How far will Pompeo drive the war with China

 First posted in Asia Times.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has taken charge of orchestrating the US attack on China. As President Donald Trump’s popularity drops further behind his rival, former vice-president Joe Biden, the more outlandish and outrageous have Pompeo’s provocations become.

The most recent is to accuse TikTok of being a threat to America’s national security. TikTok is a social-media platform introduced from China that has quickly attracted more than 100 million users in the US.

Pompeo offered no evidence or explanation of how TikTok can be a threat to national security, but the actual reason is envy. Pompeo is suffering from technology envy and market-share envy. He can’t conceive of anything from China that’s better than anything from America, such as Huawei before TikTok.

Pompous Pompeo is supposed to be a smart guy, but he doesn’t understand technology. He was upset when the CEOs of three of the four high-tech giants – Apple, Amazon and Google – at a recent congressional hearing, would not confirm being victims of intellectual-property theft by China. 

Pompeo was offended that three of the most valuable American companies would not support his demonizing of China.

Zuckerberg rewarded

Among the four who testified, only Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was quick, nay even anxious, to confirm IP theft, even though he offered no concrete evidence in his broadly general testimony. 

Of course, he might be biased, as TikTok’s popularity represents a threat for Facebook and is costing Facebook market share. 

In the social-media business, any loss of eyeballs translates directly to a loss of advertising revenue. In Silicon Valley, getting “zucked” means that a Facebook competitor either had been taken over or was driven out of business. But TikTok became too popular and too big too fast to get zucked over. 

Clearly, Facebook needed help to bring TikTok down and Zuckerberg had the favor from the Trump administration. Only last week Trump announced his intention to ban TikTok from the US unless the company was transferred to American ownership. 

It has been increasingly obvious to all Americans that anything is possible with The Friend in the White House. Become a cabinet officer or get appointed to a plum ambassadorship or get out of the prison or have an felony record expunged – all are possible with a hefty donation, and you have the Donald by your side. 

However, for Trump to order the sale of TikTok to Facebook would be too blatant even for him. Instead, he has given Microsoft 45 days to take advantage of the fire sale and close the deal. 

He even expects a big cut from the sale to go to the US Treasury, and more than likely a private finder’s fee for his own pocket for “creating” the deal.

TikTok should sue White House

What should TikTok’s Chinese owners do? They face an utterly corrupt executive branch and a legislative branch that is either supinely compliant or willing partakers of the sleazy payoff from the White House. 

TikTok needs to take its case to the third co-equal branch of the US government, the judiciary. Recent decisions by the US Supreme Court, two Trump appointees notwithstanding, suggest that this body continues to consider upholding and protecting the constitution more important than bowing to political pressure.

At a minimum, the legal process would take the fate of TikTok beyond the November election. After that, the owners can hope for a new ball game in town.

The entire TikTok experience should give Beijing pause to rethink its approach to Washington. From Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi to Ambassador Cui Tiankai in Washington, China’s approach has been to try to reason with the US. It is wasting its time. 

Pompeo has no inclination to be reasonable. He has no interest in acting in the best interests of the American people. He is only interested in taking the US to the brink of war, in case the Trump campaign needs to resort to a military confrontation as a last desperate measure to win re-election.

However, Trump has other options, so he may not have to resort to war with China. He could declare the election invalid because of mail-in ballots or some other alleged irregularity or postpone the election because of the pandemic he could not control. But those ramifications are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Pompeo’s technique is as if he is in a football game, wherein he could jump across the line of scrimmage and then penalize the other side for an offside infraction. America is used to winning against lesser countries with this bullying approach, so he was not the inventor.

Invasion follows human rights accusation

Accusing a target country of human-rights violations is a favorite tool for justifying American interference. Saddam Hussein was accused of depriving the Iraqis of freedom and democracy. And that was good enough reason to invade. 

Today, Americans are still in Iraq and the citizens there are arguably less free and certainly enjoy less personal safety.

Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was accused of the same infraction, met the same fatal outcome and the country was left in complete turmoil. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is the more recent designated oppressor of human rights and Syria is in shambles. 

Millions of Syrians have been killed or left homeless and forced to find safety elsewhere in Europe.

