Red Dragon Menacing II

COVID-19 - The CCP Virus

Table Of Contents

Coronavirus Pandemic Reveals CCP’s True Nature

Beijing’s Attempt to Influence Wisconsin Official Backfires

CCP Ordered To Destroy BioSamples

China Covertly Seizing Global PPE

Global Crisis Caused by the CCP Regime

Australia is “Gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”

Inconsistent Data Point to CCP Lying

CCP Targeting US Creativity

CCP’s “Wolf Warriors”

Five Secrets of the CCP Coverup

Pandemic Cover-Up vs Persecution Campaign

Chinese Communists’ Germ Warfare Research

Military Team Collaborated With Lab Where COVID-19 Pandemic Originated

Chinese Scientist Who Shipped Deadly Pathogens to Wuhan Held 2 Patents

Timeline of China’s COVID Vaccine Development Raises Serious Concerns

Exclusive: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab

Coronavirus Pandemic Reveals Chinese Communist Party’s True Nature

March 22, 2020 | By Ding Yi,   (Minghui.org)

“You disregarded the achievements of urban development since the Military Games. You are a sinner who disrupted the stability and unity of Wuhan, and you are the culprit who sabotaged the progress of Wuhan City,” said leaders of Wuhan Central Hospital when they reprimanded a female doctor who sent information to her colleagues upon discovering an unknown coronavirus in some patients.

Under extreme pressure, Dr. Ai Fen went into silence.

Dr. Ai’s story is one of the many examples of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) covered up information about the coronavirus epidemic that later broke out in Wuhan and quickly evolved into a pandemic. The Eidemic and Great Leap Forward

At the beginning of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, all the “common sense” established in the medical field was cast aside. It was acknowledged from the very beginning that the coronavirus is highly contagious with no effective cure. However, the CCP covered up the facts from the very beginning with lies and false information.

On December 31, 2019, a top leader of China’ s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) claimed that coronavirus was “preventable and controllable.” The same narrative was repeated by other health officials in Wuhan in January, even days before the city was locked down.

Such remarks reminded people of the exaggerated lies and destructive policies of the CCP during the Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958. In the campaign, the CCP officials claimed that grain production had reached thousands of kilograms per acre and disaster relief offices were thus disbanded, because with so much grain for consumption, the relief office was no longer in need.

Truth be told, many people, including CCP officials, came from farmlands and they knew exactly how much grain an acre of land could produce. However, under the totalitarian rule of the CCP, they went along with the lies against their conscience and common sense, and turned a blind eye to what was going on. As a result, tens of millions of people died from starvation in the Great Famine that soon followed in the same year. Politics in Command

After the coronavirus epidemic broke out, the hospitals in Wuhan didn’t adopt any special measures to isolate coronavirus patients from regular patients, which greatly increased everyone’s potential exposure to the virus. Such poor management and lack of proper protective gear also caused thousands of medical staff to be infected, as well as suffering physical and mental exhaustion.

For public health concerns as significant as the epidemic, all treatment methods and procedures are decided by the CCP officials, while opinions and advice from medical professionals are ignored. After decades of CCP rule, people have now grown used to the term “putting politics in command.”

From the “Cultural Revolution” to the “June 4th Tiananmen Massacre,” from the persecution of Falun Gong to the suppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the CCP has always ruled by the “Party nature” instead “human nature.” For them, “maintaining stability” is much more important than following the rule of law.

At the same time, when the pandemic is yet to subside, the CCP has required factories and companies to resume work as soon as possible. If a business owner does not follow orders, he would face a huge fine.

Meanwhile, an internal document from the CCP indicated that there was a limit for the number of confirmed cases to be reported in each area. Should the number exceed the limit, local officials in that area would be removed from their positions. Such “low” record is favorable for the CCP to deceive its people and the world, while encouraging more people to go back to work to rescue the collapsing economy. The True Nature of the CCP

As pointed out in the book Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party  published in 2004, the CCP grew by steadily accumulating wickedness and perfecting its nine inherited traits, giving them “Chinese characteristics”: “evil, deceit, incitement, unleashing the scum of society, espionage, robbery, fighting, elimination, and control.”

Such inherited traits have been evident in how the CCP handles the coronavirus epidemic.

As discussed above, the CCP has been limiting distribution of testing kits as well as using other methods to strictly control confirmed infection cases and death cases around the country, in order to deceive people.

When the international community accused the CCP of refusing investigation by experts from overseas, the CCP diplomats openly claimed that the US military might have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and demanded that the US disclose the facts. Meanwhile, the CCP mobilized its “50 Cent Army” [internet censorship enforcers who are paid 50 cents per post] to spread rumors on the Internet, in attempts to shift the blame.

As numerous other countries face surging cases every day, the CCP “reported” “zero” new local infections on March 18, for the first time in the last two months, and claimed that all new infection cases are imported from overseas countries.

Many Chinese living abroad were misled by the CCP propaganda and believed that it is dangerous to stay overseas with the pandemic running rampant. They rushed back to China to seek protection, only to realize a different reality.

Lessons from history told us that no promise of the CCP should be trusted, because they never honor what they promise. Those who continue believing in the CCP will pay a huge price.

The CCP has always been on the path of anti-humanity. The world should be clear-headed and not become its pawn or have any illusions about it.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/3/22/183734.html

B eijing’s Attempt to Influence Wisconsin Official Backfires, Results in Resolution Condemning Virus Cover-up

By Cathy He

April 13, 2020 Updated: April 14, 2020

The Chinese regime’s attempt to get a Wisconsin state senator to voice support for Beijing’s CCP virus containment efforts has resulted in the lawmaker introducing a resolution slamming Beijing’s cover-up of the outbreak.

