Saturday, February 29, 2020
The Greatest Life-Or-Death Crisis in China Isn’t What You Think
Since the first diagnosis on December 8 in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has become a global concern.
The respiratory illness is now designated as coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19. According to the World Health Organization, currently 2,804 people have died from the virus. Nearly 98 percent of those fatalities have occurred within China.
“To the Chinese Communist Party, even one million people dying does not matter,” said Sean Lin, a microbiologist and U.S. Army veteran. “It’s just a statistic to them.”
Speaking on a Thursday panel at CPAC 2020, Lin joined two former generals and prominent China expert Gordon Chang to discuss “The Present Danger: China.”
While lamenting the loss of lives, they consider how the outbreak is exposing a regime’s decades of lies.
“The Chinese people understand that the disease is coronavirus,” said Chang, “— but the real disease is communism. For the first time, the Chinese people are starting to lose their fear of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party itself.”
“The disease is coronavirus — but the real disease is communism.” – Gordon Chang
For Americans, Robert Charles says this is no time to panic. He served as Assistant Secretary of State under George W. Bush which involved public health issues.
“From what we know currently, this appears to be overblown as a ‘crisis’ by politicians and the media,” said Charles in a phone interview. “But this is a health event, not a political event.”
Facts On Coronavirus — and China
According to the CDC, currently 15 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the U.S. with no fatalities.
“The coronavirus is really a group of viruses, this latest strain called COVID-19,” said Charles. “Its fatality rate is between 2 and 4 percent, depending on whose reported numbers you look at. That’s a much lower rate than we saw with SARS or Ebola.”
In the U.S., people recently back from China have been quarantined. The virus spreads via person to person contact.
“The vast majority who have contracted it recover,” said Charles. “Among those who contract it, those with weaker immune systems — such as very elderly people or newborn babies — are most at risk.”
Chang warned of China spreading the notion that this disease originated in the U.S., including in a statement they released on Thursday.
“A prominent Chinese physician just stated that the first diagnosis of coronavirus was in China, but the origin was not in China,” recounted Chang. “It’s a ludicrous, dangerous, and totally irresponsible charge.”
Rather than the virus, Chang sees other reasons to be concerned. The communist regime has spent decades building up military and technology assets.
“Just about everything is on the line here,” said Chang. “Americans have often been very good about ignoring what our enemies are saying about us. We must not be taken by surprise.”
Life-Or-Death Crises in China
Having seen communist states rise and fall during his tenure in diplomacy, Charles agrees the Chinese government cannot be trusted.
“Their authoritarian rule is brutal,” said Charles. “Confirmed reports show one million Chinese people have been placed in reeducation camps, just over the past year or so. Those few churches that do exist have surveillance cameras with facial recognition.
“It’s like what we saw in the Soviet Union decades ago, only this time with sophisticated technology.”
Sean Lin has a firsthand vantage point on China’s abuses.
As a student, he protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He escaped communist China years later and emigrated to the U.S.
Lin then served in the U.S. Army, ultimately directing a viral disease lab at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Today, he raises awareness of human rights abuses in China.
“One of their biggest crimes that has been exposed is organ harvesting,” said Lin.
“They remove the organs from innocent prisoners of conscience, killing them in the process. They make great profits from this state-run enterprise.”
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting tracks these atrocities. They report more than one million Chinese people have been killed in...
Islamists Are Slaughtering Christians Left and Right in Nigeria
Abraham Cooper and Johnnie Moore of the New York Postprovided lurid details about the Christian slaughter taking place in Nigeria.
In recent years, Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram have gained notoriety for the slaughter of Christians in the African country.
A 9-year-old girl told them about her experience witnessing terrorists murder her parents and siblings with machetes.
They also recounted the story of the kidnapping of two female parishioners of a church that had been destroyed twice.
The church’s pastor had to rescue them by paying off the terrorists with a ransom.
According to the authors, “The ransom demanded was a fortune for any individual in his modest town. So he sold virtually all his possessions, as did other church members, to pay the thousand dollars required to save their lives.”
Another village’s experience didn’t turn out well:
Other stories didn’t end so happily. We met men from a village razed entirely by the Islamists. The livelihoods were sabotaged, their families’ massacred. The attackers waited till the middle of the night before assailing men, women and childnre with guns and machetes. Kidnapping wasn’t to their taste. They started fires, then unleashed horrific ethnic cleansing.
One victim — Leah Shurabi — has stood out among the rest. This Christian teenager was 14 years old when she refused to convert to Islam despite the constant threats coming from her terrorist captors. The two authors were in Nigeria on the second anniversary of her abduction.
Nigeria’s Muslim president, Muhammadu Buhari, shared her Christian testimony in a statement on the front page of a leading newspaper in Nigeria.
“Leah remains in the hands of the terrorists,” declared Buhari. “They say [it’s] because she refuses to renounce her Christian faith. We say that no person has the right to force another to...
Congolese Migrants Riot in Paris, Set Fire to Dozens of Vehicles
Diversity continues to be a strength.
A crowd consisting primarily of Congolese migrants rioted in Paris, setting fire to dozens of vehicles as firefighters battled blazes around the Gare de Lyon train station.
The station was partially evacuated late Friday as police urged the public to avoid the area.
“At least 30 motorcycles, scooters & rental cars have been torched. Part of a building was also set alight,” tweeted reporter Oliver Miocic.
Lots of damage caused by protesters setting fire to parts of Gare de Lyon. At least 30 motorcycles, scooters & rental cars have been torched. Part of a building was also set alight. Reports it is linked to this evening’s concert of Congolese star Fally Ipupa. #garedelyon pic.twitter.com/66TqMqqrcn— Oliver Miočić (@olivermiocic) February 28, 2020
Another video shows plumes of black smoke rising from a large fire near the station.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking that this is a video from some war in the Middle East but it actually is migrant riots today in Paris near #GareDeLyon.Congolese migrants are fighting the police because some singer(FallyIpupa)that they don’t like will play
Wall Street Journal Shouldn’t Apologize for Article Criticizing China’s Communist Party
The Wall Street Journal should stand firm in the face of China’s action last week to rescind the media credentials of three Journal reporters and order them to leave the country.
Chinese authorities said the expulsion was over the Journal’s publishing a commentary by academic Walter Russell Mead headlined “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” which addresses the communist nation’s economic fragility and the worldwide effects of a possible Chinese collapse.
The Chinese government claimed that use of the term “Sick Man of Asia” in the headline of the Feb. 3 article was racist toward the Chinese people.
Next, 53 employees of the Journal signed a letter demanding that the newspaper paper apologize and retract the original headline. They did this even though it is widely known that the Chinese government manipulates the media credentialing process to influence American news outlets to avoid criticism of “sensitive” topics.
The Wall Street Journal should not apologize. This is a ploy by the Chinese government that attempts to exploit Americans’ fear of political incorrectness to stir up racial outrage and gain power over the U.S. media.
Yes, the “Sick Man of Asia” term could be interpreted as archaic as some Asian activists alleged. Nevertheless, it is much closer to a historical term than a racial slur.
Unlike clear and obvious slurs against Chinese people and other racial groups (which are well-known), “Sick Man of Asia” has been used in many nonracist historical contexts as well as in current affairs. In fact, the first recorded use of the phrase was in 1896, in a Chinese newspaper called the North China Daily News, to describe the country’s humiliation.
Since then, the phrase has made its way into many scholarly works and journals. A 2011 article written by Foreign Affairs correspondent Yanzhong Huang describes China’s health crisis with the headline “The Sick Man of Asia.” Scholars have used the same moniker to describe other Asian countries.
Although not a flattering term, it’s probably the rhetorical equivalent of calling an African country “screwed up” or calling Russia a “kleptocracy.”
Naturally, however, the Chinese government has weaponized criticism of the Journal article’s headline to attack the free press and whip up a nationalistic frenzy against the United States.
The forced expulsion of U.S. journalists, including one who currently resides in Wuhan to report on the deadly coronavirus, forebodes a strong push to restrict critical media coverage in China as many residents continue to seek out ways to get noncensored news, especially on the coronavirus and the Hong Kong protests.
This is Exhibit A of the Chinese Communist Party’s propagandistic media strategy: First, conflate criticism of the government with criticism of the entire Chinese race. Then, stir up nationalistic rage and gain leverage over the American media so they steer clear of reporting on the Communist Party’s systematic curtailment of the people’s rights.
It is apparent that Chinese government is desperate to distract the Chinese people from its own free speech issues and economic turmoil. As The Washington Post reports about the Feb. 19 expulsions: “The authorities also appeared to be attempting to stoke nationalist outrage in China at a time of extreme duress for the ruling Communist Party.”
Several weeks ago, a Chinese doctor named Li Wenliang tried to warn fellow citizens about the then-infant coronavirus, but he was suppressed and told off by Chinese police. Now Li is dead from that same coronavirus, and the Chinese people are not able to gain access to his potentially lifesaving information.
When Chinese citizens took to the social media site Weibo with the trending hashtag “We want freedom of speech” (#WeWantFreedomOfSpeech), the government quickly censored them.
As Mead argues in the “Sick Man of Asia’” article in the Journal, along with the Communist Party’s unprepared response to the coronavirus epidemic, China maintains a unitary power structure that may prove too brittle to handle unexpected “black swan” events such as viruses, terrorist attacks, and mass protests.
If the Communist Party fails, there indeed is little to stop China from going into a meltdown, with deleterious effects on the rest of the world.
Mead writes:
Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction.Americans should not buy the Chinese Communist Party’s line. We should be allowed to criticize an increasingly oppressive, fragile government of an unfree...
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