Hidden Harmonies China Blog

Recently, some western news outlets have been reporting that WHO Director privately believes Covid-19 entered the human population through a “catastrophic leak” in a Wuhan lab.

Below is an excerpt from an article titled “WHO chief ‘believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab’ after a ‘catastrophic accident’ in 2019 despite publicly maintaining ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’,” as well as some observations.

The Daily Mail reported:

The head of the World Health Organisation privately believes the Covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory, a senior Government source claims.

While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.

The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million.

However, in the absence of any compelling evidence of ‘zoonotic’ spread – the process by which a virus leaps from animals to humans – it is now adopting a more neutral public stance.

Isn’t this amazing? First, who is the “senior Government source”? Are we talking about some obscure source one can just banter about to create another hit piece? Another secret dossier-type attack?

As if there is no new lows Western media can reach…

Paul Krugman – winner of the 2008 Economics Nobel Prize, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a senior columnist for The New York Times – have always been a China hater. But he had always spewed hate with some intellectual pretense – shallow and insincere as they may be.

I have not read him for years, but for diversion from the suffocating info war that the West is waging against Russia, I thought I would turn to Paul for some good old fashioned China Bashing. I was not ready to be so appalled and disappointed.

Like much of New York Times and the Western Media, not even a shred of class or intellectual rigor is left.

As we near the Beijing Winter Olympics, and as we keep hearing the West voicing its “concerns” over “Genocides” in XinJiang, “Democratic” “Abuses” in Hong Kong, and all sorts of human rights “Violations” throughout China, I keep thinking to myself, what is this world really about?

In light of the recent attempted color revolution and foreign sponsored terrorist coup against the government of Kazakhstan, where is the voice that says enough is enough? National governments must be empowered to help the people. Even if national governments become corrupt, the people must be given the space to re-organize and regroup their government. Foreign NGOs, even the truly well-intentioned ones, cannot take place of the local governments. NGOs are never transparent. They have no legal or moral duty to the people. They can pack up the next day, and no one would call them out for it. Local governments can’t do that. The people can never really know who the NGOs truly are, where they get their money, who are their real bosses, what’s their mission, who within to be held accountable, etc.

Here are some videos from my colleague Rolf last year to deserve a second look in light of the ideological attacks levied against China these days…

• Bloomberg’s Stephen Engle interviews Oscar Kwok, Hong Kong Police deputy commissioner (41 min. video) (IPCC: Independent Police Complaint Council) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pw5IUliuCs
• How BBC «journalist» John Sudworth reports on Xinjiang. An evaluation by «Numuves», a Canadian English language teacher working in Guangzhou (Canton)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RK5Me8maG4
• Abdul Tursuntohti – a radicalized extremist in Xinjianghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUy-U4G4Dxk
• How are jailed extremists treated in Xinjiang?The story of Almira Muhterhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vTT9rsHGx4
• Jeffrey D. Sachs on BBC Newsnighthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMSg1tnQYs

One of the funner thoughts we see in Chinese Internet this 6/4 is this observation shared by Chief Editor of Global Times.

In response to digital “candlelight” vigils posted by British officials such as the one below over the 6/4 incident …

Hu, echoing Many on Chinese social media, asks: has there been a national tragedy in U.K.? Is there a national mourning going on in the U.K.? 😉

The U.S. correctly categorized the ETIM as a terrorist organization in 2018 … till it did not suit the interests of the U.S.

On February 7, 2018, per US Air Force Pentagon Report: “ETIM is a terrorist organization that operates in China”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KReYMBbNiuk

In 2020 however, the US removed ETIM from their terrorist lists.

Same echos of Saudi Crown Prince… The U.S. won’t penalize the Saudis despite clear evidence of Khashoggi’s killings.

The U.S. however will penalize China based on faked dossiers relating to Xinjiang.

Terrorists are saints when the terrorists are on the right side.

