CNN’s Meanwhile in China: The Rise of China During the First Three-Year Intl-Hnk-Micmic Year

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The most urgent and daunting task facing China in the new year is how to handle the fallout from its botched exit from zero-Covid, amid an outbreak that threatens to claim hundreds of thousands of lives and undermine the credibility of Xi and his Communist Party.

The restrictions on covids put China out of sync with the rest of the world. Three years of lockdowns and border curbs have disrupted supply chains, damaged international businesses, and hurt flows of trade and investment between China and other countries.

But the haphazard reopening also offers a glimmer of hope for many: after three years of stifling Covid restrictions and self-imposed global isolation, life in China may finally return to normal as the nation joins the rest of the world in learning to live with the virus.

“We have now entered a new phase of Covid response where tough challenges remain,” Xi said in a nationally televised New Year’s Eve speech. “Everyone is holding on with great fortitude, and the light of hope is right in front of us. Perseverance and solidarity are needed in order for us to pull through.

While China’s state media had been pro-Russia in the past, it appears they have toned down their rhetoric as Russia suffered setbacks in Ukraine.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/china/china-2023-lookahead-intl-hnk-mic/index.html

China’s health crisis since the September 11th outbreak: Predictions from the CNRC-2023 look ahead intl HNK-mic

The sudden lifting of restrictions last month caused an explosion of cases, with little preparation in place to deal with the surge in patients and deaths.

Hospitals are overwhelmed, doctors and nurses don’t have enough time, and crematoriums are struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies, as the country’s fragile health system is scrambling to cope.

The experts predict that the worst is yet to come. Less developed cities and the rural hinterland are still expecting more infections even though major metropolises such as Beijing may have seen the peak of the outbreak.

The outlook is grim. The death toll could be a lot higher if China doesn’t roll out booster shots and antiviral drugs fast enough.

The government launched a campaign for the elderly but many are hesitant to take it because of side effects. Fighting vaccine hesitancy will require a lot of time and effort when medical workers are already stretched thin.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/china/china-2023-lookahead-intl-hnk-mic/index.html

The Covid Pandemic is Coming to an End – Managing the Impact of China’s Uncertainties on the Economy and Human Rights of the World

Any uptick in China’s growth will provide a vital boost to economies that rely on Chinese demand. There will be more international travel and production. The prices of raw materials and energy will go up as a result of rising demand.

“In the short run, I believe China’s economy is likely to experience chaos rather than progress for a simple reason: China is poorly prepared to deal with Covid,” said Bo Zhuang, senior sovereign analyst at Loomis, Sayles & Company, an investment firm based in Boston.

Other experts also expect the economy to recover after March. In a recent research report, HSBC economists projected a 0.5% contraction in the first quarter, but 5% growth for 2023.

The partial reopening of the border is a celebration by Chinese citizens despite the uncertainty.

Though some residents voiced concern online about the rapid loosening of restrictions during the outbreak, many more are eagerly planning trips abroad – travel websites recorded massive spikes in traffic within minutes of the announcement on December 26.

Several Chinese nationals overseas told CNN they had been unable or unwilling to return home for the last few years while the lengthy quarantine was still in place. It meant big life moments missed like graduations, weddings, childbirths and deaths.

Some countries have offered a warm welcome back, with foreign embassies and tourism departments posting invitations to Chinese travelers on Chinese social media sites. Some countries are more cautious than others, with some requiring travelers coming from China to pass a new test.

In many ways, it doesn’t matter if poor security at a laboratory in China caused the outbreak that killed seven million people around the world, as well as a million in the US. Both possible routes of transmission represent a threat to humanity and need to be addressed, which is one reason why China’s lack of transparency on the issue is so potentially dangerous. The pandemic remains a huge embarrassment for China, souring its national mythology of a mighty rising power.

China’s ties with the West and many of its neighbors plummeted significantly over the origins of the coronavirus, trade, territorial claims, Beijing’s human rights record and its close partnership with Russia despite the devastating war in Ukraine.

The lack of top-level face-to-face diplomacy certainly didn’t help, neither did the freeze on in-person exchanges among policy advisers, business groups and the wider public.

Communication lines are back open and more high-level exchanges are in the pipeline – with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, French President Emmanuel Macron, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Italy’s newly elected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni all expected to visit Beijing this year.

The Sino-Russian War in 2020: The Rise of the Cold War and the Dominance of Scientific Cooperation in the Rise of China’s Cold War

This trio of confrontations, along with the rising tensions between US and Chinese forces in Asia, and the escalating standoffs over Taiwan, are dramatizing a long-building and once theoretical rivalry that is now a daily reality.