Wisconsin Senate President Roger Roth on March 26 introduced a resolution to condemn the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for “deliberately and intentionally” misleading the world about the outbreak in Wuhan, which has resulted in a “global pandemic the likes of which has not been seen for generations,” according to the resolution text.

Roth told The Epoch Times that the resolution would not have been introduced were it not for the Chinese consulate’s actions.

He received two emails from an official in the Chinese consulate in Chicago, asking him to pass a resolution the consulate drafted that would tout Wisconsin state’s support for Beijing’s efforts to combat the outbreak.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijings-attempt-to-influence-wisconsin-official-backfires-results-in-resolution-condemning-virus-coverup_3310100.html

CCP Ordered To Destroy BioSamples

Lessons from the CCP’s Orders to Destroy Virus Samples and Withhold Pandemic Information

April 27, 2020 | By Zhi Qing(Minghui.org)

The State Council Information Office in China released a white paper titled “Development of China’s Public Health as an Essential Element of Human Rights” on September 29, 2017. The white paper stated, “China set up the world’s largest online direct reporting system of notifiable epidemics and public health emergencies in 2015, and the average reporting time has been shortened from five days before the introduction of the system to four hours.”

This begs the question of why the ongoing coronavirus pandemic wasn’t publicly acknowledged by the Chinese Communist Party’s top leaders until more than a month after it broke out in Wuhan late last year. Interestingly, two epidemic response drills were held shortly before the outbreak, in July 2019 and September 2019, respectively, with the second drill taking place in Wuhan.

Why did the direct reporting system and drills fail to achieve their purpose of quickly alerting people to public health crises? One of the reasons is that many of the things done by the CCP are just to put on a political show. As such, when crises actually strike, CCP officials are often ordered to prioritize the CCP’s political agenda over the well-being of the Chinese people. In order to maintain its power, the Party turns to censorship and deceit.

A recent document received by Minghui.org reveals that China’s National Health Commission had issued orders to destroy coronavirus samples and prohibited related discussions during the crisis.

Policy from the National Health Commission

http://en.minghui.org/u/article_images/2020-4-25-sanhaowenjian.jpg

A document issued by the Heilongjiang Province Health Commission on February 22, 2020, citing policies from China’s National Health Commission

The above announcement issued by the Heilongjiang Province Health Commission cited a notice from the National Health Commission (Document 2020 No. 3), which said biological samples should be managed in the following way:

1) No institutions are allowed to provide biological samples, pathogens, cultures or related information to any organizations or individuals unless it is authorized by provincial-level or higher health commissions.

2) Institutions or individuals who had obtained biological samples from medical facilities or local CDC agencies prior to this announcement should immediately destroy the samples or submit them to city-level CDC offices.

3) During the period of disease control work, data produced on pathogen detection or research are classified as “special information.” No institution or individual is permitted to disclose pathogen detection or research results; the publication of relevant papers and research results must be reviewed and approved by the designated department.

These three points were consistent with how Wuhan and Hubei officials covered up coronavirus cases, suggesting that they are part of a nationwide policy from top CCP leaders disseminated through all levels of health departments. Based on these requirements, diagnosis and reporting of the coronavirus cases require provincial-level approval.

The abovementioned policy helps explain why the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths are relatively low in China. There have also been reports that coronavirus patients were either recategorized as having other illnesses or simply unreported.

Differentiating the Communist Party from the Country of China

China is ruled by the CCP, which penetrates all levels of government agencies and state-owned enterprises. The official coronavirus data are gathered and reported by CCP officials at every government level.

At each level, the Party secretary ranks higher than the administrative head at that level. Therefore, the CCP has the final say over public health and many other critical policy issues. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, the CCP is most concerned about maintaining its own power and reputation.

The atheist CCP thrives on violence and deception. In no way does its ideology represent the traditional Chinese culture that has defined China for over 5,000 years. As a result of the CCP’s decades of indoctrination, however, many Chinese people often mistakenly equate the CCP to China.

CCP: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

As the pandemic unfolded in the past few months, many people have learned how the CCP covered up the outbreak. But these tactics are not new. In fact, the regime has been deceiving people since it came to power several decades ago—claiming to serve the people but harming whoever interacts with it.

Such practices go back to the origin of the communist party. Scholars have found that communism was derived from the Illuminati, a secret satanic society launched in 1776 in present-day Germany. Its associated organization, the Fabian Society, had a logo of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The CCP’s deceptive nature is similar to a story depicted in ancient Chinese literature. “The Painted Skin” is a story written in Liaozhai Zhiji (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio) by Pu Songling.

The story was about a young scholar named Wang Sheng who met a beautiful young woman. Wang took her home and lived with her. One day, Wang found her door locked, so he peeked through the window. Inside the room, a ghost was painting a human skin; upon finishing, she put it on and changed back into the woman. Later on, the ghost killed the scholar and ate his heart.

“How silly it is!” Pu wrote at the end of the story. “People sometimes mistake a ghost for a beauty and dismiss wisdom as nonsense… The cause-effect relation exists throughout history—just some people are too foolish to know it.”

After suffering so much from the coronavirus pandemic, I hope many people will learn the lesson and not be fooled by the CCP again.

http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/4/27/184217.html

United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies

By Sam Cooper Global News Canada

April 30th, 2020

In mid-January, Chinese consulates in Canada and worldwide issued an urgent call. China was concerned that the new coronavirus raging in Wuhan was so deadly and infectious that its nurses and doctors would run out of safety supplies.

