Photo taken on May 18, 2020 shows an exhibit at the Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang, northeast China’s Liaoning Province. May 18 marks the International Museum Day. (Xinhua/Yao Jianfeng)
Source: Xinhua
17/05/2020
Lufthansa Cargo adds more flights to mainland China, ferrying urgent supplies to Europe
- There has been strong demand for air freight services since April, when Chinese factories got back to work
- Cargo flights have become critical in moving protective health equipment across the globe
Planes of German air carrier Lufthansa at the country’s largest airport in Frankfurt. Photo: Reuters
German freight carrier Lufthansa Cargo is expanding in China, surpassing 100 weekly flights for the first time, and adding new flights to Shenzhen.
Peter Gerber, CEO of Europe’s largest cargo airline, said there had been heavy demand for its services, though this might cool by the peak of summer.
“At the moment, cargo demand is very, very strong,” he told the Post. “It started to get strong in April, when Chinese industries got back to work, and after that we have seen a constant, heavy demand, a real peak.”
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Global air freight capacity has been squeezed as two-thirds of the world’s aircraft have been grounded by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The collapse of air travel has practically put a stop to passenger flights, which typically carry half of all air cargo.
Since the pandemic, cargo flights have been critical in moving protective health equipment across the globe. From sending masks and other supplies to China in February, the German carrier is now taking urgent supplies from the mainland back to Europe.
Peter Gerber says Lufthansa Cargo has a high responsibility in maintaining supply chains, for both global health and world trade. Photo: Handout
“We have a high responsibility in maintaining supply chains in these unprecedented times for both global health and world trade,” Gerber said.
With the addition of Shenzhen, Lufthansa Cargo will fly to five destinations in China. It serves more than 300 destinations in 100 countries.
The cargo carrier is part of the Lufthansa Group and coordinates all the freight that goes into the passenger planes of its sibling brands, including Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian.
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By next week, Lufthansa Cargo will be running more freight flights to China than the 72 passenger flights the group flew weekly before the pandemic to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, Nanjing and Qingdao.
Lufthansa Cargo has a fleet of seven Boeing 777 Freighters (777Fs), with two new 777Fs arriving this year as part of its strategy to operate a fleet with a single aircraft type.
It also has six McDonnell Douglas-11Fs that Gerber said would still be retired as planned at the end of 2020, despite the extra demand for cargo capacity.
Its additional flights to China will make use of “preighters” – passenger aircraft flying cargo only. Gerber felt the trend of using empty passenger planes as “preighters” had peaked, pointing out that they cost the same to operate as freighters but carry only a fraction of the cargo.
Although he did not rule out future expansion, he said: “Demand will gradually come down in the next two or three months because a lot of equipment would have been shipped by then and some shipments will go on rail or ocean shipping.”
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He said some uncertainty remained over continued demand for airfreighted cargo, given the battered state of the world economy. Airlines would have to consider longer-term demand before deciding to invest more in cargo aircraft. “It depends how it looks beyond the next year,” he said.
Gerber said no decision had been taken yet on whether to convert some of the group’s orders for Boeing’s newest widebody 777X passenger aircraft into cargo planes.
He added that future plane orders would be balanced against the wider needs and spending decisions at Lufthansa Group, which is currently negotiating a government pandemic bailout package in the region of €9 billion (US$9.7 billion).
Source:SCMP
05/03/2020
Special Report – Before coronavirus, China bungled swine epidemic with secrecy
(Reuters) – When the deadly virus was first discovered in China, authorities told the people in the know to keep quiet or else. Fearing reprisal from Beijing, local officials failed to order tests to confirm outbreaks and didn’t properly warn the public as the pathogen spread death around the country.
All this happened long before China’s coronavirus outbreak, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives worldwide in less than three months. For the past 19 months, secrecy has hobbled the nation’s response to African swine fever, an epidemic that has killed millions of pigs. A Reuters examination has found that swine fever’s swift spread was made possible by China’s systemic under-reporting of outbreaks. And even today, bureaucratic secrecy and perverse policy incentives continue undermining Chinese efforts to defeat one of the worst livestock epidemics in modern history.