Every country invaded by the US under the guise of defending human rights has become a humanitarian disaster. And this is despite the irony that no country has been a worse abuser of human rights than the US. Just ask the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Pompeo is using the human-rights cudgel with a difference. He makes broad and blanket accusations that show he doesn’t care about the validity of what he is saying. He is goading and provoking China to respond and raise the bilateral tension, all for the purpose of getting to the point where conflict becomes inevitable and somehow China is blamed as the bad guy.

Hear what an American businessman living in China has to say about the fallacies behind Pompeo’s position on YouTube.

Beijing’s tough challenge ahead

What should officials of Beijing government do in response? Admittedly with great difficulty, but Beijing must find ways to resist responding in quid pro quo fashion to every example of Pompeo’s baiting. 

In some cases, if possible, simply ignore him. In others, signal that Beijing will wait until the November election to respond appropriately.

Pompeo knows nothing about China. He is said to be tutored by a professor of Chinese history, an ethnic Chinese formerly from the PRC now teaching at the Naval Academy. Judging from Pompeo’s anti-China rant given at the Nixon Library, the lessons didn’t do anything for him.

By repeatedly spitting out “Chinese Communist Party” throughout his speech as if those were expletives, Pompeo apparently sees himself as a liberator of the oppressed people of China. 

The only problem is that more than 90% of the Chinese population approve of the way the single political party is governing China, more than double the approval rating Trump has with the American public.

Pompeo’s rewriting of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China and the winning bilateral relations that ensued for decades was amateurish and embarrassingly childish. Rather than convincing nations to join his anti-China alliance, third parties may simply find his revisionist speech amusing, just as the Chinese people find Pompeo a joke.

Disdain for Pompeo 

Whenever possible Beijing should treat Pompeo with the disdain he richly deserves. Despite his top-notch academic record from West Point and Harvard Law, he has willingly subordinated his pride and integrity to shill for someone his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, called a moron.

In all cases, it’s crucial for Beijing to move the ball toward the goal of winning world opinion and the uphill challenge of explaining Pompeo’s lies and distortions to the American public. Professor Jeffrey Sachs has provided an excellent review of Pompeo’s behavior and consequences as a starting point.

Already some of the allies that Pompeo has assumed to be in his pocket are having second thoughts on the wisdom of following Pompeo’s all-club-and-no-carrot diplomacy. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson resisted the US for a long time before reluctantly giving Huawei the boot. 

This will cost the UK billions of pounds and years of lead time in installing a nationwide 5G network. He undoubtedly will review his decision after November.

Until recently, Canberra has been the most ardently loyal follower of Washington. Now many of Australia’s political leaders not named Scott Morrison are suddenly wondering: “Hey wait a minute, why are we going along with Pompeo’s China-bashing position when China is our most important customer and economic partner?” 

Nation of Change has questioned the wisdom of America waging a cold war – much less a hot one – with China: “Governments all over the world are collaborating with China to stop the spread of coronavirus and share the solutions with all who need them. The US must stop pursuing its counter-productive effort to undermine China, and instead work with all our neighbors on this small planet.”

For the sake of my fellow Americans and for all the people of the world, I hope the coming election will spell the end of the aberrant regime of Donald Trump and a petulant, hard-nosed Pompeo.

See Nathan Rich's latest review on the Cover 19 and alleged China coverup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-bXzCpRoNI

8/10 discussion of ban on Tenchant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQJhQk21FnU

Nathan Rich discuss anti-terrorism in Xinjiang vs. US efforts

https://youtu.be/EovpQE6dZeE

NR discuss poll of  majority of Hongkongers see US a threat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As1M1QHGN_U&feature=youtu.be

On Pompeo's clean network speech and alleged China's aggressiveness

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

Re-election fears drive Trump's fight with China

First posted in Asia Times.

Walking down the busy aisle of a Costco outlet in the US, I saw a stack of boxes of newfangled, multi-functional gadgets positioned to attract the attention of passers-by. The gadget plugs into a wall socket, and its motion sensor will turn on an adjustable dimmer at night, and continuously disinfects the circulating air and kills the odors in the room. 

No larger than 10 by 10 centimeters, the device needs no maintenance or any replacement of parts. This is an ideal and appealing product for staying home to avoid the Covid-19 pandemic. Costco’s price? Under US$50 for a box of two units.

