Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Image copyright AFP / GETTYImage caption The P4 laboratory (centre) in Wuhan is among a handful around the world cleared to handle viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission
Chinese state media has accused US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of lying, after he said there was “enormous evidence” the coronavirus emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Mr Pompeo made the claim on Sunday, without going into specifics.
In an editorial on Tuesday, the hawkish Global Times newspaper said Mr Pompeo was “degenerate”.
The World Health Organization says the US claims are “speculative”, and that it has seen no “specific evidence”.
What did Chinese media say?
Editorials in Chinese state media often given an insight into the direction of government thinking, but there has been no official response to Mr Pompeo’s comments as yet.
“Pompeo aims to kill two birds with one stone by spewing falsehoods,” it said.
“First, he hopes to help Trump win re-election this November…second, Pompeo hates socialist China and, in particular, cannot accept China’s rise.”
Media caption “The Chinese Communist Party has refused to co-operate with world health experts” – Mike Pompeo
The editorial admitted there were “initial problems” in China’s response to the outbreak, but claimed “the overall performance is bright enough to outweigh the flaws”.
It also said it was “conceivable that the virus first contacted humans in other places [than Wuhan]”.
The Global Times is not the only Chinese outlet to take aim at Mr Pompeo and the US.
The People’s Daily said Mr Pompeo had “no evidence”, while a piece on the CCTV site accused US politicians of “nefarious plotting”.
What did Mike Pompeo say?
In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Mr Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” that the virus had emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running sub-standard laboratories,” he said.
Mr Pompeo – a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – said he did not think the virus was man-made or genetically modified.
The Wuhan laboratory is known to study coronaviruses in bats. In April, President Trump was asked whether “lax safety protocols” allowed such a virus to escape via an intern and her boyfriend.
Mr Trump did not confirm the theory, but said: “More and more we’re hearing the story.”
Media caption Donald Trump was recently asked if the virus emanated in a laboratory, rather than a market
Last week, he was asked if he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that the virus emerged in the Wuhan laboratory.
“Yes I have,” he replied – but said he could not go into specifics.
On Monday, World Health Organization emergencies director Michael Ryan said it had received “no data or specific evidence” from the US about the virus origins.
“So from our perspective, this remains speculative,” he said.
Last week, the US intelligence community said it “concurred” that the virus “was not man-made or genetically modified”.
But it said it would “continue to examine” whether the outbreak began via “contract with infected animals, or if it was the result of an an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan”.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday that the most likely source of the virus was a wildlife market. However he said he would not rule out the theory that it originated in a lab.
“What’s really important is that we have a proper review, an independent review which looks into the sources of these things in a transparent way so we can learn the lessons,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, Western “intelligence sources” have told several news outlets there is “no evidence” to suggest the virus leaked from a laboratory.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The Chinese city of Wuhan recently lifted its strict quarantine measures
The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus originated last year, has raised its official Covid-19 death toll by 50%, adding 1,290 fatalities.
Wuhan officials attributed the new figure to updated reporting and deaths outside hospitals. China has insisted there was no cover-up.
It has been accused of downplaying the severity of its virus outbreak.
Wuhan’s 11 million residents spent months in strict lockdown conditions, which have only recently been eased.
The latest official figures bring the death toll in the city in China’s central Hubei province to 3,869, increasing the national total to more than 4,600.
China has confirmed nearly 84,000 coronavirus infections, the seventh-highest globally, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
What’s China’s explanation for the rise in deaths?
In a statement released on Friday, officials in Wuhan said the revised figures were the result of new data received from multiple sources, including records kept by funeral homes and prisons.
Deaths linked to the virus outside hospitals, such as people who died at home, had not previously been recorded.
Media caption Learn how Wuhan dealt with the lockdown
The “statistical verification” followed efforts by authorities to “ensure that information on the city’s Covid-19 epidemic is open, transparent and the data [is] accurate”, the statement said.
It added that health systems were initially overwhelmed and cases were “mistakenly reported” – in some instances counted more than once and in others missed entirely.
A shortage of testing capacity in the early stages meant that many infected patients were not accounted for, it said.
A spokesman for China’s National Health Commission, Mi Feng, said the new death count came from a “comprehensive review” of epidemic data.