Beijing’s secretive early handling of the coronavirus epidemic has troubling similarities to its missteps in containing African swine fever, but with the far higher stakes of a human infection. After the coronavirus was found in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, local and national officials were slow to sound the alarm and take actions disease experts say are needed to contain deadly outbreaks. Beijing continues to gag negative news and online postings about the disease, along with criticism of the government’s response.
With swine fever, Beijing set a tone of furtiveness across government and industry by denying or downplaying the severity of a disease that the meat industry estimates has shrunk China’s 440-million-hog herd by more than half. The epidemic has taken a quarter of the world’s hogs off the market, hurt livelihoods, caused meat prices to spike globally and pushed food inflation to an eight-year high. (For a graphic on soaring China pork prices, click here)
Cover-ups across China – coupled with underfinancing of relief for devastated pig farmers and weak enforcement of restrictions on pork transport and slaughter – have enabled the spread of the livestock virus to the point where it now threatens pig farmers worldwide, according to veterinarians, industry analysts and hog producers. Since the China outbreak, African swine fever has broken out in 10 countries in Asia.
The vacuum of credible information has made it impossible for farmers, industry and government to tell how and why the disease spread so quickly, making preventive measures difficult, said Wayne Johnson, a Beijing-based veterinarian who runs Enable Ag-Tech Consulting.
“To get it under control, you have to know where it is,” Johnson said.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement to Reuters that it has repeatedly communicated to all regions the importance of timely and accurate reporting of African swine fever outbreaks and had zero tolerance for hiding and delaying the reporting of cases.
Interviews with farmers, industry analysts and major suppliers to China’s pork sector indicate otherwise. More than a dozen Chinese farmers told Reuters they reported disease outbreaks to local authorities that never made it into Beijing’s official statistics. Those infections are going unreported to central authorities in part because counties lack the cash to follow a separate requirement from Beijing to compensate farmers for pigs killed to control the disease.
Local officials have also avoided reporting outbreaks out of fear of the political consequences. And they have routinely refused to test pigs for the virus when mass deaths are reported, according to interviews with farmers and executives at corporate producers.
A farmer surnamed Zhao, who raises a herd in Henan province, said local officials told him as much when they resisted recording the outbreak he reported on his farm, which wiped out his herd.
“‘We haven’t had a single case of African swine fever. If I report it, we have a case,’” Zhao recalled an official telling him. The local officials could not be reached for comment and a fax seeking comment went unanswered.
When the coronavirus hit, Chinese authorities reacted with a push to reassure the public that all was well. The first reported death from the virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, came on Jan. 9 – a 61-year-old man in Wuhan. In the following days, Chinese authorities said that the virus was under control and not widely transmissible.
The assurances came despite a lack of reliable data and testing capacity in Wuhan. Testing kits for the disease were not distributed to some of Wuhan’s hospitals until about Jan. 20, an official at the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Hubei CDC) told Reuters. Before then, samples had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing for testing, a process that took three to five days to get results, according to Wuhan health authorities.
During that gap, city hospitals reduced the number of people under medical observation from 739 to 82, according to data from Wuhan health authorities compiled by Reuters, and no new cases were reported inside China.
China’s top leadership has dramatically ramped up the public-health response since its early missteps. Beijing built new hospitals in days to treat the sick and launched an unprecedented blockade of the disease epicentre on Jan. 23, first quarantining Wuhan’s 11 million residents at home, then suspending transport in all major cities of Hubei province, home to about 60 million people.
Still, the initial attempts to tightly control information left many people unaware of the risks and unable to take precautions that might have prevented infection – and the suppressing of news and commentary continues today. Wuhan authorities reprimanded eight people they accused of spreading “illegal and false” information about the disease. One of them, 34-year-old doctor Li Wenliang, later died from coronavirus, triggering an angry backlash on social media.
