflects the official story of the pandemic’s beginnings: the local authorities in Wuhan were slow to act but then Comrade Xi stepped in to direct a ‘People’s War’ against the virus. This contrasts with the narrative from the Trump White House: the Chinese are engaged in a cover-up. They knew from the start that the virus could be passed between humans, not just caught from animals; they knew there would be a pandemic long before they told anyone. They’re still lying about how many cases they’ve had, about the number of deaths and about the origins of the virus in a Chinese laboratory.
President Trump deals with the truth as casually as he has the many women in his past. But Ma has no time for the ‘shameless apologists’ in the West who defend China, ‘a regime that dragged infected patients down the street and herded them like cattle into trucks’. He goes on: ‘I suspect that some Westerners’ praise of the Chinese Communist party is political, influenced by hatred for America. But the truth is, it is perfectly possible to abhor everything that Trump stands for, to berate his reckless mishandling of the pandemic, to consider Boris Johnson’s management a catastrophe, while at the same time condemning Xi Jinping’s repressive dictatorship for [China’s] cover-ups, murderous lies and inhumanity.’
President Trump says he’s seen proof that the virus came from a Chinese lab. It might have got out through a ‘horrible mistake’. He was signing a proclamation for Older Americans Month when he also wondered aloud if ‘somebody’ did ‘something on purpose’. He was signing another proclamation — it’s one of his favorite things to do — when he went even further. It was National Nurses Day — ‘That’s a very important day’ — and he was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, flanked by a couple of nurses in scrubs. ‘We went through the worst attack we’ve ever had on our country… This is worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center.’
This was Trump being Trump, half-accidentally accusing the Chinese of an act of war with a biological weapon. No one else in his administration has repeated this unhinged claim; even Fox News ignored it. But Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has flirted with the idea that the virus was ‘man-made’ (if not a weapon). And, whether it’s natural or manufactured, he says there is ‘enormous evidence’ that the virus leaked from a laboratory.
We have not been shown this evidence. Instead, we are told there is ‘intelligence’. But what might be in the public record to support Trump’s case? China says the virus came from bats or cats sold for food in a live animal market in Wuhan. It is at the very least an enormous coincidence that Wuhan has two laboratories doing research on coronaviruses from bats. The market was just 300 yards from one of the labs, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which housed some 600 bats with various coronaviruses. A Chinese scientific paper — now wiped from the internet — says a researcher there was attacked by a bat, and another covered in bat urine.
And the idea that the virus is man-made is not just a crazy theory that Trump got from one of his golf buddies. Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist and Nobel Prize winner, has said that the virus was the result of ‘very meticulous work’ by molecular biologists. ‘This virus was created,’ he said. Prof Montagnier remains a lone voice but the second of the Wuhan laboratories, the Institute of Virology, had been doing so-called ‘gain of function’ work, whereby viruses are made more lethal or infectious in order to study them. This kind of research is so dangerous that it was banned for a time in the US. Perhaps it will be banned again after this pandemic. It is certainly terrifying to discover that this was going on. Wuhan was part of an international team that took the genes for the coronavirus’s ‘spike’ protein, which helps it to invade human cells, and spliced them into a more infectious version of the virus.
The research in Wuhan is led by China’s ‘bat woman’, Dr Shi Zhengli, a hero to some Chinese, a villain to others. She says she worried at first that she might be responsible for the pandemic. She didn’t ‘sleep a wink’ until tests came back showing that the virus killing people in Wuhan wasn’t an exact match for the one in her lab. She told Scientific American: ‘That really took a load off my mind.’ A number of western virologists agree: the two strains of the viruses are different, so different that the one behind the pandemic must have evolved decades ago, only now jumping from bats to humans. Case closed? Not quite. Scientists in Australia have said the Chinese might have been growing the virus in the human ‘receptor’ protein that the spike protein latches on to — pushing the virus to evolve more quickly into something far more deadly.
These are suspicions, not proof. For the time being, most scientists — and it seems the spies — say the evidence suggests that nature, not man, is to blame for the pandemic. Still, there are lingering questions: why did the Chinese authorities order lab samples to be destroyed? Why was the Wuhan market sealed and bleached? Were these measures to destroy the pathogen for safety or to hide the evidence?