Saw this on the Front page of my “Favorite” newspaper – the New York Times.

China Border Rules, Meant to Stop Virus, Disrupt Business and Upend Lives China’s formidable travel restrictions have hampered the operations of many companies, separated families and complicated the lives of thousands of students.

Yet throughout much of last year, New York Times has been running articles like this accusing or insinuating that China wasn’t tough enough cracking down on the flow of traffic and how it had “allowed” the virus to escape to infect the world.

If only China had been tough enough. If the U.S. had only been tough enough on shutting down traffic from China… on catching the virus early …

Never mind the hypocrisy that if China was guilty of not containing a heretofore unknown virus, how is the West – with the lessons of China already available – not guilty of not containing the virus itself within its own borders and infecting the rest of the world?

Never mind that New York Times has been echoing Trump even thought it was a fervent anti-Trump newspaper.

The thing is even when China was successful in shutting down, as it had in Wuhan, the likes of New York Times has been accusing China of violating “human rights” shutting down. When China is successful shutting down its borders, it is now accused of hampering business, separating families and complicating the lives of millions.

What the f**k is “rights”? It is not what the West thinks. The human condition is complex, diverse, and subtle. It is cannot be shoved into a deranged psychotic bottle of Western ideology. It cannot be politicized for the convenience of the few.

Just another deranged sample point of Western discourse on China…

[This piece is cross-posted at theSaker. A “more polite” version has been published at AsiaTimes.]

I have picked on America for some time … and for good reasons … because American leaders and media on the world stage have been tragically hypocritical and arrogant for too long.

Just look at the recent murder of Iran’s top nuclear scientist – Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Imagine if a top scientist in the U.S. (or U.K. or France or Germany for that matter) was murdered in a similar fashion: American leaders and media would all be all up in arms, calling out the despicable act for what it is, an affront against basic civility.

But because this happened to Iran, there is no moral indignity expressed in the U.S. media or its leaders. Trump seemingly smugly tweeted the news. Other leaders acknowledged nonchalantly almost as if it were news about bad weather. The killing is treated at worst as political intrigue by Israel – with certain approval by Trump – to prevent Biden from improving relations with Iran and perhaps rejoining the JCPOA.

It’s truly despicable … but expected. And now we see something just as disgusting in … Australia!

Here, I want to give a few quick comments about Giuliani’s case about massive fraud that stole the election from Trump.

A transcript can be found here.

Giuliani started his case this way:

As reported in a Reuters article earlier today, Italian researchers have shown that the Coronavirus has been circulating in Italy at least since last September.

Donald Trump was elected with a mandate to make deals and “drain the swamp.”  I had my doubts he could make a difference in the geopolitical realm.  But even on economic matters, he has not had a lot of success. His Tiktok saga reveals just how far he has left people down.

[This article is cross posted at the Saker; a short, abridged version of this article was initially published on the South China Morning Post.]

Trump’s demand for a fire sale of Tiktok hit a legal wall two weekends ago when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction.  Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, questioned whether a President had the legal authority to so broadly ban and restrict a “personal communication” and “informational” service such as Tiktok on “national security” grounds. 

But even without the injunction, Trump’s vaunted deal-making skills were fast morphing into a freak show.  From the beginning, Trump made unsubstantiated accusation that Tiktok was being used as a platform for Chinese espionage even when the CIA found no evidence of Chinese espionage.  The EFF – which traditionally has been critical of China’s Internet companies – has also concluded that there is no evidence that TikTok is less secure than other social media apps. 

[This post is cross-posted at thesaker blog]

Recently, I wrote a short comment in the piece India’s border policies line with Thalassa noting that “India is on the wrong side of history.”  It was too “conclusory” a comment that deserves to be better explained.  So I’d like to take a brief time why I think India is on the wrong side of history in siding with America against China today.

I’d first like to take a larger view of history.