Some critical posts were allowed during a brief and unusual period of online openness in late January. But Beijing’s censors – the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) – have since cracked down on posts about Li and other information that authorities deem negative, according to CAC censorship orders sent to online news outlets and seen by Reuters. One CAC notice ordered online outlets to guard against “harmful information.” Another ordered them not to “push any negative story.”
The CAC did not respond to a request for comment sent by fax.
UNREPORTED OUTBREAKS
Beijing had years to prepare for African swine fever. Veterinarians have frequently warned Chinese authorities of the risks since the disease started spreading through the Caucasus region in 2007.
Pigs infected by the virus initially suffer high fever, loss of appetite and diarrhoea. Then their skin turns red as internal haemorrhaging starts and their organs swell, leading to death in as little as a week.
With no vaccine or cure available for the disease, experts recommend that infected pigs and others housed in the same barn are culled, with the carcasses either burned or buried to prevent further infection. Farms, equipment and vehicles that could be contaminated need to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected.
The first case in China was discovered on Aug. 1, 2018, on a farm near Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Just two weeks later, the virus was found more than 1,000 kilometres to the south in pigs bought by the country’s top pork processor, WH Group(0288.HK), from another northeastern province, Heilongjiang. It took Beijing another two weeks to block pig exports from the whole region, and that and other transport restrictions were poorly enforced, said Johnson and other industry experts. WH Group declined to comment.
One factor behind the epidemic: Chinese consumers prefer fresh pork – straight from the slaughterhouse, rather than chilled. This means hundreds of thousands of live pigs are moved long distances every day to supply processors in major cities. That mass movement spread the disease relentlessly.
Over the first four months of the outbreak, Beijing reported swine-fever cases almost daily as the virus spread from the northeast down through central China, west into Sichuan, and to the huge province of Guangdong by year-end. Veterinarians believe the virus spread quickly because it can survive for weeks on dirty farm equipment or livestock trucks.
And yet gaps in counting and tracking the pig disease have been routine across China. Reuters found a striking absence of reported outbreaks in some of the nation’s most productive pork regions.
For instance, almost none of the reported outbreaks have come from the major hog-raising provinces of Hebei, Shandong and Henan. The three contiguous northern provinces were the source of some 20% of the 700 million pigs China slaughtered in 2017. Many came from backyard farms, which make up a large part of China’s industry and have proven fertile breeding grounds for the disease. Yet each of the three provinces has reported just a single case of African swine fever, despite widespread anecdotal reports of outbreaks there that industry sources believe killed millions of pigs.
Neither Shandong nor Henan authorities responded to requests for comment. Hebei’s department of agriculture said it had “strictly reported and verified the epidemic” and that the disease situation was currently “stable.”
Six Henan farmers told Reuters they reported outbreaks during late 2018 and the first half of 2019. In some cases, local authorities helped deal with dead pigs, they said, but never tested for the virus.
That’s what happened when Wang Shuxi, a farmer in Henan’s Gushi County, lost more than 400 pigs in March 2019. Wang said he had no doubt that his pigs had African swine fever, even though authorities never tested them – and he couldn’t test them himself, because Beijing did not permit the commercial sale of disease test kits at the time.
His pigs showed telltale symptoms of the disease.
“The whole body went red,” he said. He injected the animals with an anti-fever medication to no avail. “At the start, they didn’t eat, and even after injections, it kept returning,” he said. “If you can’t cure it, you know it’s swine fever.”
Provincial and county governments had strong incentives to avoid verifying and reporting outbreaks because of Beijing’s rules on compensating farmers, said Huang Yanzhong, specialist in health governance with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Under an African swine fever contingency plan drawn up in 2015, Beijing ordered the culling of all pigs on farms where the disease is found and on every farm within a three-kilometre radius. The central government raised compensation from 800 yuan ($115) to 1,200 yuan for every pig culled in 2018. Beijing typically promised to provide between 40% and 80% of the money, depending on the province. Localities would fund the rest.
In April 2019, the national agriculture ministry said the central government had allocated 630 million yuan to cull 1.01 million pigs to contain the disease. But that money either wasn’t sufficient or regularly did not get paid out, farmers told Reuters. None of about a dozen farmers who told Reuters they tried to report outbreaks said they had received the promised 1,200 yuan for each pig.
Many got nothing. Wang, the Gushi County farmer, said that almost a year after his pigs died, he has received no recompense. Gushi County officials could not be reached for comment.
Many farmers, eager to salvage value from their herds, have resorted to sending their pigs to slaughter at the first sign of illness – thereby thrusting the virus into the human food supply. The swine fever virus does not threaten people. But its presence in meat – where it can survive for weeks – creates a cycle of infection because many backyard farmers feed pigs with restaurant scraps that include pork.
Garbage feeding caused 23 outbreaks in 2018, Huang Baoxu, deputy director of the China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, told reporters at a briefing in November that year. His remarks were a rare instance where the central government revealed findings about the spread of the hog virus. The centre declined to comment for this story.
Farmers visiting slaughterhouses dealing in sick pigs also likely picked up the virus on their trucks or equipment, spreading it back to their farms, Johnson said.
In the southern province of Guangxi, the disease raged through the spring of 2019 and early summer, several farmers told Reuters last year. Bobai County was hit hard.
A Bobai farmer surnamed Huang said she lost almost 500 pigs during April and May. She said she tried to report the diseased pigs to the local government but was ignored. The official she spoke to by phone never came to her farm. He told Huang that her pigs could not be saved – but that they didn’t have African swine fever. His advice, she said: “hurry and sell the pigs while they could be sold.”
Huang said she sold more than 30 pigs that she believed had the virus. They looked healthy when she sold them, she said. Others sold obviously sick pigs at very low prices. “Traders took all the pigs, including the sick ones – as long as they could walk to the trucks,” she said.
Huang buried her dead pigs daily for weeks on a relative’s land. Others simply dumped their dead pigs on the roadside or in the mountains, she said. The government provided no help.
Eventually, in late May, Bobai County reported one pig dead from the disease, official statistics show.
Authorities in Guangxi did not respond to a request for comment, and officials in Bobai county’s agriculture bureau could not be reached.
Beijing’s agriculture ministry said in a statement that it had issued an August 2019 order requiring punishments in situations where localities failed to report outbreaks. The ministry said it meted out unspecified discipline to more than 600 local personnel for what it called failures to manage the disease that were uncovered in its investigations of problem areas.
The practice of processing infected hogs has persisted despite new rules from Beijing in July that required slaughterhouses to test all batches of pigs for the virus. The agriculture ministry said in January that 5% of the more than 2,000 samples taken from slaughterhouses in November tested positive for the disease.
An Australian study in September found 48% of meat products confiscated from Asian travellers arriving at its ports and airports contained the virus.
“It showed there’s an awful lot of unrevealed infection not being reported to the authorities,” said Trevor Drew, director of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory.
One such information gap is at the top of the industry – China’s large corporate pig producers. They have also been hit hard by the disease, despite taking more extensive measures than backyard farms to disinfect trucks and require workers to change clothes and shower before and after shifts.
None of China’s top publicly traded producers have publicly announced any swine fever outbreak, but executives of major hog producers acknowledged in interviews with Reuters that their herds were hit by the disease.
Thai conglomerate C.P. Pokphand(0043.HK), one of China’s leading pig producers, has had swine-fever outbreaks on farms in Liaoning, Shandong, Henan and Jiangsu provinces, Bai Shanlin, chief executive of China operations, told Reuters in a rare admission by a listed firm. Executives at three other listed companies, also among China’s top pig producers, acknowledged outbreaks at several farms but declined to be identified.
None of the outbreaks that these large companies have confirmed to Reuters were reported by Beijing, according to a Reuters review of the agriculture ministry’s data on outbreaks.
By August 2019, a year after the first case was found in China, pork prices had passed a record set back in 2016. And they were still climbing rapidly. With a crucial national celebration approaching in October – the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic – China’s top leaders took note. Pork is a staple of Chinese cuisine, and rising meat production has been among the many signature achievements in the Communist Party’s decades-long drive to bring prosperity to China.
In a video conference that month with officials from all 34 provinces and regions, Vice Premier Hu Chunhua issued a warning: Sufficient pork was vital to people’s lives and the country’s stability. He called for the urgent recovery of the herd as a key “political task.”
A raft of new production policies and incentives emerged from Beijing. And as the provinces rallied to replenish the nation’s herd, reports of African swine fever grew even more rare. Disease outbreaks reported by the agriculture ministry have tailed off since August. In January, Agriculture Minister Han Changfu said the situation has stabilized.
The government’s statistics are rife with contradictions, however. The ministry has reported 163 outbreaks of African swine fever since August 2018 and said 1.19 million pigs have been culled, a fraction of 1% of China’s total herd. Separate ministry data tracking the herd monthly show that, by September 2019, the herd had shrunk by 41% from the prior year. (For a graphic on the decline in China’s pig herd, click tmsnrt.rs/38lkOcx )
These official estimates of the decline are far too low, three major industry suppliers told Reuters.
“It’s at least 60%,” said Johan de Schepper, managing director of Dutch feed ingredients firm Agrifirm International. His assessment, based on sales to about 100 large pig producers, echoed those of others in the industry.
The virus is still killing pigs nationwide and the herd may still be shrinking, say farmers and industry suppliers. “Half of the herd was gone before this winter, and I think half of the rest will be gone by the end of the season,” said Johnson, the veterinarian, citing conversations with clients from across China.
The problem: Some areas were hit with a second wave of the disease.
Henan province is among them, farmers told Reuters. Last year, about 60% of Henan’s herd was wiped out, mainly in the densely farmed areas in the south and west of the province, analysts at Guotai Junan Securities wrote in an internal memo seen by Reuters. Recently, the memo noted, the virus has moved through east Henan, taking out another 20%.
The vicious disease ruined Zhao, the farmer in central China’s Henan province. The virus struck in October, causing high fever, internal bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea in his pigs. Just two survived. The other 196 died in a week.
When Zhao tried to report the outbreak to the county veterinary authority, he said, officials strongly encouraged him to keep quiet. A local official reminded him of the national mandate to cull all pigs within three kilometres of an infected farm. That could spell disaster for his neighbours if Zhao spoke up.
“If it’s found to be African swine fever, people nearby will have to stop raising pigs,” Zhao recalled a local official telling him. Zhao decided against filing a report to protect his neighbours, he told Reuters on a recent visit to his farm.
Further up the political hierarchy, the deputy governor of Henan province was quoted by the provincial agriculture bureau as saying in December that Henan had been free of the disease for 14 months, after a single reported case in September 2018. The provincial government did not respond to requests for comment.
The disinformation game continues. Zhao says that when county officials came by his farm in January, they recorded that he still had 180 pigs. In fact, he said, he had just the two hogs that survived the October outbreak.
“The country is being kept in the dark,” he said.
Source: Reuters
29/02/2020
Could the coronavirus help to improve China’s ties with South Korea, Japan?
- Cooperation on ‘soft’ issues like public health can provide an ‘opportunity for improvement’ in the nations’ broader relationship, international affairs expert says
- Foreign ministers agree to do all they can to ensure Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned visits to east Asian neighbours go ahead later this year
South Korea on Thursday reported 505 new coronavirus cases, its largest increase yet. Photo: AP
The rapid spread of the coronavirus outside China, especially in South Korea and
has created a fresh challenge to Beijing’s delicate relationship with its northeast Asian neighbours, but experts say the unprecedented public health crisis could draw them closer, at least for now.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi held separate conversations with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts on Wednesday as Beijing scrambles to deal with the growing risk of imported infections from the two countries.
In a sign of the “strong momentum at the leadership level on both sides”, Wang and Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi agreed to ensure Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Japan later this year goes ahead as planned, despite mounting fears the virus outbreak will become a pandemic.
China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that Yang Jiechi, Wang’s predecessor and Xi’s top aide on foreign affairs, would visit Japan on Friday. His trip is expected to pave the way for Xi’s high stakes visit in the spring, observers said.
But Benoit Hardy-Chartrand, an international affairs expert at Temple University in Tokyo, said that if the outbreak did not subside in the next few weeks, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government would come under intense pressure to delay the visit.
“Despite reassuring official pronouncements, no one would be surprised if the visit was postponed to a later date,” he said. “With an already declining approval rate, the Abe administration would be hard-pressed to go ahead with the summit.”
During her phone call with Wang, South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha urged China to refrain from carrying out what she described as “excessive” restrictions and forcible quarantine measures against visitors from her country, the Yonhap news agency reported.
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on Thursday reported 505 new coronavirus cases – its largest increase yet and the first time any country has confirmed more daily cases than China. The outbreak has now spread to more than 30 countries and killed more than 2,800 people.
US-CHINA TRADE WAR
In the cities of Qingdao and Weihai in east China’s Shandong province – both of which are home to large South Korean and Japanese communities – local authorities have begun to quarantine arrivals from the two countries, while similar measures targeting South Koreans in particular have been introduced in Shenyang and Nanjing.
This is the first time China, where the coronavirus originated and which earlier criticised other nations for overreacting to the outbreak, has introduced country-specific measures in the name of disease control.
The move sparked fierce criticism in South Korea, with more than 750,000 people signing an online petition calling for a ban on Chinese visitors.
The foreign ministry in Seoul said that about 40 nations and regions had imposed some sort of restrictions on South Korean visitors.
Both South Korea and Japan – which were among the first to offer support and aid to China when the epidemic took hold – have imposed only partial restrictions on Chinese travellers, mostly those from Hubei, the province at the centre of the contagion.
Wang again thanked South Korea for its support and defended China’s control measures, saying they were necessary to reduce the cross-border movement of people and restrict the spread of the disease, China’s foreign ministry said.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Photo: EPA-EFE
Yonhap said both Wang and Kang also agreed that Xi’s proposed trip to South Korea in the first half of the year would proceed as planned.
Chinese experts said the coronavirus had deepened distrust and antagonism towards China in both countries, with many South Koreans and Japanese blaming China for the spread of the disease.
Li Wen, an expert from the China Institute of International Studies, said the coronavirus crisis had seen the rise of the “China threat” in South Korea, with its government under enormous pressure to get tough on its giant neighbour.
According to Yonhap, Kang urged South Korean diplomats in China earlier this month to help minimise any negative impact the epidemic might have had on relations between the two countries.
Hardy-Chartrand said relations between China and South Korea remained tense because of Seoul’s deployment of the American-made THAAD missile defence system, which in turn led to Beijing introducing unofficial sanctions that caused resentment among South Koreans.
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But the latest spat over the control measures was unlikely to be a major obstacle to regional relations, he said.
“Overall, cooperation on so-called soft issues like public health, as we are witnessing at the moment, can provide an opportunity for further improvement in the broader relationship, at least in the short term,” he said.
China-Japan relations might also benefit from closer cooperation on disease control given uncertainty in the region over the US-China trade war, the North Korean denuclearisation impasse, the United States’ commitment to its allies, and the coronavirus outbreak, he said.
“I am less sanguine about the mid- to long-term prospects for Sino-Japanese relations, given that the sources of the tensions that we saw from 2010 to 2017, namely the East China Sea territorial dispute and other historical issues, remain wholly unresolved,” he said.
According to a Pew study in December, 85 per cent of Japanese have an unfavourable view of China, the highest among 34 countries surveyed, while 63 per cent of South Koreans see China negatively.
Source: SCMP
28/02/2020
Coronavirus: secretive South Korean church linked to outbreak held meetings in Wuhan until December
- Around 200 Shincheonji Church of Jesus members continued to meet in the Chinese city amid rumours of virus, but ‘no one took [claims] seriously’ at first
- Around half the Covid-19 cases in South Korea have been linked to members of the religious group
The Shincheonji church in Daegu has been linked to a cluster of infections. Photo: Yonhap via AP
Members of the Christian sect linked to a cluster of coronavirus cases in South Korea held meetings in Wuhan until December, only stopping when they realised that their community had been hit by Covid-19, the previously unknown disease caused by the virus.
The South China Morning Post has learned that the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the centre of the epidemic, has around 200 members, most of whom are currently under quarantine outside the city.
“Rumours about a virus began to circulate in November but no one took them seriously,” said one member, a 28-year-old kindergarten teacher.
“I was in Wuhan in December when our church suspended all gatherings as soon as we learned about [the coronavirus],” said the woman, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
She said the group was continuing to share sermons and teachings online, but most members had returned home at the start of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January.
The 250,000-member Shincheonji Church of Jesus is regarded by mainstream Christian groups as a secretive and unorthodox sect. Its founder, Lee Man-hee, has claimed that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Around half the Covid-19 infections in South Korea have been linked to a branch of the church in Daegu.
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According to the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 977 confirmed cases as of Tuesday – the second highest number outside China – and 11 deaths.
Of the 84 new cases reported on Tuesday, over half were recorded in Daegu city.
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A member of the church from Daegu reportedly visited China in January, and health officials in South Korea are investigating whether a cluster of infections in Cheongdo city is linked to a three-day funeral ceremony held at a local hospital.
Chinese sources said that the Shincheonji church has about 20,000 members in China – most of whom live in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Changchun and Shenyang.
One Christian pastor in Hubei province, who declined to be named, said that Shincheonji church members were hard-working and some continued to proselytise even during the outbreak.
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The Wuhan kindergarten teacher said she was confident that the recent mass outbreaks in South Korea were not linked to Shincheonji church members from the city.
“I don’t think the virus came from us because none of our brothers and sisters in Wuhan have been infected. I don’t know about members in other places but at least we are clean. None of us have reported sick,” she said.
“There are so many Chinese travelling to South Korea, it’s quite unfair to pin [the disease] on us.”
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She sidestepped questions on whether church members had travelled from Wuhan to South Korea after the outbreak.
The teacher said that in 2018 the Wuhan group’s “holy temple” in Hankou district had been raided by police “who branded us a cult”, but members continued to worship in small groups.
“We are aware of all the negative reporting out there after the outbreak in South Korea, but we do not want to defend ourselves in public because that will create trouble with the government,” she said. “We just want to get through the crisis first.”
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Bill Zhang, a 33-year-old Shanghai resident and a former missionary with Shincheonji, said the group’s secretive nature made it hard for the authorities to effectively crackdown on its activities.
He said the Shanghai branch held its main meetings on Wednesdays and Saturdays, attracting 300 to 400 people at a time.
“The Shincheonji church in Shanghai has been raided many times and police spoke to church leaders regularly.
“But the church members simply continued their meetings in smaller groups of eight-to-10 people and regrouped when the surveillance was relaxed.”
Zhang continued: “Shincheonji holds that it is the only real church that upholds the biblical truth and all other churches – mainstream or cults – are evil.”
Source: SCMP
01/02/2020
Britain pulls embassy staff, families from China as coronavirus spread
- The decision, which follows a similar move by the US this week, came as the death toll from the outbreak soared to 259
- Health officials on Friday confirmed the first cases in the UK after two people tested positive for the virus
A coach carrying British nationals evacuated from Wuhan arrives at the Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral, near Liverpool in northwest England. Photo: AFP
Britain on Saturday said it was temporarily withdrawing some staff and their families from its diplomatic sites in China, as Beijing struggles to contain the nationwide new
epidemic.
The decision, which follows a similar move by the United States this week, came as the death toll from the outbreak soared to 259 and the total number of cases neared 12,000 within China.
The Sars-like virus has also begun to spread around the world, with more than 100 infections reported in more than 20 countries.
“We are committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of our staff and their families,” a spokesman for the British Foreign Office said.
“We are therefore temporarily withdrawing some UK staff, and their dependents from our embassy and consulates in China.”
He added that Britain’s ambassador in Beijing and staff needed to continue critical work will remain, and that British nationals in China would still have access to constant consular assistance.
The US, which on Friday temporarily banned the entry of foreign nationals, who had travelled to China over the past two weeks, has also made similar changes.
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On Wednesday, it authorised the departure of non-emergency government employees and their family members from its offices in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenyang.
And on Friday, it ordered all relatives of staff members under the age of 21 to leave China immediately.
A spokesman for the US Embassy in Beijing said it made the decision “out of an abundance of caution related to logistical disruptions stemming from restricted transportation and overwhelmed hospitals related to the novel coronavirus”.
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British health officials on Friday confirmed the first cases in the UK, after two members of the same family tested positive for the virus.
One of the two individuals is a student at the University of York, a university spokesman said on Saturday.
Also on Friday, 83 British citizens returned on a UK government-chartered flight from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the centre of the epidemic.
They were immediately taken to a hospital in northwest England for a two-week quarantine.
Source: SCMP
08/10/2019
China’s leading robot maker improves lives of the elderly
SHENYANG, Oct. 8 (Xinhua) — China’s leading robot maker, SIASUN Robot & Automation Co., Ltd., said it has been developing robots that can provide better services for the aged.
Based in Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province, SIASUN’s products have been utilized in nursing institutions, medical institutions and hospitals for the elderly.
So far, the company has created more than 20 kinds of robotic products, including intelligent robots for daily care, intelligent beds, semi-automatic bed chairs and walking aids.
The enterprise said robots could assist the elderly in daily care, which would increase efficiency and reduce the labor intensity of nursing staff.
“With the increasing aging population, there is a huge market and room to grow for rehabilitation robots for the elderly in China,” said Li Xuewei, general manager of SIASUN’s medical and health robot division.
Li said service robots for the elderly and the disabled, such as nursing and rehabilitation robots, would be in high demand in the near future.
As a leading enterprise in China’s robotics industry, SIASUN’s products have been exported to more than 30 countries and regions.
Source: Xinhua
08/09/2019
German Chancellor Merkel visits central China’s Wuhan
German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan, capital city of central China’s Hubei Province, Sept. 7, 2019. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Wuhan on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
WUHAN, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) — Angela Merkel Saturday visited central China’s Wuhan during her 12th trip to the country as German Chancellor since 2005.
Before Wuhan, capital city of Hubei province, Merkel had visited a number of cities besides Beijing during her China trips in the past.
When talking with students of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Merkel highlighted the importance of international cooperation in the era of globalization, and called on the students to be participants.
Saying that a nation’s prosperity is part of the prosperity of the whole world, she voiced her hope that students should shoulder common responsibilities to combat global challenges.
In the speech, Merkel reviewed her past trips to China. In Shenyang, she witnessed economic upgrading. In Chengdu she learned about development of western China. In Shenzhen she saw remarkable progress brought by the reform and opening-up.
She said quite a few noted German companies including Siemens, and small and medium-sized innovation enterprises are operating business in Wuhan. Wuhan and Duisburg became the first pair of sister cities between China and Germany in 1982.
Merkel exchanged views with students on internet, artificial intelligence, intelligent manufacturing, and environmental protection.
Before wrapping up her trip, Merkel also visited a local hospital and a factory of the German company Webasto.
Source: Xinhua
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