It needed personal protective equipment (PPE).

In just six weeks, China imported 2.5 billion pieces of epidemic safety equipment, including over two billion safety masks, Chinese government data shows.

And this raises big concerns on a number of fronts, say critics, including Conservative MP Erin O’Toole.

China was evidently hiding the extent of a pandemic that endangered the world while covertly securing PPE at low prices. This “surreptitious” operation left “the world naked with no supply of PPE,” Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s former ambassador to Beijing, told Global News.

The result: starting in March, after COVID-19 had circled the globe, countries that provided masks to China in January and February were forced to compete for China’s supply.

By late January, sources in manufacturing and military circles were warning western governments that China seemed to be covertly seizing global PPE supply, O’Toole and Guajardo said.

But leaders in Canada didn’t act, according to O’Toole.

“One source told me in January it became well-known amongst military and emergency services that China was stockpiling masks and basically buying out as many quantities as it could,” he said in an interview with Global News. “And we know, … that senior officials, in the end of January and the early days of February, are equally aware at Public Works Canada, with respect to a run on PPEs.”

An investigation by Global News examines the troubling methods and underground actors used by Beijing to quietly corner the world’s supply of PPE in a state-level operation.

China used diplomatic channels, state-owned businesses and Chinese diaspora community associations that are thought to be increasingly under the influence of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s powerful United Front Work Department (UFWD).

And through clandestine United Front networks run out of Chinese consulates in cities from Vancouver to Toronto to New York to Melbourne to Tokyo, the Communist Party urged millions of “overseas Chinese” to bulk-buy N95 masks in order to ship “back batches of scarce supplies for the motherland.”

As troubling as China’s methods were, the operation looks even worse under a magnifying glass because some organizations seemingly involved in the United Front’s efforts in Canada include members that have previously been monitored or investigated by the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), according to RCMP and CSIS sources.

Under the radar

Some United Front group members in Vancouver have caught the attention of Canadian law enforcement.

China’s PPE import operation was portrayed by its state media as a warlike effort. And it was a dramatic success.

According to a U.S. congressional report released in April, from Jan. 24 to Feb. 29, China ramped up its production of masks and slapped export restrictions on China-based foreign companies such as Canadian mask maker Medicom and U.S. mask maker 3M.

At the same time, China imported 2.02 billion safety masks, according to Beijing’s March 2020 customs records.

“To ensure sufficient domestic supplies to counter COVID-19 (Beijing directed) regional offices in China and overseas to work with PRC industry associations to prioritize securing supplies from global sources,” the report says.

The global callout for masks was posted to UFWD websites and sent to Chinese consulates where United Front officials are embedded.

The requests occurred around Jan. 14 and 15, when Chinese officials received confidential instructions from Xi, and all regions were warned to “prepare for and respond to a pandemic,” according to leaked documents cited in an Associated Press investigation. Hospital staff were ordered to don protective gear.

Guajardo, Mexico’s former ambassador to Beijing, told Global News that by Jan. 23, when China locked down Wuhan, he had recognized Beijing was involved in massive PPE imports.

Guajardo, who now works in a Washington, D.C., consultancy, said in mid-January, he was contacted by a source in Mexican supply chain logistics.

“They said, you know a funny thing, I’m being swamped by orders to send all the N95 I can find to China.”

He said he completed some checks in the United States and judged PPE stock was vanishing from retail locations through “under the radar” methods.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, they are buying all the N95 supply in the world,’” Guajardo told Global News.He was so convinced that he sent an ominous tweet on Jan. 27 forecasting an impending shortage of PPE in North America.

In March, the masks sold to China in January and February were being sold back to Mexico at 20 to 30 times the price, according to Guajardo.

And the Washington Post and CNN reported in April that PPE is sometimes costing more than 1,000 percent the prices seen in early January.

“This pandemic got complicated because of China’s coverup at the start,” Guajardo said. “And now it is further complicated by China leaving the world naked with no supply of PPE.

“They started the pandemic and now they are profiting from it.”

Guajardo added that in his experience with China, the masks being sold back now will not only come at exorbitant prices and with potential quality defects but with longer-term political demands.

The U.S. congressional report released in April similarly concludes: “The Chinese government may selectively release some medical supplies for overseas delivery, with designated countries selected, according to political calculations.”

China ramped up PPE production while barring exports and increasing imports, U.S. congressional report finds.

In an interview, O’Toole, the Conservative MP, said that in Canada, he was hearing the same PPE warnings from his sources in January that Guajardo was getting from sources in Mexico and the United States.

O’Toole said he knows “for a fact” that senior Canadian bureaucrats in January were alerted that China was hoarding PPE. But instead of responding to the threat, Canada’s government shipped 16 tonnes of PPE to China.

O’Toole says he believes the methods Beijing used to secure PPE and Canada’s response need to be investigated in a broad national inquiry when coronavirus health risks finally recede.

“The Communist Party of China willfully withheld information on an outbreak for at least weeks, if not months,” O’Toole said. “It not only gave the world less time to respond, it downplayed the potential severity of the threat. Countries did not make decisions with respect to flight bans and (protecting) PPE stores.”

Asked by Global News to respond to O’Toole’s assertion, a spokesperson for Public Health Canada said that in January, officials started to monitor the coronavirus in China and “initiated work with Public Services and Procurement Canada to procure supplies needed to respond to a possible outbreak in Canada.”