Both leaders expressed a message of unity, with Xi saying the two countries should “strengthen strategic coordination” and “inject more stability into the world,” according to Chinese state media Xinhua.

Russia’s justification for the invasion took place shortly after Putin visited Beijing to find a friendship with “No Limits” with China’s president. China would prefer Russia, which shares its autocratic form of government, not to suffer a total defeat in Ukraine – which could lead to the ousting of close ally Putin. And China increasingly tends to view its global interests through the prism of its standoff with the US, so it may perceive an advantage in Washington being locked in an arms-length conflict in Ukraine that is costing billions of dollars and to which it is sending reserve military equipment and ammunition that can therefore not be used to bolster its Pacific forces. Delays in procurement in the US arms industry caused by Ukraine could also slow the flow of weapons to Taiwan.

China and Russia are strong allies and will not distance themselves from one another, with several experts telling CNN that the two countries still have their eye on a new world order.

The director of the China Program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center claims the war has made China less interested in Europe. The damage is not significant enough for China to abandon Russia.

The US government has caught genuine Chinese spies stealing trade secrets and scientific and technological developments. The government’s scrutiny of Chinese scholars could hurt national security by demonizing scientists who work with China and discouraging them from going to the US, according to many. In a survey published this week1, Lee says, she found a link between fears of racial profiling and a desire among scientists to return to China.

Anming Hu, a researcher at the University of Tennessee, who was charged for hiding ties with China in 2020 and was put under house arrest until he was acquitted, is trying to get his research back on track. He has spent the past year rebuilding his lab, but has had trouble securing any funding. Currently, he has two graduate students on his team; before his arrest he had six, he says, adding that he won’t now take on students or researchers from China because it’s too risky.

One example of a university taking a more active role in the initiative’s wake was reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune in December 2022. After the university accused him of hiding ties to China, he was forced to quit his job at UC San Diego. UCSD said that he had violated its conflict-of-commitment policy, by accepting travelReimbursements from Chinese institutions that he had visited, and failing to disclose Chinese grants with his name on them. Fu denies any wrongdoing, according to the Tribune.

Universities reject the idea that they are unfairly targeting researchers of Chinese heritage. Toby Smith is the vice-president of science policy and global affairs at the Association of American Universities in Washington DC. All faculty members are required to make sure that they are telling the truth.

He wants US funding agencies to give more clarity on what constitutes an offence and what are appropriate and fair sanctions for universities.

Scientists need support, says Gisela Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, a non-profit organization based in New York City. Universities and agencies should give training to scientists on how to complete forms, and allow them to revise forms to make sure they are correct, she says.

The committee formed by Congress to assess economic and competitive threats posed by China was first voted on in January. The AAU has said that the creation of the committee signals an intent in Congress to monitor China’s influence on the nation’s scientific enterprise.

Chen is afraid to apply for federal research funding because he doesn’t want the forms to be used against him like in the past. To feel more secure, he has switched from researching nanotechnologies with obvious commercial applications to doing more-fundamental science, exploring the solar evaporation of water. He rarely answers e-mails from Chinese researchers or students who ask about his research papers.

It was possible that the coronavirus escaped from the lab in Wuhan, which came to light in May of 2020 at a time when it was considered taboo to inquire about it.

The Investigation of COVID-19 and the Position of the US Intelligence Community in the High-Energy Phase of Cosmic Dilepton Production

Intelligence agencies can make assessments that are low, medium or high. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new assessment from the Department of Energy. A senior US intelligence official told the Journal that the update to the intelligence assessment was done in light of new intel, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.

A Department of Energy spokesman told CNN they support the work of our intelligence professionals in their investigation of the origin of COVID-19.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the umbrella agency for 18 other agencies that make up the intelligence community.

The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday he was “pleased” that the Department of Energy “has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to.”

“I have requested a full and thorough briefing from the administration on this report and the evidence behind it,” the Texas Republican said in a statement.

The committee will be focused on the premise that after a long period of trying to integrateChina into the global system as a competitor not an enemy, the US is starting to switch to a tougher stance in regards to Chinese leadership’s attempts to undermine the US global order.

“We need to do extensive hearings. I hope that our Democratic colleagues in the Congress will lend their support. I know the Republicans in the House are certainly supportive of that,” the Senate Armed Services Committee member said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Covid-19 Epidemic: How Chinese Americans are coming to the Biggest Pandemics? A Reply to the House Oversight Committee

Over the last three years, one of the biggest Pandemics in a century, has happened. A lot of evidence that it’s coming from the Chinese,” Sullivan said.

The House Oversight Committee was reviewing the classified information provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a request for information earlier this month, according to a statement from a spokesman for the committee’s chairman.

One of the sources said that the new assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information from a House Republican Intelligence Committee report released last year on the origins of the virus.

Sullivan told Dana Bash that there was no definitive answer to the question from the intelligence community. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them feel that they don’t have enough information to be sure.

The national conversation centered around the origins of Covid-19 in 2021 according to the words from Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University.

The US Energy Department has made an assessment about what really happened in China, three years removed from the start of a disease that is still disrupting daily life.

The intelligence community classified a report that showed four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed the potential impact of the vaccine on humans in 2014–2018.

Three other intelligence community elements were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, the community’s report said.

The Bipartisan Select Committee on Competition with China: Sensitivity to the Covid-19 Pandemic or the Uyn Vaccine

For the better part of 2020, advocates of the lab leak theory had to fight against claims they were being xenophobic or racist — in part thanks to anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-President Donald Trump, who embraced the theory.

The inquiry launched by Trump’s State Department, which was supposed to investigate China’s biological weapons program, was stopped early on in the Biden administration.

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

It can take months or years to discover the host of aviruses that have arisen in the past from natural transmission through animals.

The diplomatic spat over the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the US is not the most recent cause of tensions as far as I know.

As with the latest Covid-19 drama, China has reacted angrily to US criticism – all of which it appears to view in the wider context of its belief that every US policy is aimed at depriving it of its rightful global influence.

The new bipartisan Select Committee on competition with China will be introduced in the House on Tuesday evening, just as Washington-Beijing tensions are at their worst.

Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, the new committee’s chairman, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Tuesday’s hearing would not focus specifically on the latest drama – after the Department of Energy assessed with low confidence that the Covid-19 pandemic originated with a lab leak in the Chinese city of Wuhan. He said that finding, which is a minority view among US intelligence agencies, could be examined in a future hearing but that he wanted to show Americans on Tuesday that the threat from China was “not just an over there problem, it’s … right here.”

“We want to understand what we got wrong about the Chinese Communist Party and what we need to understand about it going forward in order to get our policy right,” the Wisconsin Republican said.

On CBS News on Sunday, Gallagher warned: “We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a tennis match. This is about what type of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in Xinjiang-lite or do we want to live in the free world?” The US accused the Uyghur minority in China of genocide, a charge China continues to deny.

The committee may be one of the few places where a divided Congress and a divided White House can find common ground. The Biden administration has reinforced the already tough stance toward China that ex-President Donald Trump adopted later in his presidency. A law signed by President Joe Biden allows for the government to spend up to $200 billion in order to take over the leadership of the Semiconductor Chips industry which could have a major effect on the economic race between the US and China.

When Science Meets Politics: The Case for a Closer Look at the Covid-19 Experiment in the Light of the Wall Street Journal

The bottom line is that neither lab leak or animal spillover can be ruled out. The former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNN they don’t have definitive information.

But it didn’t take long for Republicans to claim political victory in the wake of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal report about new intelligence causing the Department of Energy to believe with low confidence that a lab leak was to blame. A Georgia lawmaker is accused of spreading conspiracy theories about the Swine Flu.

Tom Cotton is a Republican senator from Arkansas. Being proven right doesn’t matter to China because of their lab leak. The Chinese Communist Party needs to be held accountable so this doesn’t happen again.

It doesn’t matter if it was man made or not, it still doesn’t mean that the whole world was exposed.

This week in Washington, the issue has once more turned into an excuse for Republicans to target scientists and health care experts in order to make up a story about Covid-19 that still has massive gaps.

The US has been warning China in the last week that they could send lethal aid to bolster Russia’s forces, which would put China on a different side of a proxy war against the US and NATO countries that sent billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine.

This new front in the US-China rivalry is starting to show up in US politics. While being tough on Beijing is a bipartisan position, the idea of a larger conflict in Ukraine conflicts with the US’s more limited view of power abroad. Senate Republican leaderMitch McConnell supports more US aid forUkraine but some conservatives warn against going to war. He specifically mentioned the possibility of Chinese involvement in his comments last week.

His comments were a reminder that everything in Washington is ultimately political. Few issues have been politicized more than the US relationship with China.