As I expected, the product was made in China. I couldn’t imagine from whom China could have stolen the intellectual property (IP) for this idea and design, nor where such a product could be made in the US for anywhere near the selling price.

In fact, just as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan did before, China has moved on from copying and borrowing to innovating and introducing new products for the world market – including, of course, American consumers.

Just like their Asian neighbors, China did its share of copying and reverse-engineering to catch up with the US. But the US also did its share of stealing from the UK in the 19th century to catch up to what was then the world’s leading industrial power.

Copycats go on to innovate

None of these countries stopped at mere copying. While they make me-too products, they improve their skills and go on to innovate and create proprietary products for new markets. Yet US President Donald Trump’s administration insists on accusing China of theft of IP as a reason for confrontation, even theft of IP that the US does not have, such as Huawei’s 5G (fifth-generation telecom technology).

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr, among others in the Trump team, are unrelenting in accusing China of cyber-theft and hacking to steal American secrets. 

Recent reports from multiple sources indicate that Russian hackers have been actively seeking to vacuum up Covid-19 vaccine developments from Western countries. Yet Barr spent 45 minutes at the podium recently accusing China of theft, while not presenting one shred of evidence or making any mention of Russia.

Barr and his colleagues seem to know all the ways China’s hackers can attack America’s Internet without offering any actual proof. As we learned from Edward Snowden, no one is more sophisticated and skilled at cyber-theft than the US. I suppose it’s easy enough to accuse China of cyber-theft according to the way the US steals from others. 

US Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio along with the Trump team have decided Chinese students should be barred from entering the US as a way of preventing loss of technology. The top tier US universities vehemently disagree. They depend on the brightest graduate students to make scientific advances, and they know many of these come from China.

Conflict hurts US more

However, the China hawks within and outside the White House are determined to inflict a hurt on China even if it’s at a cost of terrible blowback to the US. They just don’t appreciate how much of their noses are sliced away to spite their faces.

The so-called trade war is a case in point. The tariffs on Chinese imports have caused China to sell less to the US. True enough. But it was Trump who had to beg China to buy more soybeans. 

Seeing Trump’s perfidious personality, China has prepared to wean itself from depending on exports to the US. China has been busy developing trade relations with the rest of the world. Now only about 3% of China’s exports go to the US. 

Furthermore, China has a robust, integrated economy with a strong manufacturing sector along with the world’s largest and fastest-growing consumer economy. Making things for its own consumers creates a virtuous cycle to keep the domestic economy revving. 

In fact, China’s consumer market is too big to ignore. Much as Trump would like to see American companies disengage from China, Apple has just increased its investment in China to open more retail stores there.

The trade war was supposed to bring manufacturing back to the US. It’s not happening, because it’s not that simple. Unless Trump can drive the US economy down to a Third World level – and not that he isn’t trying – and American labor is willing to work for peanuts, the low-end factories can’t come back. 

To bring high-end manufacturing back, Trump needs a lot of smart and well-educated graduates in science and technology – and presumably without any ethnic Chinese. Indeed, one tiny itsy-bitsy step in that direction was to entice Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – note, not really American – to build a small, modest fab in Arizona.

Now, perhaps the reader can appreciate why the International Monetary Fund expects the US economy to shrink by 8% while China is the only country that will still manage a net economic gain for this year.

Hypocrisy over human rights

Incredibly, Pompeo and his colleagues continue to accuse China of human-rights violations as another reason to make that country an enemy. This has to be the epitome of hypocrisy. 

The US has more people incarcerated than any other nation. What’s more, black Americans are much more likely to be shot by the police and/or arrested and jailed. And because of the gun culture, the US has one of the highest per capita rates of fatal shootings.

No country is as brutal in stopping refugees at the border as the US under Trump. As a tactic to discourage others from coming, border enforcement has deliberately separated children from their parents. Then the record-keeping is so poor that distraught parents face formidable odds to find their kids again.

That cynical practice devoid of human decency speaks volumes on the sincerity of alleged American respect for human rights.

For years, China has had a national policy to help hundreds of millions out of poverty and has reached the point that very few are still living below the poverty line. By contrast, Trump has enacted massive tax cuts to benefit the top 10%, but he does not have a clue on how to help the rest of the Americans.