Internal Public Health Canada emails indicate that on Jan. 31 Minister Patty Hajdu approved a donation of PPE to China from Canada’s emergency stockpile including “stuff that (would be) expiring in Feb. and March.” The ministry believed this donation would not compromise Canada’s PPE supply, the emails say.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged that two planes from Canada sent to purchase PPE in China have now returned empty.

Trudeau cited congestion at Chinese airports and restrictions that only allow planes to wait for cargo for short periods. But China called Trudeau’s claim “inaccurate.”

After this story was published Global News asked Trudeau whether he was aware in January that China was engaged in a global operation to secure PPE, and if his government was aware, why no action was taken to protect Canada’s supply.

“As of Jan. 2 our chief public health officer convened a group of provincial public health officers to advise that there were reports of a new virus present in China,” Trudeau said Thursday. “Our intelligence services were tracking and aware of the issues and we got regular updates through the month of January. Further than that, I don’t have anything to add.”

Chinese consulates and community associations named in this story have not yet responded to questions from Global News.

‘Every overseas Chinese is a warrior’

A review of official reports from state media such as Xinhua as well as UFWD web pages in China and reports from associated Chinese-Canadian community groups, record massive PPE shipments of at least 100 tonnes from Canada to China in January and February.

The efforts were organized through consulates in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. In Vancouver and Toronto, business associations officially tied to the UFWD appear to have taken the lead in the global drive for N95 masks, also securing and shipping PPE from other countries into China.

A Feb. 2 report in Xinhua documents one facet of the global operation involving millions of migrants from the southern China region of Fujian. The report — subtitled “Every overseas Chinese is a warrior” — bursts with militaristic descriptions that have the ring of propaganda.

“The menacing epidemic came suddenly. But majestic strength comes from front-line medical staff, party members and cadres, from the people, and from Fujian Chinese and overseas Chinese,” the Xinhua report says. “Fujians from dozens of countries on five continents joined this invisible battle … they travelled day and night and raced against time to send back batches of scarce supplies for the motherland.”

The report focuses on the Toronto Fuqing Chamber of Commerce. This is one of the groups that attended a United Front-linked anti-Hong Kong democracy rally in Markham, Ont., in summer 2019.

According to the Xinhua report, the Fuqing chamber president flew to China in January before China’s Spring Festival.

But after “seeing that supplies were becoming scarce, he boarded a flight to Toronto to help with the purchase (of masks),” the report says.

The report makes no mention of the potential COVID-19 risks presented by the Fuqing chamber president flying from China to Toronto at the time of the Spring Festival, when China’s government reportedly issued internal warnings that pandemic spread danger was high. However, there is no indication the Fuqing chamber president knew of pandemic travel risks at the time, because Canada and the World Health Organization were not advising against travel from China into Canada.

According to the Xinhua report — which Global News could not independently verify — after the chamber president landed in Toronto in -25 C weather, he immediately got in a vehicle and drove to Fuqing chamber headquarters and ordered: “Purchase (PPE) in partitions. Act now!”

“Immediately, nearly a hundred overseas Chinese drove to the chamber of commerce,” the Xinhua report says.

In the following days, 200 Fuqing chamber members travelled across Ontario buying up medical supplies, the report says, while in China, an official “worked with the United Front Work Department of Fujian, and customs in Fujian” and various Chinese airlines in order to receive “the medical supplies from Canada.”

The Fuqing chamber president could not be reached for comment.

The reports of large shipments of PPE from Toronto are corroborated by reports from the Toronto office of Hainan Airlines (HNA).

The reports say on Jan. 25, HNA “responded to the call of the state” and transferred loads of PPE to China that were donated by “foreign government departments, charities, social organizations, and overseas Chinese.” By mid-February, HNA had delivered 56 tonnes of PPE from Toronto to China, the reports say.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 26, the Chinese Consulate General in Montreal established an epidemic emergency team to secure PPE for China and “communicated with more than 10 Canadian government officials at three levels.”

Through businesses and “overseas Chinese and student groups,” the consulate in Montreal assisted dozens of groups to fly more than 30 tonnes of masks and protective clothing to various cities in China, Chinese state reports say.

And on Jan. 23 in Vancouver, Yongtao Chen, a real estate developer and the chairman of the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations (CACA), was alerted by the Chinese consulate of the desperate need for PPE in Wuhan, Chinese state reports say.

CACA is a “controlling level” United Front group in Canada, according to Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat who has defected to Australia.

Yonglin Chen, a former Chinese diplomat, alleged the CACA is a directing UFWD group in Canada. Twitter

And it is a member of the UFWD’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, an organ used by Beijing to influence the Chinese diaspora, according to the 2018 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

CACA leaders worked with the Vancouver consulate through an epidemic-response WeChat group to raise funds and organize the purchase of PPE in Canada and elsewhere, a Jan. 31 report by a CACA-linked website says.

“Through various channels, the joint meeting has snapped up protective clothing, disinfectant, masks and other protective materials, and is stepping up arrangements to ship to Wuhan,” the report says.

CSIS and RCMP investigations

At least one of the Vancouver-led groups that appears to be involved with CACA in Beijing’s PPE drive, the Guangdong Overseas Chinese Federation, includes members who have attracted the attention of Canadian national security and law enforcement investigations, sources with knowledge of RCMP and CSIS files said. Leaders of the federation could not be reached for comment.

A March 23 report from the All-China Federation of Returned Chinese Overseas outlined PPE shipping efforts of the Guangdong federation, which has members in 131 countries. The report quoted Guangdong federation leader Ruji Feng, president of the Canada Chao Shan Association in Vancouver, saying “the local communities actively co-operate with the embassies and consulates to promote and contact all community overseas Chinese groups to prepare various medical supplies.”