Ma Jian points out that China has never provided concrete evidence that the Wuhan market was the source of the virus. He wants the regime to open its labs to independent investigators. ‘In times of national emergency, the Chinese government’s first instinct is to cover up. This is the least it owes to the world for the calamity it has inflicted.’
Whether China did inflict the calamity is partly a matter of dates and chronology. On December 31, it warned the World Health Organization about a cluster of ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ but did not say there was human-to-human transmission. Dr Li knew then that this was possible — patients were being quarantined in his own hospital. We now know that President Xi secretly took charge of the fight against the virus on January 7, around the time that Li caught it, but celebrations for the Chinese New Year were allowed to go ahead as planned in Wuhan, with a mass banquet for 40,000 families. Ma says: ‘The authorities hoped that if they suppressed news of the virus it would disappear. As always, they prioritized saving the Chinese Communist party’s face over saving people’s lives.’
Ma’s book China Dream is an unflinching satire of Xi’s ‘China Dream of national rejuvenation’ and the ‘rabid consumerism’ that goes with it. This was consummated when China’s lockdown ended and the Hermès boutique in Guangzhou broke the national record for a shop’s takings in a single day, selling $2.7 million worth of handbags and shoes. One customer boasted that she had spent $100,000 on a handbag (the Hermès black crocodile Birkin 30).
Ma says in the introduction to China Dream that his fellow Chinese have been made into ‘overgrown children who are fed, clothed and entertained, but have no right to remember the past’. He describes the museum on Tiananmen Square, where China’s history after 1949 is ‘cleansed of darkness and reduced to an anodyne, joyful fairy tale’. The regime, he writes, has lied about the Great Leap Forward, a reckless campaign to transform China into a Communist utopia that caused a famine and killed 20 million people; it has lied about the mass psychosis of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into a decade of mob violence; it has lied about the massacre of peaceful protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is lying now, he says, about the coronavirus outbreak; it is a regime built on lies.
***
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***
The US Senate has passed a bill calling on China to tell the truth about coronavirus — and would rename the street outside the Chinese embassy in Washington DC ‘Li Wenliang Plaza’. That won’t much bother the Chinese government. Absurdly, it blames ‘the US Army’ for causing the outbreak in Wuhan and — more convincingly — points to America’s own failures in dealing with the virus.
Ma says the crisis may have made the regime stronger than ever. ‘The Communist party has recast itself as the savior of the Chinese people, and even the benevolent savior of the world. The propaganda has worked, and the masses have returned to the blissful slumber of Xi Jinping’s China Dream. Dr Li has been appropriated. All dissenters have been disappeared. If China’s economy makes a full recovery, the party will be untouchable.’
This may be the China the West faces after the pandemic is over. As I say, we don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Dr Li and Ma Jian warn us that we may never know it.
This article is in The Spectator’s June 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours.
Wuhdunnit? We have only suspicions, not proof
The idea that the virus is man-made is not just a crazy theory that Trump got from one of his golf buddies
Paul Wood
China’s Solzhenitsyn: Author Ma Jian, who now lives in exile in London
Paul Wood
May 31, 2020
4:55 PM
This article is in The Spectator’s June 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours.
We don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Even so, it already has a tragic hero: Dr Li Wenliang. His name is known around the world now, but the details of what happened to him are telling.
On December 30 last year, Li warned fellow medics on a WeChat group that seven patients had been quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan. They had some kind of coronavirus. A few days later, after screenshots of his messages were posted to the wider internet, he was summoned by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. The secret police presented him with a typed confession stating he had lied. He signed it. He had to. The police document was sententious but chilling: ‘Your behavior severely disrupted social order… We advise you to calm down and reflect carefully. We sternly warn you: if you are stubborn, do not show repentance, and continue to conduct illegal activities, you will be punished… Do you understand?’
I spoke about Dr Li to Ma Jian, the author known as China’s Solzhenitsyn. All his books are banned in China and he lives in exile in London. In any normal society, he tells me, Dr Li would have reported his concerns directly to the hospital’s managers. ‘But China is not a normal society. Dr Li was silenced.’ Ma is in no doubt that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist party are ‘the primary culprits for this global catastrophe’. That is because, he believes, Beijing’s stamp was on events in Wuhan from the start. State television announced that eight medics were being investigated for ‘rumor-mongering’. The national news agency carried a statement from the Wuhan police instructing citizens to ‘jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace’. Ma says that while the authorities were busy pretending nothing was wrong, the number of infected grew exponentially. They missed the chance to stop the virus.