A long-term study from Harvard recently published revealed that the approval of the Chinese people of their central government increased from 86% in 2003 to 93% in 2016, the period of the study. The Trump White House would kill for an approval rating from the American people at half that number.

The study also found that low-income Chinese citizens in rural areas have closed the satisfaction gap with high-income citizens in the coastal areas. This is evidence that China’s government, at all levels from local to central, has been diligent in improving the lives of all its people.

Beware of Trump

So why is Trump trying to pick a fight with China? There are at least two speculations attributed to contingency planning by Trump’s advisers in case he loses his re-election bid. 

Defense writer Michael Klare is fearful that by sending an aircraft-carrier strike force to the South China Sea – already twice this month – Trump is preparing for a repeat of the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident that triggered the Vietnam War. This one could provoke a military conflict with China that would give Trump the excuse to defer the November election and remain in office.

A regular MSNBC commentator has a similar worry. He speculates that Barr in concentrating on China and ignoring cyber trespasses by Russia is part of the plan to accuse China of nefarious interference with the election outcome if Trump were to lose.

The danger is not with China but that the Trump team will lie and cheat to steal the election – a tactic Pompeo is well known for from his days as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the American people let the Trump team get away with this, they may not live to rue the consequences.

Tom Cotton leads the China attack

First posted in Asia Times.

Part 2: The Republican senator's accusations are not supported by facts on the ground, or by science

Politicocalled Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas the No. 1 coronavirus China hawk. This was not an honorific title but well-earned and well deserved. He has been the most vicious attack dog on State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s blame Chinateam. 

As early as January, when the world was just beginning to grasp the full significance of the novel coronavirus, Cotton charged that the virus came from the virology lab in Wuhan. He planted the seeds of accusation without providing any supporting evidence, but that’s how propaganda is supposed to work.

Sometimes he shared with the media that it may have been an accident that the lab let the virus loose. Other times he hinted that the lab may have created the virus to let loose on the world. His allegations were carefully vague so that he could not be pinned down. 

Pompeo and President Donald Trump play the same blame game even though the US Director of National Intelligence issued a press releasestating: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” (Of course, this statement is subject to withdrawal, if the boss threatens to fire the Director.)

Cotton follows Ferguson

.

Cotton also accused China of deliberately letting the virus loose on the world. He was drawing on Niall Ferguson’s assertion that China let international flight depart from Wuhan, which was factually incorrect. Daniel Bell, a fellow academic showed Ferguson that the Wuhan airport shutdown all flights, not just domestic on January 23. Ferguson would not retract but stand by his lie.

It’s widely recognized that every lie diminishes the reputation of the perpetrator, but Cotton has an ulterior motive. He wants to sue China for compensation for the economic damages and lives lost due to Covid-19. Of course, he would never call the contagion by the official name. To him, it’s always the “Chinese” virus.

Cotton cleverly thought he could lead a lawsuit to cancel the trillion-dollar IOU the US government owes China. Frankly, that’s a lot of trouble to weasel out of a trillion-dollar debt. It would be much easier for the fed to simply print one or two or three trillion dollars with the snap of Congressional fingers. Larry Kudlow, President’s economic advisor, also shuddered at the thought of what such a default would do to the credit worthiness of the dollar.

More recently, Cotton thought out loud on Fox News that it was fine for students from China to come to the US to study Shakespeare but not for quantum computing or artificial intelligence. That was a strange juxtaposition.

Study football at Arkansas

Of course, if Chinese students aspire to become Shakespeare scholars, they would surely apply to Oxford and Cambridge. University of Arkansas might be a back-up choice if the student couldn’t get into University of Alabama to study college football.

Cotton appears to be under the notion that Chinese students majoring in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) come to the US to steal secrets. Quantum computing and artificial intelligence happens to be two disciplines that Americans scholars are just as likely to go to China to study as vice versa. In some ways, China is as up to date and may be even ahead of the US.

It’s apparent that Cotton doesn’t understand much about STEM education in the college and post-graduate level. There is a bit over 1 million international students studying in the US and slightly over one-third is from China. Most of them are self-funded by their families. Since Beijing is not paying their way, there’s no need to spy for their tuition. 

