FyiBob Kasprak========================
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!important;}}The World Health Organization team that spent weeks in Wuhan ended
up giving Chinese authorities a propaganda victory.
Fyi
Bob Kasprak==============================
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| February 10, 2021 | Read this email in your browser |
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| SPONSORED BY THE FP GUIDE TO LEADERS IN GRADUATE EDUCATION |
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| By James PalmerWelcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.The highlights this
week: What to make of the WHO investigation into the origins of the
coronavirus, the Biden administration announces a comprehensive review of U.S.
strategy toward China, and how the pandemic may have affected China’s birth
rate.Have feedback? Hit reply to let me know your thoughts.
Who Pulls the Strings?
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A weekslong World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of
the coronavirus came to a spluttering end this week. The investigators
simultaneously dismissed suspicions that the virus could have originated in a
laboratory leak and endorsed Beijing-backed conspiracy theories about possible
origins beyond China.The investigation was a propaganda victory for the Chinese
authorities and a bizarre misstep by WHO, which botched early information about
the pandemic while pandering to Beijing and has faced frequent criticism for
being too close to China. The Biden administration was quick to express
skepticism, with good cause.All indications are that the coronavirus originated
through zoonotic transfer, most likely connected to China’s largely unregulated
trade in wild animals. But numerous theories have hypothesized that the virus
emerged from one of Wuhan’s laboratories, one of which was conducting research
on bats. The only evidence for this is sketchily circumstantial—despite leaks
from the Trump administration pushing the story.But WHO’s investigation of the
issue was hardly thorough. Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO team leader, said he had
questioned lab personnel extensively: “They’re the best ones to dismiss the
claims and provide answers to all the questions.” But this isn’t true,
especially in an autocratic system that often scapegoats people for accidents:
Lab personnel would have every reason to cover up the story.The WHO
investigators also gave cautious approval to the idea pushed by Beijing that
the virus could have been brought to China by cold goods carried from Europe or
the United States. Every study shows that the coronavirus transmits by airborne
droplets. “There’s no evidence for this epidemiologically preposterous theory
that it was exported to Wuhan,” the global health expert Annie Sparrow told
Foreign Policy. “China didn’t import it. It incubated it.”The investigation’s
progress seems to have divided the team itself. WHO team member Peter Daszak
launched an attack on the Biden administration after it questioned the results
of the investigation. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance project was a funder of the
Wuhan labs, and he has consistently defended WHO’s position on China. But
another team member, Thea Kolsen Fischer, complained of a refusal to provide
complete data, and still other team members spoke privately of uncooperative
officials and intense political pressure.“The Chinese government is just trying
to its divert attention away from Wuhan, where the outbreak began and where
they discovered the new coronavirus last December. Beijing has concocted this
fomite-spread-by-frozen-food theory to avoid being held accountable for their
own deadly cover-up and causing yet another pandemic,” Sparrow said. “And now
we’re going to see this mission embark on a global wild-goose chase with
Beijing in remote control.”SPONSORED
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| The Winter 2021 FP Guide: Leaders in Graduate Education features stories of
inspirational professors, deans, and students at top schools who are training
future leaders in international affairs for the next 50 years to confront the
multiple challenges facing global stability. |
What We’re FollowingPentagon review. The Biden administration has announced a
comprehensive review of U.S. strategy toward China. The review will be led by a
team headed by Ely Ratner, the special assistant to the U.S. defense secretary
on China—and a smart, careful hawk. After the incoherence of the Trump years,
such a review is needed, but approaching it purely from a military perspective
isn’t enough.The United States has never before faced a strategic opponent that
is also its biggest trading partner, and comprehensively rethinking trade,
strategy, and economic policy will require action and coordinated strategy
across the government on an unprecedented scale. Of course, China policy can’t
be led by the military and the intelligence community alone.But the river of
congressional cash flows through the Defense Department, and diverting it to
the places it’s more needed may be tricky.Mongolians under threat. Following
the crackdown on protests against the end of Mongolian-language education,
authorities in Inner Mongolia have introduced “ethnic unity regulations.”
Judging by precursors in Tibet and Xinjiang, the rules signal much worse
treatment of Mongolian culture and possibly of Mongolians themselves.Inner
Mongolia, which was settled by Han Chinese in the 19th century, has a long
history of resistance to state power. Today Mongolians are generally well
integrated into Chinese society; they are considered a high-status minority and
don’t face the bigotry that Uighurs or Tibetans do. But as Han ethnonationalism
grows, that could change.Graying early? New government figures show that
China’s birth rate fell by 14.9 percent between 2019 and 2020—a stunning drop
likely prompted in part by the insecurity of the pandemic. China’s birth rates
have worried government planners for years, leading to the end of the one-child
policy in 2016.With parenting increasingly expensive in cities, however, most
urban families are still choosing to have one child at most—undermining
government ambitions to increase the “high-end population,” as official
documents term university-educated urbanites, while reining in rural births.
Given the lack of immigration and an aging and still mostly poor population,
time may catch up with China’s rise more quickly than pundits have anticipated.
Tech and BusinessGrowing debt. In the wake of the crackdown on Alibaba’s Ant
Group, microloans made through mobile apps are likely to be Chinese financial
regulators’ next target, as peer-to-peer lending was in 2020. That’s a good
thing. As Protocol’s Zeyi Yang reported this week, microlending is out of
control—even food delivery apps offer to lend their users money.Chinese law
restricts such lending to a 36 percent annual percentage rate—a fraction of the
cost of U.S. payday loans but still higher than credit card or bank rates.
Otherwise, these now nearly universal ventures, seen as a gold mine by Chinese
firms, have been largely unregulated. China’s central bank has already warned
that there is almost no room for household debt to expand. Urban migrants from
the countryside often juggle loans from multiple sources to make ends meet.But
in the long run, sustainable credit needs to be made available. Before online
loans, many people turned to loan sharks and quasi-legal lenders such as pawn
shops, which still lend out hundreds of billions of yuan at high interest rates
a year.
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Racialized surveillance. Following numerous reports of Chinese firms, including
Huawei, singling out Uighurs in facial recognition, a Los Angeles Times/IPVM
investigation found that Dahua, the world’s second-largest security camera
manufacturer, provides Chinese police with “real-time warning for Uighurs” and
informs them of “Uighurs with hidden terrorist inclinations.”In many parts of
China, being Uighur is now effectively criminalized, with the few remaining
Uighur residents of cities outside Xinjiang reporting routine harassment by
police. The arrival of Uighurs, even mothers with children, in a new city or
town prompts the arrival of the police and actions ranging from warnings to
stay in their hotel or apartment to deportation back to Xinjiang.Dahua is
rolling out its race-based systems to other countries, which may have their own
least favored minorities to target.Inflation divergence. The latest inflation
figures point to a sharp divergence in the Chinese economy, with commodity
prices pushing up producer price inflation while the consumer price index sees
slight falls. It’s no surprise that consumption remains depressed: Even in the
wake of China’s victory over the coronavirus, unexpected lockdowns are still
relatively frequent, and families are more cautious about spending.But the
government is likely hoping for a boost from the Lunar New Year, which starts
on Friday and usually sees a week of vacations and spending.That’s it for this
week.We welcome your feedback at newsletters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. You can find
older editions of China Brief here. For more from Foreign Policy, subscribe
here or sign up for our other newsletters.Photos: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty
Images (top), Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images |
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