In its daily news conference, the foreign ministry said accusations of a cover-up, which have been made most stridently on the world stage by US President Donald Trump, were unsubstantiated. “We’ll never allow any concealment,” a spokesman said.
Why are there concerns over China’s figures?
Friday’s revised figures come amid growing international concern that deaths in China have been under-reported. Questions have also been raised about Beijing’s handling of the epidemic, particularly in its early stages.
In December 2019, Chinese authorities launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia after cases began circulating in Wuhan.
China reported the cases to the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN’s global health agency, on 31 December.
But WHO experts were only allowed to visit China and investigate the outbreak on 10 February, by which time the country had more than 40,000 cases.
The mayor of Wuhan has previously admitted there was a lack of action between the start of January – when about 100 cases had been confirmed – and 23 January, when city-wide restrictions were enacted.
Around that time, a doctor who tried to warn his colleagues about an outbreak of a Sars-like virus was silenced by the authorities. Dr Li Wenliang later died from Covid-19.
Wuhan’s death toll increase of almost exactly 50% has left some analysts wondering if this is all a bit too neat.
For months questions have been asked about the veracity of China’s official coronavirus statistics.
The inference has been that some Chinese officials may have deliberately under-reported deaths and infections to give the impression that cities and towns were successfully managing the emergency.
If that was the case, Chinese officials were not to know just how bad this crisis would get in other countries, making its own figures now seem implausibly small.
The authorities in Wuhan, where the first cluster of this disease was reported, said there had been no deliberate misrepresentation of data, rather that a stabilisation in the emergency had allowed them time to revisit the reported cases and to add any previously missed.
That the new death toll was released at the same time as a press conference announcing a total collapse in China’s economic growth figures has led some to wonder whether this was a deliberate attempt to bury one or other of these stories.
Then again, it could also be a complete coincidence.
China has been pushing back against US suggestions that the coronavirus came from a laboratory studying infectious diseases in Wuhan, the BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher in Washington DC reports.
US President Donald Trump and some of his officials have been flirting with the outlier theory in the midst of a propaganda war with China over the origin and handling of the pandemic, our correspondent says.
Mr Trump this week halted funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing it of making deadly mistakes and overly trusting China.
“Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?” Mr Trump said at the White House on Wednesday.
On Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: “We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how [coronavirus] came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier.”
But China has also been praised for its handling of the crisis and the unprecedented restrictions that it instituted to slow the spread of the virus.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday his government is trying to determine whether the coronavirus emanated from a lab in Wuhan, China, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.
The source of the virus remains a mystery. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence indicates that the coronavirus likely occurred naturally, as opposed to being created in a laboratory in China, but there is no certainty either way.
Fox News reported on Wednesday that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.
This report and others have suggested the Wuhan lab where virology experiments take place and lax safety standards there led to someone getting infected and appearing at a nearby “wet” market, where the virus began to spread.
At a White House news conference Trump was asked about the reports of the virus escaping from the Wuhan lab, and he said he was aware of them.
“We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened,” he said.
Asked if he had raised the subject in his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said: “I don’t want to discuss what I talked to him about the laboratory, I just don’t want to discuss, it’s inappropriate right now.”
Trump has sought to stress strong U.S. ties with China during the pandemic as the United States has relied on China for personal protection equipment desperately needed by American medical workers.
As far back as February, the Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology dismissed rumors that the virus may have been artificially synthesized at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such a facility.
Pompeo, in a Fox News Channel interview after Trump’s news conference, said “we know this virus originated in Wuhan, China,” and that the Institute of Virology is only a handful of miles away from the wet market.
“We really need the Chinese government to open up” and help explain “exactly how this virus spread,” said Pompeo.
“The Chinese government needs to come clean,” he said.
The broad scientific consensus holds that SARS-CoV-2, the virus’ official name, originated in bats.
Trump and other officials have expressed deep skepticism of China’s officially declared death toll from the virus of around 3,000 people, when the United States has a death toll of more than 20,000 and rising.
He returned to the subject on Wednesday, saying the United States has more cases “because we do more reporting.”
“Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?” he said.
Image copyright AFP / GETTY
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 