More importantly, foreign students pay full tuition and represents a significant source of revenue for American colleges and universities.

Especially at the graduate school level, university STEM departments depend on the quality of the students to maintain the quality of the research output and thus maintaining their reputation for excellence. A recent surveyshowed that among nations, students from China ranked second highest in I.Q. while the American students came in at No. 28. That’s why top tier schools such as MIT, Stanford and others aggressively recruit students from China.

Another surprising revelation was that the top five most popular majors among the Chinese students were respectively business management, computer science, finance, mathematics and economics. This suggests that students from China are not just coming for STEM but just as interested in learning how to manage businesses the way it is done in the West.

Students from China have discovered that they are four times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime while in the US (and this was before the coronavirus induced xenophobia) than if they stayed home. In addition, with Trump’s randomly arbitrary granting of student visas and visa renewals, interest in studying in the US is flagging. A decade ago, enrollment in the US increased by nearly 30% every year. For the academic year of 2018-19, the increase was only 1.7%.

Lancet: the U.S. screwed up

Cotton was also part of the chorus accusing China of covering up the seriousness of the virus. Not so, said Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of Lancet, who praised China’s international cooperation and pointed to five papers published in January. It was U.S., U.K. and other countries in the West that squandered February and March, he lamented. 

Lancet is world renown, peer reviewed, medical research scientific journal. An open statement signed by 27 scientists from around the world was published on February 19in Lancet declaring their solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.

Their open letter in part said: The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

At the end of April, the world was greeted with the news that the first double blind, international study has found Remdesivir made by Gilead to be 30% more effective in helping a patient recover from Covid-19. Not a miraculous cure or vaccine to be sure, but a step in the right direction and the stock market responded positively.

The paperwas published in Lancet and the title of the paper included the words: “a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial.” The clinical trials were performed in China and the investigators were Chinese. It’s an example of the benefits of international collaboration and cooperation.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, was often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Even if Pompeo, Cotton et al., succeed in blackening China and obscuring its contribution, how will the world and the American people benefit from the absence of cross border collaboration? How will lies cure America of the Covid-19 epidemic?

Trump’s Nazi-style propaganda on Covid-19

First posted in Asia Times.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, was a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was Hitler’s minister of propaganda from 1933 to the end of World War II. Whether Goebbels actually said that or not doesn’t matter anymore. It had been attributed to him so often and for so long, it might as well be true.

Same rule applies today. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has been busy acting as President Donald Trump’s chief minister of propaganda blaming China for every conceivable and inconceivable action and non-action as related to the novel coronavirus.

Although Pompeo comes to his current job with impressive qualifications for fabrication, drawing on his tenure as former head of CIA, he is not just lying for self-amusement. He has to orchestrate the maximum blame game on China to cover up for the fumbling incompetence of the Trump administration in dealing with Covid-19.

Just as the latest announced death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. exceeded 26% of the world’s total, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, triumphantly proclaimed that combating the epidemic was an “American success story.” Since the U.S. represents less than 5% of the world’s total population, it’s hard to imagine what a less than success story would have looked like. 

But no, Kushner’s boast should not be regarded as an amateur attempt at propaganda. It was simply blatant bloviating baloney. Pompeo has much more capable core of adjutants to carry out the Nazi like tactics of misinformation.

One prominent example comes to mind is Niall Ferguson. He put his considerable academic reputation behind his assertion that that China deliberately contaminate the world by permitting international air travel from Wuhan even as domestic travel was locked down. Needless to say, this revelation caused quite a sensation, perfect for Pompeo’s blame game.

As propaganda goes, Pompeo could not have been given a more powerful cudgel against China. Unfortunately, it was not true.

Another scholar, Professor Daniel Bell, did fact check on Ferguson’s claim. To save Ferguson from public embarrassment, Bell privately contacted him to tell him that the Flightstats from Wuhan airport showed that all the flights, domestic and international, were shutdown from Wuhan at noon on January 23. Therefore, the charge that China deliberately let air passengers contaminate the world was untrue.