Dr Li went back to work, having promised to respect the law on public security and social harmony. He caught the virus he’d warned others about. By the end of January, he was in an intensive-care bed in his own hospital, wearing an oxygen mask and drenched in sweat. He decided to speak to the New York Times, an extraordinarily brave thing to do after his previous trouble with the police. He said: ‘There should be more openness and transparency.’ He also spoke to the Chinese news site Caixin: ‘I think a healthy society should not have just one voice.’ This was open defiance.
He died from the virus days later. He was 34 and left behind a five-year-old son and a pregnant wife. There were millions of angry posts on Chinese social media — despite rigorous censorship, with certain words blocked automatically. By overreacting to Li’s small act of kindness in warning his fellow doctors, the authorities had managed to turn him into a symbol. They rushed to undo the damage. Beijing sent anti-corruption investigators to Wuhan; they found the local police in error. Li was declared a martyr, the state’s highest honor (one instituted by Mao, who said: ‘All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.’) The state was trying to reclaim Li as its own. Official media parroted the line that ‘certain hostile forces’ had tried to exploit what was called the ‘Li Wenliang incident’ — but he had remained a loyal member of the Communist party. He was a hero fighting under the ‘strong leadership’ of the party’s Central Committee, ‘with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core’.
The party functionary newly put in charge of Wuhan said citizens should get ‘gratitude education’ to encourage them to properly thank Xi. This reflects the official story of the pandemic’s beginnings: the local authorities in Wuhan were slow to act but then Comrade Xi stepped in to direct a ‘People’s War’ against the virus. This contrasts with the narrative from the Trump White House: the Chinese are engaged in a cover-up. They knew from the start that the virus could be passed between humans, not just caught from animals; they knew there would be a pandemic long before they told anyone. They’re still lying about how many cases they’ve had, about the number of deaths and about the origins of the virus in a Chinese laboratory.
President Trump deals with the truth as casually as he has the many women in his past. But Ma has no time for the ‘shameless apologists’ in the West who defend China, ‘a regime that dragged infected patients down the street and herded them like cattle into trucks’. He goes on: ‘I suspect that some Westerners’ praise of the Chinese Communist party is political, influenced by hatred for America. But the truth is, it is perfectly possible to abhor everything that Trump stands for, to berate his reckless mishandling of the pandemic, to consider Boris Johnson’s management a catastrophe, while at the same time condemning Xi Jinping’s repressive dictatorship for [China’s] cover-ups, murderous lies and inhumanity.’
President Trump says he’s seen proof that the virus came from a Chinese lab. It might have got out through a ‘horrible mistake’. He was signing a proclamation for Older Americans Month when he also wondered aloud if ‘somebody’ did ‘something on purpose’. He was signing another proclamation — it’s one of his favorite things to do — when he went even further. It was National Nurses Day — ‘That’s a very important day’ — and he was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, flanked by a couple of nurses in scrubs. ‘We went through the worst attack we’ve ever had on our country… This is worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center.’
This was Trump being Trump, half-accidentally accusing the Chinese of an act of war with a biological weapon. No one else in his administration has repeated this unhinged claim; even Fox News ignored it. But Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has flirted with the idea that the virus was ‘man-made’ (if not a weapon). And, whether it’s natural or manufactured, he says there is ‘enormous evidence’ that the virus leaked from a laboratory.
We have not been shown this evidence. Instead, we are told there is ‘intelligence’. But what might be in the public record to support Trump’s case? China says the virus came from bats or cats sold for food in a live animal market in Wuhan. It is at the very least an enormous coincidence that Wuhan has two laboratories doing research on coronaviruses from bats. The market was just 300 yards from one of the labs, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, which housed some 600 bats with various coronaviruses. A Chinese scientific paper — now wiped from the internet — says a researcher there was attacked by a bat, and another covered in bat urine.