Feng’s group also assisted CACA in airlifting 60 boxes of PPE from Manila, Philippines to China, the report said.

A man who answered Canada Chao Shan’s listed number in Vancouver told Global News that he is not connected with the association and could not locate directors to comment for this story.

A review by Global News of Panama Papers offshore banking records and B.C. criminal and civil court records shows that some Canada Chao Shan members — who are mostly located in Vancouver but also in southern China — are connected to alleged underground financial activities.

In 2003, one of the Vancouver members, Xun Chuang, was given an 18-month conditional sentence on production of narcotics charges and a 10-year firearms prohibition, B.C. criminal records show. And according to B.C. Supreme Court civil case filings and sources, Xun Chuang and his Canada Chao Shan officer address are connected to suspects targeted in the RCMP’s E-Pirate investigation, Canada’s largest-ever casino money-laundering and underground banking investigation.

Xun Chuang could not be located for comment through the law firm that handled one of his real estate lending cases. He was not named as a suspect or charged in the E-Pirate investigation.

The suspects connected to Xun Chuang were allegedly involved in real estate lending and casino loan-sharking operations connected to drug trafficking and underground banking in Richmond, B.C., and mainland China.

However, money-laundering and tax evasion charges in the E-Pirate investigation were stayed before suspects went to trial due to evidence disclosure errors by federal prosecutors. The allegations have not been proven.

The group, Canada Chao Shan, and some associated with the group are known to CSIS agents, a source who could not be identified confirmed.

United Front links between Australia, Canada and southern China

United Front groups in Canada helped direct Beijing’s worldwide PPE ops. GFX

Similar murky United Front networks have been investigated in Australia, where the Australian government implemented PPE export bans on March 29 after several Chinese real estate developers sent well over 82 tonnes of PPE to China, according to a U.S. congressional report.

One of the southern China-based United Front groups involved was connected to allegations of organized crime and suspicious “casino junket” activity, the Sydney Morning Herald has reported.

And the Guangdong and Chao Shan United Front groups active in Australia are also linked to Canadian group leaders, Chinese UFWD meeting records show. One prominent Guangdong federation United Front leader named Xiangmo Huang, who is a billionaire real estate developer and casino high roller, was barred from Australia in 2018 on national security grounds.

Alex Joske, a United Front expert and researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that the All-China Federation of Returned Chinese Overseas — of which the Guangdong federations in Canada and Australia are a part — is an increasingly important part of Chinese President Xi’s United Front diaspora control strategy.

Joske told Global News that China’s Communist Party uses organized crime and United Front groups for strategic uses abroad.

“In Australia, we’ve observed overlap between political influence operations, intelligence agencies and organized crime,” Joske said. “For example, a gambling junket operator and alleged criminal figure who also runs groups that report back to the United Front Work Department and collect information on politicians.”

Jonathan Manthorpe, a Canadian author and United Front expert, has reported that it is believed Ottawa blocked visas for 200 Guangdong federation officials seeking to visit Vancouver in 2018, based on national security grounds. However CSIS would not confirm to Global News whether it advised Ottawa to block the visas.

In an interview, Manthorpe told Global News that Xi has vastly increased resources of the United Front, which Xi calls a “magic weapon.”

“The United Front Works Department is, to put it very simply, a political warfare operation,” Manthorpe said. “It’s in all the embassies and consulates in Canada.”

And United Front operatives seeded in Chinese consulates worldwide create and take over “seemingly innocuous groups, most of them embedded in ethnic Chinese communities not only in Canada but in all the countries where the Chinese diaspora of around 50 million people now live,” Manthorpe said.

Manthorpe says a particularly troubling aspect of the United Front’s mass mobilization of Chinese immigrants for the collection of PPE is the Chinese Communist Party’s “ability to exert discipline and to demand patriotic loyalty.”

“To me, it is utterly unconscionable that here are Canadians who are being intimidated and pressured in their own country by foreign agents,” Manthorpe said. “These are assaults on our sovereignty, and they are assaults on our national interest. And they are assaults on our citizens. We should not allow that.”

However, Chinese officials have countered criticism that the country cornered the world’s PPE supply, claiming that after China has conquered its internal coronavirus threat, United Front groups including Guangdong Federation members are now distributing PPE to other countries and “overseas Chinese.”

“It is understood that at present, the Guangdong Overseas Chinese Federation is also actively coordinating a group of masks and other epidemic prevention materials to be donated to overseas Chinese groups in areas with severe epidemics in Italy, Spain, the United States, Peru, and the United Kingdom, hoping to relieve the current shortage of anti-epidemic materials for overseas Chinese,” a March 23 UFWD report says.

While United Front actors have been on CSIS’s radar since 1998, Manthorpe says, networks are growing rapidly in Canada under Xi’s regime.

And the current threat level was encapsulated in a 2018 CSIS report that says: “The CCP’s United Front activities incorporate co-opting elites, information management, persuasion, as well as accessing strategic information and resources. It has also frequently been a means of facilitating espionage.”

China does not acknowledge that its United Front is used for espionage, and Chinese consulates in Canada did not respond to questions for this story.

John Townsend, CSIS’ head of media relations, would not directly answer whether the national security agency could be investigating the PPE export operations involving United Front groups in Canada, such as Canada Chao Shan.

“Under our act, CSIS clearly has a mandate to investigate espionage and sabotage, terrorism, foreign interference, and subversion and we will continue to use our legal authorities to ensure the government of Canada receives intelligence on these critical issues,” he said.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6858818/coronavirus-china-united-front-canada-protective-equipment-shortage/

Global Crisis Caused by the CCP Regime

May 03, 2020 | By a Minghui correspondent in Toronto, Canada

(Minghui.org) As of May 1, 2020, the coronavirus has infected over 3.3 million people worldwide and caused more than 235,000 deaths in this devastating global pandemic. World leaders across continents have been reprimanding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its initial cover up and ongoing misinformation about the disease.

On April 14, more than 100 China experts and senior political figures signed an open letter describing the CCP’s cover-up of the coronavirus as “China’s Chernobyl Moment.” Addressed to Chinese citizens and friends of China, the letter begins, “The current global crisis has been caused by the [CCP] regime so many of you have been tolerating or supporting for decades.”

The Chinese Embassy in Canada harshly denounced the letter on April 19, labeling it as “anti-China.” Government officials and authors of the letter refuted the claim, adding that the response is typical of the regime’s practice of suppressing freedom of speech.

Similar to the CCP’s response to the letter, China analysts have observed a global propaganda war with the CCP regime as it faces increasing condemnation for the damage it has caused with the coronavirus.

One of the authors of the letters, Shuvaloy Majumdar, Senior Fellow of the Canadian think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute for Public Policy, was recently interviewed by Minghui.org. He spoke about the current situation.

The CCP Is a “Master of Deception”

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is the largest independent think tank in Ottawa, with the aim to “make poor public policy intolerable… by proposing thoughtful alternatives through non-partisan and independent research and commentary.” Mr. Majumdar said, “The world wants to see China succeed, but the CCP does not take criticism and shirks responsibilities instead. That was why such an open letter was needed to address the issue.

“And as we have seen, the crisis that has started in Wuhan and was badly managed for months, badly communicated and poorly coordinated with the world, has now grown into a global pandemic and a global economic crisis. I think the opening of the letter was designed for an audience of Chinese people who I think the world shares frustrations alongside.

“In China, we saw that the national, the communist party, sought to silence doctors that were trying to tell the truth and other voices that were trying to be helpful to the world and to other Chinese people on the threat that this pandemic was to the country.”

The crisis happened because of the system of communism in China. Majumdar said that the regime “is vastly repressive of its minorities. It obviously does not embrace free speech. It crushes the notion of any private property, even those are constitutional obligations.”

In addition, with the help of Western countries over the past few decades, China has grown to be the second largest economy in the world and believes that “all of the world’s political, military, and economic arteries should flow to China.” But China’s expansion is often achieved through deception.

Majumdar called the communist regime a “master of deception” and said that its “deception goes far deeper because they have weaponized the supply chains that China has produced for the world, they seek to exploit trade for their security advantage, and their political position in the world. And that is very troubling.”

Disruption of Global Norms

Majumdar said the CCP has historically employed coverups to distract “from the real issues that would help the world heal faster and the economy recover more decisively.” By doing so, it is “disrupting the idea of global norms on those basic principles.”

Recently, there have been many media reports about China hoarding personal protection equipment (PPE) without telling the world about the pandemic. Majumdar said such a strategy began late last year when the CCP was considering whether PPE and pharmaceuticals could be used as leverage for trade negotiation with the United States.

“It is unsurprising to see that as they knew and sought to control the crisis in Wuhan,” Majumdar explained. “They started reordering their manufacturing hubs and accepting and purchasing PPE around… while lying to the world about the problem that was spreading.”

Revisiting Relationship with the CCP

Majumdar reflected on his changing view of China. “The optimism for many years, by myself included, was that greater economic engagement with China, the development of its country, the literally creating more literacy and services for its people would also create greater demand for the rule of law, for property rights, for free speech, for freedom of religion, all the things that are essential to succeed. But what has happened? All good wishes, but what has happened and become even more real…is that actually the Chinese Communist Party has sought to partner with the world for its own prosperity, so that one day it could dominate the world with its own world order.”

Mr. Majumdar said Western nations need to “understand this ongoing threat by the irresponsible and reckless actions of the communist party. Have greater impetus to think through, how to partner with each other and how to engage China without creating any space for submitting to China.”

But the CCP’s influence has gone beyond individual nations. “We’ve seen it’s not just the WHO [World Health Organization], we’ve seen a very gradual and sophisticated approach by China across the multilateral system, whether it’s their chairmanship of INTERPOL, the international criminal police organization, whether it’s the relationship with the WHO, with the International Civil Aviation Organization, which deals with commercial airline traffic rules and regulations. [And] how they invest in UN peacekeeping missions on priorities that are important to the Belt and Road Initiative,” he added.

By doing so, Majumdar observed, the CCP has comprised the integrity and credibility of such organizations’ leadership for its own benefit. For example, “at the World Health Organization, we see a policy setting body, a regulatory setting body, and a policy implementing body. They [CCP officials] do these three things in the realm of global public health. They compromised at the very top,” he added.

Therefore, Mr. Majumdar believes it is time to reevaluate these issues, both the relationship with the CCP as well as its influence on these organizations.

A Global Propaganda War

Regarding the Chinese Embassy’s response to the open letter, Majumdar said it was “verbally abusive, poorly written, almost comically presented.”

Canada is not alone in being targeted by the CCP. “Chinese diplomats around the world are waging an aggressive disinformation campaign… aimed at controlling the narrative about the origins of the coronavirus,” reported MacroBusiness on April 30 in an article titled “China launches global propaganda war.”

This is happening across many countries in a style referred to as “Wolf Warrior” style of diplomacy. “Chinese envoys have been especially aggressive on Twitter, which they are using to attack, intimidate and silence Western journalists, lawmakers and think tank scholars—essentially anyone who contradicts China’s official version of events,” the article observed.