Ferguson could have admitted to making an error and issued a retraction, but that’s not how Nazi style propaganda works. He didn’t back down but went public with his reply. He said, in his blog, “Even if, as seems on balance likely, no flights left Wuhan for domestic or foreign destinations after January 23.…” He goes on to contend that enough people had been allowed to leave Wuhan because of the Chinese New Year before January 23, and thus his claim was not wrong. How lame can he get?

Both Bell and Ferguson own first rate academic credentials and have published many books. Bell is teaching in China while Ferguson is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on Stanford University. The one blemish on Ferguson’s record was for teaming with a Republican student group in attempting to uncover dirt on a progressive student activist whose pointed criticism was annoying him. As a result of the scandal, he had to resign from a conference chairmanship.

Ferguson’s affiliation with Hoover has a consequential multiplier effect. His notoriety from his China attack set a precedent for other rightwing colleagues in Hoover to join the chorus castigating China. Lanhee Chen, formerly a young staffer for Mitt Romney and now also at Hoover, has been especially energetic making the media rounds adding his voice to the lies scripted by the chief minister of propaganda. It’s not for certain that he knows much about China, but he knows how to take the cue from Pompeo, Ferguson et al.

Next installment: profile of another adjutant minister of propaganda, Senator Tom Cotton.

Sino-US cooperation a matter of self-interest

China has learned what the US apparently has not, that pandemics affect everyone in the world eventually By GEORGE KOO MARCH 23, 2020, Asia Times

In 2014, when the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa, US president Barack Obama’s administration invited China to join in leading the multinational effort to suppress the disease. Despite ghastly local hygienic conditions and a terrifying rate of mortality, the outbreak was brought under control in a few months.

With China electing to join the effort under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), it was a successful collaboration involving a host of other nations. It was a natural outcome because these countries followed international norms. That is, containing the original outbreak in situ is always easier than to let the contagion explode into a worldwide pandemic. Advanced nations with the resources and expertise to help do so out of self-interest.

But this time, the US response to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China was radically different. President Donald Trump’s White House elected to stay on the sidelines and instead raised the decibel level of a rhetorical blame game. The Trump team seemed determined to keep China as an adversary and throw sensible reasoning out the window.

Early on, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Beijing for keeping the true nature of the disease hidden. He alleged that China’s lack of candor had cost the US valuable time in preparing to fight the disease, which he persisted in calling the “Wuhan virus” until his boss overruled him by writing “Chinese virus” over “Covid-19” in his press-conference script.

The Western media joined in heaping scorn and ridicule on China. They considered the Wuhan lockdown draconian and a violation of human rights, questioned China’s competence to manage the outbreak, and labeled China the “sick man of Asia” all over again.

It wasn’t until March 13 that The New York Times made a modest attempt at balanced reporting by posting a commentary by Ian Johnson, an NYT writer based in Beijing. He flew from the Chinese capital to London and observed the rigorous precautions taken at Beijing International Airport in contrast to the lackadaisical handling of travelers at Heathrow. 

China’s lockdown wasted

Johnson sadly concluded that China’s draconian measures, which bought precious months for the world to prepare, were being squandered by the West. Notwithstanding Pompeo’s claim that his country lost precious time because of China, the Trump administration actually did squander two months, January and February, idly watching while China was battling the virus.

During this debacle, Trump got rid of public health expertise in his National Security Council, he cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he didn’t take the threat seriously and thought the disease would go away under the warm sun of April. As late as January 30, Trump called the virus a hoax. Then on February 25, he assured the American public that he had the matter “very well under control.” 

Trump was and is simply clueless.

Even before the NYT piece on March 13, the pandemic had already struck hard at Italy. Overnight, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte had to change his plans for a regional lockdown into a nationwide lockdown. 

He saw that for any hope to contain the contagion, he would have to follow the Wuhan protocol and take the draconian steps to lockdown. Thus the world has come to appreciate that the “Wuhan model” of total “draconian” lockdown was the only way to control the epidemic. 

A particularly useful compilation of actual events as they occurred in China was posted by Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, on March 19. 

Nature said, “By contrast [to SARS], three weeks after the first known case of the disease now known as Covid-19, China had notified the WHO of a spike in cases of a pneumonia-like disease. Two weeks after that, the coronavirus had been isolated, genetically sequenced, and a diagnostic test developed, giving China the tools it needed to launch one of the greatest infectious-disease containment efforts the world has ever seen.” 