And the idea that the virus is man-made is not just a crazy theory that Trump got from one of his golf buddies. Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist and Nobel Prize winner, has said that the virus was the result of ‘very meticulous work’ by molecular biologists. ‘This virus was created,’ he said. Prof Montagnier remains a lone voice but the second of the Wuhan laboratories, the Institute of Virology, had been doing so-called ‘gain of function’ work, whereby viruses are made more lethal or infectious in order to study them. This kind of research is so dangerous that it was banned for a time in the US. Perhaps it will be banned again after this pandemic. It is certainly terrifying to discover that this was going on. Wuhan was part of an international team that took the genes for the coronavirus’s ‘spike’ protein, which helps it to invade human cells, and spliced them into a more infectious version of the virus.
The research in Wuhan is led by China’s ‘bat woman’, Dr Shi Zhengli, a hero to some Chinese, a villain to others. She says she worried at first that she might be responsible for the pandemic. She didn’t ‘sleep a wink’ until tests came back showing that the virus killing people in Wuhan wasn’t an exact match for the one in her lab. She told Scientific American: ‘That really took a load off my mind.’ A number of western virologists agree: the two strains of the viruses are different, so different that the one behind the pandemic must have evolved decades ago, only now jumping from bats to humans. Case closed? Not quite. Scientists in Australia have said the Chinese might have been growing the virus in the human ‘receptor’ protein that the spike protein latches on to — pushing the virus to evolve more quickly into something far more deadly.
These are suspicions, not proof. For the time being, most scientists — and it seems the spies — say the evidence suggests that nature, not man, is to blame for the pandemic. Still, there are lingering questions: why did the Chinese authorities order lab samples to be destroyed? Why was the Wuhan market sealed and bleached? Were these measures to destroy the pathogen for safety or to hide the evidence?
Ma Jian points out that China has never provided concrete evidence that the Wuhan market was the source of the virus. He wants the regime to open its labs to independent investigators. ‘In times of national emergency, the Chinese government’s first instinct is to cover up. This is the least it owes to the world for the calamity it has inflicted.’
Whether China did inflict the calamity is partly a matter of dates and chronology. On December 31, it warned the World Health Organization about a cluster of ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ but did not say there was human-to-human transmission. Dr Li knew then that this was possible — patients were being quarantined in his own hospital. We now know that President Xi secretly took charge of the fight against the virus on January 7, around the time that Li caught it, but celebrations for the Chinese New Year were allowed to go ahead as planned in Wuhan, with a mass banquet for 40,000 families. Ma says: ‘The authorities hoped that if they suppressed news of the virus it would disappear. As always, they prioritized saving the Chinese Communist party’s face over saving people’s lives.’
Ma’s book China Dream is an unflinching satire of Xi’s ‘China Dream of national rejuvenation’ and the ‘rabid consumerism’ that goes with it. This was consummated when China’s lockdown ended and the Hermès boutique in Guangzhou broke the national record for a shop’s takings in a single day, selling $2.7 million worth of handbags and shoes. One customer boasted that she had spent $100,000 on a handbag (the Hermès black crocodile Birkin 30).
Ma says in the introduction to China Dream that his fellow Chinese have been made into ‘overgrown children who are fed, clothed and entertained, but have no right to remember the past’. He describes the museum on Tiananmen Square, where China’s history after 1949 is ‘cleansed of darkness and reduced to an anodyne, joyful fairy tale’. The regime, he writes, has lied about the Great Leap Forward, a reckless campaign to transform China into a Communist utopia that caused a famine and killed 20 million people; it has lied about the mass psychosis of the Cultural Revolution that plunged China into a decade of mob violence; it has lied about the massacre of peaceful protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is lying now, he says, about the coronavirus outbreak; it is a regime built on lies.
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The US Senate has passed a bill calling on China to tell the truth about coronavirus — and would rename the street outside the Chinese embassy in Washington DC ‘Li Wenliang Plaza’. That won’t much bother the Chinese government. Absurdly, it blames ‘the US Army’ for causing the outbreak in Wuhan and — more convincingly — points to America’s own failures in dealing with the virus.
Ma says the crisis may have made the regime stronger than ever. ‘The Communist party has recast itself as the savior of the Chinese people, and even the benevolent savior of the world. The propaganda has worked, and the masses have returned to the blissful slumber of Xi Jinping’s China Dream. Dr Li has been appropriated. All dissenters have been disappeared. If China’s economy makes a full recovery, the party will be untouchable.’
This may be the China the West faces after the pandemic is over. As I say, we don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Dr Li and Ma Jian warn us that we may never know it.
This article is in The Spectator’s June 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours.