The hell of ‘Zero Covid’

China shows just how dangerous public-health fanaticism can become.

Imagine a nation in such a state of distress that its citizens were reduced to bartering for food. A nation where women were so desperate for something to cook and eat that they started swapping sanitary towels for vegetables. A nation where families were so hungry that they would trade their cigarettes for a cabbage. This country actually exists. And it isn’t one of the poor, sometimes famished nations of the global South. It’s China. More accurately, it’s China under the policy of ‘Zero Covid’. If you want to witness the hell of Zero Covid, the dystopian derangement of subordinating every facet of life to the crusade against coronavirus, look no further than the country where this virus first emerged.

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The China Olympics are a moral failing

There are even questions as to whether merchandise was fashioned with forced labor

The international community has failed regarding China and the 2022 Olympics. It’s a moral failing above all, but it’s also an administrative and symbolic failing.

Beijing’s worldwide abuses of human rights, international trade, military aggression toward neighbors and, of course, the unleashing of the Covid-19 pandemic has been allowed to fester, and gone unpunished. In return, China has been granted an international nod of approval by getting to host the 2022 International Olympic Games in Beijing, with the blessing of the International Olympic Committee and European and Western democracies.

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China’s Hostile South Pacific Takeover

This October, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) convened, via video link, the first foreign ministerial conference with nearly 20 Pacific Island states. On December 3, the Chinese quickly followed up this initiative by establishing “The China-Pacific Island Countries Reserve of Emergency Supplies.”

China’s diplomatic offensive in the South Pacific suggests yet another effort to replace the US as the world’s primary superpower and install its authoritarian values instead.

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Elon Musk launches Tesla showroom in Xinjiang amid Uyghur genocide allegations

Tesla announced it opened its first store in Xinjiang on New Year’s Eve, a week after President Joe Biden signed a law banning imports tied to forced labor in the region where the United States says the Chinese government is conducting genocide against Uyghur Muslims.

Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle company, touted the new car showroom on a Chinese social media website called Weibo. The company is led by Elon Musk, who has gone all-in on investing in China as he praises the Chinese Communist Party. All the while, the U.S. is relying on another Musk company, SpaceX, to launch satellites and astronauts into space.

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China mines social media sites including Twitter and Facebook to equip its military and government agencies with data on Western targets

China is mining social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, to harvest data on Western targets for its military, police and government agencies.

The government is purchasing newer and more sophisticated data surveillance systems to collect information on foreign entities, according to the Washington Post which reviewed bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects dating back to early 2020.

The documents revealed the purchase of a $320,000 Chinese state media software that mines social media to create a database of foreign journalists and academics.

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China unveils plan to ‘take over’ Latin America

Chinese Communist Party officials have unveiled an “action plan for cooperation” with Latin American countries that amounts to a “comprehensive” plan to cultivate influence and threaten American interests, following a new ministerial with the nearest neighbors of the United States.

“The Chinese don’t say, ‘We want to take over Latin America,’ but they clearly set out a multidimensional engagement strategy, which, if successful, would significantly expand their leverage and produce enormous intelligence concerns for the United States,” U.S. Army War College research professor Evan Ellis, a former member of the State Department policy planning staff, told the Washington Examiner.

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China opens embassy in Nicaragua for first time since 1990 after Taiwan ties cut

China has opened an embassy in Nicaragua for the first time since 1990, less than a month after the central American country cut ties with Taiwan.

The Nicaraguan foreign minister, Denis Moncada, said there was an “ideological affinity” between the two countries and thanked China for donating 1m doses of the Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine.

Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, established relations with China in 1985, but after he lost the election in 1990, Nicaragua recognised Taiwan.

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Xi’an: Cries for help and food in quarantined Chinese city

Some residents under lockdown in the Chinese city of Xi’an say they do not have enough food, even as officials insist there are adequate supplies.

More than 13 million were ordered to stay at home last week as authorities sought to battle a Covid outbreak.

But compared to other lockdowns globally, locals cannot go out even for essential reasons like buying food.

The government is delivering supplies but many on social media say they are yet to receive them and are struggling.

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China choking off semiconductor supply with draconian lockdown that makes no sense based on their own data

A drastic lockdown is shutting down semiconductor production in the Chinese city of Xian, where China acknowledges a mere total of 1,000 cases (not hospitalizations or deaths) during the current outbreak in a city with a population of 13 million. By comparison, New York City, with a population of 8 million, had 40,856 cases on December 30 and a 7-day average of 28,808 cases per day.

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U.S. Brings a Pea-Shooter to a Gunfight With China

Many of my conservative friends are spinning their wheels with pea-shooter-gauge measures against China—kicking Chinese companies out of the U.S. stock market, for example. On Dec. 10 the U.S. government canceled an initial public offering for the Chinese AI startup SenseTime, whose facial recognition software may help Chinese authorities identify Uyghurs. Two weeks later SenseTime moved its IPO to Hong Kong; it rose 44% in the first two days of trading. China has a trade surplus, $3.2 trillion in reserves, and a 40% savings rate. It is an exporter, not an importer of capital. American capital markets are a convenience, not a necessity for Chinese companies.

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Why China haunts America

America’s growing antagonism towards China is a reflection of its domestic malaise.

The events of 2021 confirmed that the US political class sees containing China as its No1 foreign-policy goal. Indeed, China is now one of the few issues that publicly unites Republicans and Democrats. Treating China as the biggest external threat to America can no longer be regarded as a Trumpian aberration. The Joe Biden administration has been similarly focused on China, building on a theme that goes back at least to Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ 10 years earlier.

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Germany’s New Government: Business as Usual with China

Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has had his first telephone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Scholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel as chancellor on December 8, pledged to strengthen economic ties with China, but he failed to mention human rights or the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong.

The telephone call will disappoint those who had hoped that Germany’s new government — a three-way coalition consisting of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) — would break with the past and take distance from Merkel’s policy of appeasing dictators and sacrificing human rights on the altar of financial gain.

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American Traitors: Academics Working for China

It took a federal jury in Boston less than three hours to return guilty verdicts on all six felony counts against Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Lieber, “one of the country’s top research chemists” according to the New York Times, lied to the FBI about his participation in Beijing’s Thousand Talents Program, did not pay income tax on money from Chinese sources, and failed to report his Chinese bank account to the Internal Revenue Service.

The case against the Harvard academic was airtight. Nonetheless, members of America’s academic elite are up in arms that the Department of Justice prosecuted Lieber, and many are campaigning against law enforcement efforts.

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China is working on ‘brain-control weaponry’ that ‘paralyzes and controls opponents’ rather than killing them, US says

China is developing brain control weapons that could be used to paralyze and control opponents instead of killing them, the US has alleged.

America has sanctioned China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 affiliated research institutes for using ‘biotechnology’ to support the armed forces including ‘purported brain-control weaponry’.

The Commerce Department, which blacklisted the Chinese institutes, did not go into detail about the weapons – but a separate tranche of military documents penned in 2019 gives hints at what Beijing is trying to achieve.

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There are indications that the Chinese military has serious problems

Xi Jinping has been doing a great deal of saber rattling of late, threatening both Australia and Taiwan. China has also been building islands in the South China Sea, flying hypersonic weapons, stealing and illegally buying vast amounts of military technology, and overtly working to make its military more manly, even as the U.S. military deals with maternity flight suits and the needs of the so-called transgender troops. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, a military is only as good as the people doing the fighting, and there are indications that China has a problem in this area.

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