Neither Nature nor any other third-party sources reported any evidence that China had failed to share its findings promptly with the World Health Organization or the rest of the world. In fact, the Chinese notified the WHO even before they knew exactly what they were dealing with. It would appear that accusations of coverup are based on the presumption that China should have acted on information it didn’t yet have.

Findings crucial for the world

From China’s investigations, some of the crucial findings included that the disease can be transmitted from person to person, a safe distance to maintain is at least 2 meters, and an infected person can be contagious for five days before showing any symptoms of being ill. These were essential data necessary to understand the virus and to take necessary steps to contain the epidemic.

It took about a month after the Wuhan lockdown to bring the contagion under control. Having shown the world how to contain the pandemic, China is now sending teams to Italy and Spain to help treatment and containment. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić asked for help and Beijing responded within 24 hours. 

Cynics like to call this a Xi Jinping victory lap. That’s nonsense. China has learned what the US apparently has not, that pandemics affect everyone in the world, immediately at the site of the outbreak and everywhere else in time. Helping anyone else anywhere in the world is in China’s self-interest.

Yet America’s mainstream media can be most persuasive and determined to cast China in a bad light. To this day, even after much more information has come to light, US academics, pundits, talking heads and of course politicians of both parties still reflexively mention China’s early coverup as a given in their discussion of the coronavirus.

The real coverup is the blinders on Trump and his vision of making America great that does not rely on science, technology or international relations. 

Trump’s religion is his hutzpah and belief in his unlimited power. He needs a vaccine? He’ll get it tomorrow. He wants a cure? It will be delivered day after tomorrow. Or so he thinks.

US helped China with SARS

As a communist country, China does not rely on any religion. But because of its relative inexperience in public health issues, it did need American assistance to battle severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. 

The CDC sent teams over to Beijing to help their counterparts implement ways to contain the virus. Since then, having learned from the SARS experience, China has invested heavily in high technology in preparation for the next outbreak.

China has developed advances in artificial intelligence, remote diagnostics, robotics, and genomic epidemiology as tools to contain infectious diseases. Also, not least is the ability to build a 1,000-bed hospital in a week.

Just one indicator of China’s progress would suffice. Beijing sent 42,000 medical workers from elsewhere in China to Wuhan to help quell the epidemic. Because of their protective gear, training and work protocol, not one was infected by the virus. That’s impressive by any measure.

In California, we are abiding by “shelter in place,” a less draconian term for a Wuhan-style lockdown. Whether it will be effective depends on American willingness to give up exercising rights of individual freedom for the common good.

Some hot spots such as Boston or New York could still go out of control and the epidemic explode exponentially. There may come a point when Trump will have to ask for an act of Congress to rescind all the hostilities toward China and send Beijing a request for assistance.

Having helped China on SARS in 2003, the likelihood of China reciprocating on Covid-19 is good.

Dr David Ho into the breach

The latest decidedly non-Trumpian development is on the cover of the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek featuring Dr David Ho. Inside, the magazine reported that Ho was assembling a team to find a generalized approach that would not only cure Covid-19 but would lay the foundation to treat future mutations of the coronavirus. 

Ho is a former Time magazine Man of the Year renowned for his research on the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. His multinational and multidisciplinary team is mapping out a multifaceted and accelerated plan of attack.

Ho is an ethnic Chinese from Taiwan. Key members of his team are from the People’s Republic of China. Some of his former students hold key scientific positions in mainland China. With his reputation and network of connections, he will have access to experimental compounds from Hong Kong and Shanghai for his investigation not likely available to anyone else.

A big chunk of his financial support came unsolicited from Jack Ma and other donors in China. Funding came without preconditions, just faith and confidence in Ho’s record and reputation. This is what cross-border synergy should be all about.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Ho’s team had already been decimated by Trump’s xenophobic anti-Chinese policy? In the past two years, many ethnic Chinese technical talents have been harassed, hounded and forced to leave the US for China – a subject for another time. 

Is that smart or what?

Trump is the real threat to the West, not Huawei

First posted on Asia Times

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew to Munich to join the Trump Administration in piling on Huawei, China’s largest telecommunication company. She told the international audience that Huawei’s 5G undermines national security, threatens human rights and democratic values and takes away economic independence.