The article cited a few such examples. One case involved the Brussels-based news outlet Politico Europe that reported on China’s disinformation of the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly after the report was out, Chinese officials acted quickly and threatened to withhold medical supplies to Europe unless the report’s contents were modified.

Another example was an article on April 15 in Bild, a popular German newspaper. Under the title “What China Owes Us So Far,” the Bild article suggested that China should pay Germany €150 billion ($162 billion) in reparations for the coronavirus pandemic, to cover losses sustained by small businesses, tourism, and other industries.

The Chinese Embassy in Berlin responded and called Bild racist. Instead of expressing submission, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief refuted with his own letter titled “You Are Endangering the Entire World.”

Addressed to the top CCP leader, the letter said, “You rule by surveillance… You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.

“You plan to strengthen China through a plague that you exported. You will not succeed. Corona will be your political end, sooner or later,” the letter concluded.

http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/3/184306.html

Survivors Want Answers, and CCP Silences Them

In Wuhan, where the pandemic started, the police have threatened and interrogated grieving relatives. Lawyers have been warned not to help them sue.

By Vivian Wang, Amy Qin and Sui-Lee Wee, New York Times

May 4, 2020

The text messages to the Chinese activist streamed in from ordinary Wuhan residents, making the same extraordinary request: Help me sue the Chinese government. One said his mother had died from the coronavirus after being turned away from multiple hospitals. Another said her father-in-law had died in quarantine.

But after weeks of back-and-forth planning, the seven residents who had reached out to Yang Zhanqing, the activist, suddenly changed their minds in late April, or stopped responding. At least two of them had been threatened by the police, Mr. Yang said.

The Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before spreading to the rest of China and the world.

Lawyers have been warned not to file suit against the government. The police have interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them online. Volunteers who tried to thwart the state’s censorship apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.

“They are worried that if people defend their rights, the international community will know what the real situation is like in Wuhan and the true experiences of the families there,” said Mr. Yang, who is living in New York, where he fled after he was briefly detained for his work in China.

The crackdown underscores the party’s fear that any attempt to dwell on what happened in Wuhan, or to hold officials responsible, will undermine the state’s narrative that only China’s authoritarian system saved the country from a devastating health crisis.

To inspire patriotic fervor, state propaganda has portrayed the dead not as victims, but as martyrs. Censors have deleted Chinese news reports that exposed officials’ early efforts to hide the severity of the outbreak.

And as more voices overseas call for China to compensate the rest of the world for the pandemic, the party has cast its domestic critics as tools being used by foreign forces to undermine it.

The party has long been wary of public grief and the dangers it could pose to its rule.

In 2008, after an earthquake in Sichuan Province killed at least 69,000 people, Chinese officials offered hush money to parents whose children died. Following a deadly train crash in the city of Wenzhou in 2011, officials prevented relatives from visiting the site. Each June, the authorities in Beijing silence family members of protesters who were killed in the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

Now, some say the government is imposing the same kind of collective amnesia around the outbreak.

Three volunteers involved in Terminus2049, an online project that archived censored news articles about the outbreak, went missing in Beijing last month and are presumed to have been detained.

“I had previously told him: ‘You guys probably face some risk doing this project.’ But I didn’t know how much,” said Chen Kun, whose brother, Chen Mei, is one of the volunteers who disappeared.

“I had said that maybe he would be summoned by the police for a talk, and they would ask him to take down the site,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be this serious.”

Mr. Chen said he had no information about his brother’s disappearance. But he had spoken to the relatives of one of the other missing volunteers, Cai Wei, who said that Mr. Cai and his girlfriend had been detained and accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge that the government often uses against dissidents.

Reached by telephone on Tuesday, an employee at a police station in the Beijing district where Chen Mei lives said he was unclear about the case. The group’s site on GitHub, a platform popular with coders, is now blocked in China.

Volunteers for similar online projects have also been questioned by the authorities in recent days. In blog posts and private messages, members of such communities have warned each other to scrub their computers. The organizers of another GitHub project, 2019ncovmemory, which also republished censored material about the outbreak, have set their archive to private.

To the authorities, it seems no public criticism can be left unchecked. The police in Hubei, the province that includes Wuhan and was hardest hit by the outbreak, arrested a woman last month for organizing a protest against high vegetable prices. An official at a Wuhan hospital was removed from his post after he criticized the use of traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients, which the authorities had promoted.

The crackdown has been most galling to people mourning family members. They say they are being harassed and subjected to close monitoring as they try to reckon with their losses.

The coronavirus killed nearly 4,000 people in Wuhan, according to China’s official figures. Some residents believe the true toll is much higher. The government fired two high-ranking local officials, but that is not enough for many grieving relatives, who say they want fair compensation for their losses and harsher punishment for officials.

Zhang Hai is certain that his father, who died in February, was infected with the coronavirus at a Wuhan hospital. He says he still supports the party but thinks local officials should be held responsible for initially hiding the fact that the virus could spread among humans. Had he known the risk, he said, he would not have sent his father to the hospital for treatment.

Mr. Zhang said several Chinese reporters who had interviewed him about his demands later told him that their editors had pulled the articles before publication. He posted calls online to set up a monument in honor of the victims of the epidemic in Wuhan, but censors quickly scrubbed the messages. Officials have pressed him to bury his father’s ashes, but he has so far refused; he says they have insisted on assigning him minders, who he believes would be there to ensure that he caused no trouble.