Without much adieu, please take a good look at this short documentary from CGTN linked above. It’s about China’s take on its “War on Terror” in XinJiang. Compare China’s approach to the West’s own “internally” and “externally” (over US $6 trillion and over 1.3 million lives)

Go ahead – take the first steps to taking the red pills to escape from the MSM and US government propaganda about China … and much of the world…

[This piece was originally published in the Asia Times]

The media are once again ablaze with misinformation against China, this time on its supposed attempts to eradicate the Mongolian language from Inner Mongolia. A recent piece by Antonio Graceffo, an American economist and author based in Ulaanbaatar, in the Diplomat is an excellent introduction:

In August, the government announced that when the school year began in September, classes in Mongolian would be sharply curtailed. Under the new regulations, literature, politics and history will all now be taught in Mandarin….

Many parents in Inner Mongolia responded to the announcement by saying that they would prefer to keep their children home than have them forced to accept Mandarin-language instruction. As schools opened in the first week of September, strikes by parents were widespread.

In Naiman county, for example, where there were normally 1,000 Mongolian students, just 40 registered for this term and only 10 actually showed up on the first day of class. Across the region, more than 300,000 students have gone on strike….

Videos have surfaced online showing ethnic Mongolian parents trying to remove their children from school grounds and police preventing them from doing so. According to a report by the BBC, hundreds of riot police were deployed the prevent one strike, but after a standoff lasting several hours, parents finally managed to break through the police barricades and collect their children.

Other videos have appeared on social media showing masses of Mongolian children chanting “Our mother language is Mongolian!” and “We are Mongolian until death!’ One showed Inner Mongolian men, dressed in traditional clothes, raising the khar suld (or black banner), the battlefield standard of the Mongol army, which represents the power of the “eternal blue sky” (monke khukh tenger).

Traditionally, the khar suld was meant to concentrate and mobilize the spirit and power of all Mongols to defeat their enemies. According to legend, it is the repository of the soul of Genghis Khan. To many ethnic Mongolians, the raising of the suld is the equivalent of a declaration of war. As one Mongolian commented, “It’s a big sign that they will not give up. [The protesters] will go until [the] end.”

The article goes on to accuse China of diluting Mongolian language and identity.

So is Beijing really up to its evil ways again?

[An edited version of this article first appeared at the South China Morning Post.]

With much pomp and circumstances, the U.S. has proposed to the world a brand new beginning, a shiny new age: a Clean Global Internet. The new enemy is China, which must be purged from the new rebuilt Internet.

According to Secretary of State Pompeo, “The Clean Network addresses the long-term threat to data privacy, security, human rights and principled collaboration posed to the free world from authoritarian malign actors.” “The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

I copied a video from Tiktok showing a video from the Epoch Times. The video showed amazing recent footage of lightning in Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Chengdu.

But … instead of leaving it just as that … the video goes on to gives a narrative these natural occurrences may not be completely natural … that perhaps God is mad at China. Why else would lightning arise near where so many people live or directly hit buildings?

There are many reasons for Donald Trump to threaten to shut down Tiktok. One is personal. He is still infuriated about his team being tricked into his Tulsa rally disaster earlier in June.

Another is political. Donald is down in the polls. He is not down and out, but he is down across the board in so many areas, across demographics, and in electorally critical states. He needs a win, soon, and he ain’t going to get it against the Coronavirus. So he wants to manufacture a win against China.

But there may be a third…

Perhaps Donald really wants to shut down many of the younger generation who absolutely hate his guts – his racist, revisionist, some say fascist vision of America. He wants to shut them down. Immobilize them against mobilizing against him this coming election.

On a lighter note… if the following video is anything to go by, I think this may be an important but less discussed reason for Trump’s tirades against Tiktok. Tiktok is becoming an important platform of discourse and expression for teens around the world. Trump definitely sees them as a threat. He wants to silence a generation.

Please pass along this message…

As calls for “defunding” the Police in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death mounts across America – land of the free, it is interesting to compare how police treats its citizens in the U.S. vs China – often depicted as a “police state” in the West.

Police brutality is nothing new in the U.S. or the West (for example, see this, or this, or this, or this). What about China?

Many people in the West – apparently led on by the U.S. government – believe that the Chinese had covered up information regarding initial extent of the epidemic in China. Some had asserted that the death toll in China was actually magnitudes higher. When that could not be proven, some are taken to the notion that China kept data regarding human-to-human transmission from the world. The supposed evidence? An email Taiwanese authorities sent to the WHO on December 31.

This email has often been presented to constitute evidence that Taiwan had learned of and warned the WHO of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan, but that the WHO ignored. Turns out, the email did not make any such assertion. No one has been able to present an email from Taiwan to the WHO reporting any information about human-to-human transmission.

[This article was first published on Asia Times]

Despite his Administration’s many failures in responding to the Covid-19 crisis, Trump is rebranding himself as the tough, indispensable leader America needs.  At the center of Trump’s new pitch: his “travel ban” against China back in February.  According to Trump, but for his “early” and “decisive” actions, “thousands and thousands of lives” would have been lost.

“Everybody was against it.  Almost everybody, I would say, was just absolutely against it. … I made a decision to close off to China that was weeks early. … And I must say, doctors — nobody wanted to make that decision at the time.” 

Trump’s “travel ban” however was more taking a swipe at China than keeping America safe. 

Recently I have been reading so much junk and misinformation about China that’s it’s unbeleivable. Of course, there will always be bottom feeders such as this from a David Cole on TakiMag. But there are some more reputable ones too, such as those from Niall Ferguson about China deliberately spreading the virus to the world…

Anyways, recent allegations from Ferguson were sufficiently disturbing that Prof. Daniel Bell took the time to look at the evidence provided. Shockingly he found that even the allegations from Ferguson are based on either misunderstanding or deliberate misinformation. Rather than put word into the Professor’s mouth, I’ll copy his response (copied from his website) below.

Following is a recent piece from George Koo about the Sad State of American Anti-China Fever – from a Chinese American’s Perspective. It was published on Asia Times.

I completely empathize and echo George’s sentiment. America in my opinion has degenerated to a shadow of its former self – much in the last 20 years. It’s not the economy or gdp per se. America is still doing well there. It’s its psyche. It has conjured falsehood out of thin area against invisible enemies. It has fought pointless wars after pointless wars. The election of President Trump and the degeneration of President Trump from Candidate to President are all emblematic of America’s decline. It is a nation that no longer cares about truth … From the President down to the senators to many in the press, stories are presented in biased, unbalanced ways. There is little goodwill toward each other … or the world. It’s all about winning and success … devoid of humanity.

Without much adieu, please read George’s article.

[Important Editor Note: I have since communicated with the authors of the article and other experts in the field and now retract this post in the sense that there are major problems with the methodology of this study. First the bat virus chosen to anchor the tree is too far away to serve as an anchor. You can get whatever tree you want! Second, there are major issues associated with forcing a most parsimonious tree in a set of data with a lot of missing data – perhaps systematically biased missing data. The data set is mostly from China, and even there only a subset. Whatever tree built is a best tree for the data, and may be completely off from reality. The study is still interesting in that it is not assuming a place of origin; it is trying to figure out a place of origin. But the study – at least in its current form – has failed. If I get time, I will write a follow-up post on this study explaining in more detail. Thanks.]

I have been reading this article in the PNAS titled Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes by Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Forster. The study involves a study of the genomes of 160 covid-19 patients from the around the world. As readers may know, viruses are RNA-based entities that periodically and regularly undergo mutations. One can study these mutations and almost like clockwork trace their evolution – i.e. their lineage and migration pattern.

The authors specifically employed a methodology known as “character-based phylogenetic networks”. The technique has been used as the “method of choice” to reconstruct prehistoric human population movements, language evolution, various ecological studies, and some 10,000 phylogenetic studies of diverse organisms – and now virology.

I have posted references that explain the U.S. attempt to smear China in light of its own catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis. Turns out Taiwan is an integral part of that. Interesting article I read first on Guancha. I will translate a part … and refer to the CNBC report that it refers to as well … and conclude with some brief thoughts.

Despite Trump having said he will stop using the term “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” a few days ago, ¹ the U.S. is still actively pushing the world to buy the idea that China covered up its coronavirus outbreak, a cover up which directly lead the world to suffer a pandemic.

The G7 just failed to issue a joint statement because the U.S. kept pushing for a statement about a “Wuhan virus” that the others felt was unnecessarily antagonistic.

Recently, I found an article that goes over the U.S.’s full spectrum efforts to smear China in the face of its cataclysmic failures at home. Please refer to the following for a good overview how the US wants to pin China for covering up the Coronavirus Crisis:

[This article is cross-posted on TheSaker and GlobalResearch]

Despite strong rebukes from the WHO, President Trump and his Administration officials in recent days have made an emphatic point of calling the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese Virus” or “China Virus.”  When pushed on the racist overtone of his rhetoric, Trump retorted, “Cause [the virus] comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.”

Sadly, most Americans, even if uncomfortable, appear to agree on the facts, if not the tenor, of Trump’s choice of words. ¹

Here are some facts about the COVID-19 virus that will helpfully set the American public straight. 

[This article was originally published on Globalresearch.ca.]

Japan, China and Taiwan Reports on the Origin of the Virus

The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China, claiming it to have originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.

In fact the origin was for a long time unknown but it appears likely now, according to Chinese and Japanese reports, that the virus originated elsewhere, from multiple locations, but began to spread widely only after being introduced to the market.

More to the point, it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US.

Nathan Rich has been putting out many incredible commentaries on China on Youtube for the last few years. And this most recent one on Dr. Li’s death certainly ranks among the best commentaries I have seen in English (or Chinese even) on Dr. Li’s death in Wuhan.

Dr. Li was one of the earliest doctors to notice a SARs like virus going around in Wuhan and had “tweeted” about it on his Weibo account. Local government officials would sanction him about it – asking him to sign some papers admitting what he did was wrong and not to do it again. Later when a concurrent government investigation revealed that a new virus was truly going around, the government retracted his sanctions. Dr. Li would go on to work on the front lines … but later – just a few days ago – die from the virus.

Some people have gone anti-government over this. In the Youtube commentary, Nathan Rich noted that he can understand how people thought Dr. Li was a “hero” and that the government has erred, however he also noted that the most critical thing now is to save lives and go forward, and not distract from the government’s valiant efforts. He posited for those who are angry: even had people listen to Dr. Li’s original (then unsubstantiated) claims, would we really be better off?

Yes, more people might have more masks in the initial days and more might have been more diligent about washing hands, etc. But almost certainly, judging by people’s behavior since the Wuhan quarantine, people would have fled Wuhan and tried to cover up the fact that they might be virus carriers. So, while, on a personal level, leaving town would have been the “human” thing to do, it most certainly would been the worst thing to do in terms of saving lives and reducing the spread of the virus.

Would we be better off today had people listened to Dr. Li (and others’) initial warnings … or much worse off?

[A redacted and edited version of this article was published in the China Daily]

Nowhere is man freer than on the field of battle, where it is a matter of life and death, wrote Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. One way of determining people’s morality is by observing their reactions during a crisis.

Western audiences have offered three types of reactions to the recent virus outbreak in China: Sympathy, Sinophobia, and Schadenfreude. Sane westerners, one hopes, empathized with the victims, wishing the outbreak ends soon. Racists took advantage of it to indulge in stereotypes and memes. The third category, the western media, was delighted with the opportunity to insult the Chinese government.