Madam Fu Ying, China’s former vice minister of foreign affairs, who was in the audience at the 56th Munich Security Conference, pointed out to Pelosi that for the last 40 years, her country has imported all sorts of technology from the West and never felt threatened by the use of foreign technology.

How come, Fu asked, just one company can pose such a grave threat to western democracy? You must have very little confidence in the stability of your own government to be so worried, she suggested.

Pelosi’s somewhat sputtering response was that Huawei was more than just one company, that it has the backing of the mighty People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This was a frequently bandied about accusation based on the fact that its founder Ren Zhengfei was once an officer in the PLA. He left the military and founded Huawei many years ago, but his past continues to dog him.

Dredging up old charges and piling them on Huawei was exactly what the Trump White House has done to justify accusing the company of racketeering among other heinous (hilarious?) offenses. Even an old dispute settled with Cisco nearly 20 years ago was exhumed.

Huawei, a major international company doing over $100 billion of business annually, has suddenly become a front for gangsters, we are expected to believe.

This is clearly the handiwork of the former “we lie, we cheat, we steal” director of the CIA, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In Munich, he called Huawei a Trojan horse intent on undermining the sovereignty of governments at every level in Europe.

Of course, no other country knows better than the United States how to steal intelligence from others. As reported by the Washington Post, the CIA jointly developed and produced the CRYPTO AG, an encryption machine introduced over 70 years ago and sold to 120 countries for use in the internal transmission of top secret information.

What these user countries, some friendly to America, didn’t know was that the CIA was reading their secret transmissions right along with them.

The United States knows how to steal information. You could hardly blame them for suspecting that others such as China would naturally do the same.

Pompeo has been calling on various heads of state to try to convince them not to adopt 5G from Huawei. Apparently, Pompeo’s shadowy reputation preceded him, and his exhortation has fallen mostly on deaf ears. The economic advantages of sticking with Huawei and its already built-in infrastructure may outweigh the benefits of listening to Pompeo.

Thus it was necessary to, as Asia Times writer David Goldman observed, double down by ascribing every imaginable possible evil to Huawei. Goldman’s analysis also concluded that the American campaign to suppress Huawei was clearly failing.

The Goldman piece also mentioned that the Trump team is considering a ban on selling GE jet engines to China for the commercial jet liner it is developing. Over the short term, this would wreck China’s plans to compete with Airbus and Boeing.

But as Asia Times pointed out, the economic devastation would be mutual. By being deprived of the right to cater to the Chinese market, GE’s return on its investment on the development of the advanced engine design would be greatly deferred.

In the meantime, China would be forced to seek an engine manufacturing partner in Russia or Ukraine, or perhaps pursue a deal with GE’s French partner. However long that would take, China would eventually become a competitor and help carve up the jet engine market.

At the same time, China would buy more Airbuses and fewer, if any, Boeings – an obvious response to the US strategy to decouple with China.

The same approach has been taken against Huawei and ZTE. Namely, restrict the sale of key American-made semiconductor components to the Chinese makers of mobile phones.

The US has forced Huawei to develop its own chipsets and graphics processors. The long-term consequence is the prospect of a significant loss of sales for the original American suppliers that may even drive them out of business.

Trump’s China team is either stupid or living in the past if they think America’s technical might can continue to keep China under water. Other nations, friendly or non-aligned, have a more realistic view and are moving away from the US sphere of influence. It must have been quite a shock for the Pentagon when the Philippines recently announced it would end its collaboration with the US Navy.

Since Pelosi, a freshman congresswoman, unfurled a human rights banner on Tiananmen Square in 1992, she has had her own axe to grind with China. However, getting in a bipartisan bed with Trump on China seems terribly unwise. As Fu Ying asked in Munich, why would Pelosi want to wear the same trousers as Trump?

It is the man currently living in the White House, a leader who wilfully shreds the constitution, considers himself above the law and tries to keep his crooked cronies from going to jail. No one is a greater threat to the stability and security of the United States than Donald Trump.

Surely, Pelosi understands what’s at stake and picking on China rather than hammering on the misdeeds by the Trump White House is not in the national interests.

Surely, Pelosi understands what’s at stake by picking on China