“They spend so much time trying to control us,” Mr. Zhang said. “Why can’t they use this energy to address our concerns instead?”

In March, the police visited a Wuhan resident who had started a chat group of more than 100 people who lost relatives to the virus, according to two members of the group, one of whom shared a video of the encounter. The group was ordered to disband.

Mr. Yang, the activist in New York, said at least two of the seven Wuhan residents who had contacted him about taking legal measures against the government dropped the idea after being threatened by the police.

Even if the other plaintiffs were willing to move forward, they might have trouble finding lawyers. After Mr. Yang and a group of human rights lawyers in China issued an open call in March for people who wanted to sue the government, several lawyers around the country received verbal warnings from judicial officials, Mr. Yang said.

The officials told them not to write open letters or “create disturbances” by filing claims for compensation, according to Chen Jian-gang, a member of the group. Mr. Chen, who fled to the United States last year, said he had heard from several lawyers who were warned.

“If anyone dares to make a request and the government fails to meet it, they immediately are seen as a threat to national security,” Mr. Chen said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer or a victim, it’s like you’re imprisoned.”

Some aggrieved residents have pressed ahead despite the government clampdown. Last month, Tan Jun, a civil servant in Yichang, a city in Hubei Province, became the first person to publicly attempt to sue the authorities over their response to the outbreak.

Mr. Tan, who works in the city’s parks department, accused the provincial government of “concealing and covering up” the true nature of the virus, leading people to “ignore the virus’s danger, relax their vigilance and neglect their self-protection,” according to a copy of the complaint shared online. He pointed to officials’ decision to host a banquet for 40,000 families in Wuhan in early January, even as the virus was spreading.

He urged the government to issue an apology on the front page of the Hubei Daily, a local newspaper.

In a brief phone call, Mr. Tan confirmed that he had submitted a complaint to the Intermediate People’s Court in Wuhan, but he declined to be interviewed because he is a civil servant.

With China’s judiciary tightly controlled by the central government, it was unclear whether Mr. Tan would get his day in court. Articles about Mr. Tan have been censored on Chinese social media. Calls to the court in Wuhan on Thursday rang unanswered.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/world/asia/china-coronavirus-answers.html

A ustralia is “Gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”

By J. R. Nyquist

May 6, 2020

China is falling back on brutal threats, bullying tactics, and invective, to thwart an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The Atlantic headline on 19 March said, “China is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World.” But now, China avoids blame by open menace.

It is well known that Chinese officials have covered their tracks in Wuhan. It’s a matter of public record. We still don’t have the full story. We don’t know how the virus became infectious, or how it got out of China’s level-4 virology lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says there is plenty of evidence the virus came out of this lab. But Chinese officials continue to deny the facts.

If you criticize China for lying about the virus, expect invective from the Beijing’s state-controlled press. Expect threats, subtle and unsubtle. Expect to have your motives maligned. China’s media puppets will pour raw sewage on anyone who lays out the facts.

Recently the Chinese press has attacked U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo, calling him a liar, an enemy of world peace, and a partisan stooge. China’s Global Times accuses Pompeo of “a vicious attack fueled by politics, intelligence, and diplomacy.” According to the Chinese media, Pompeo’s behavior is “filthy” and “defies the essence of science.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison wants an investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 virus. “It would seem entirely reasonable and sensible … to have an independent assessment of how all this occurred….” The Chinese press doesn’t agree. According China’s media, Australia is “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe.” According to the Global Times: “The Morrison government’s adventurism … is in defiance of rational thought and common sense.”

If someone were to invent bullying behavior from a totalitarian state, who could invent better lines than these? Australia is vulnerable to China’s growing military preponderance. If Australia was threatened with invasion by an overstretched Japanese military in 1942, the situation is much worse with regard to a Chinese invasion in 2020.

In raw military terms: China outnumbers Australia at sea 300 to 50 in warships; 5,200 to 309 in warplanes. With regard to land forces, China has over 250 infantry divisions, 8 armored divisions and 17 artillery divisions against Australia’s 12 brigades (a brigade being smaller than a division). Worse yet, Australia has no nuclear weapons while China is a nuclear superpower.

To his credit, Prime Minister Morrison has not backed down — despite subsequent economic bullying from the Chinese ambassador. We have to ask ourselves if China’s behavior toward Australia is reasonable. Is it civilized? What kind of relationship should America have with country that sees our ally as “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”?

It was a grave mistake of President Nixon to open relations with Communist China, of President Carter to open trade with Communist China, of President Reagan to build up Communist China. We have helped a formidable enemy become a great power. This lack of foresight has landed us in a difficult situation. If we had moral sense to begin with, and if we had been honest, these errors would not have been made; for seeing that China’s leaders were functionaries in a vast system of murder and oppression, we would not have helped them, or partnered with them.

In the coming days we will be subjected to intensive propaganda. China’s business partners in the pharmaceutical and other industries will be applying the screws to our politicians. There is a word for businessmen who push the agenda of a foreign enemy, who set aside patriotic feeling for the sake of corporate profit. This word is “treason.” If anyone thinks Americans have forgotten this word, they are mistaken. If big business continues to take China’s side, then big business in this country will be finished. It will be “gum stuck to the bottom of America’s shoe.”

The same logic applies to politicians who support Chinese initiatives, who support “global governance.” Everyone needs to understand what is coming. It is time to choose sides. It is time to choose wisely.

https://jrnyquist.blog/2020/05/06/australia-is-gum-stuck-to-the-bottom-of-chinas-shoe/

Data Inconsistency Points to the CCP’s Decades-Long Pattern of Lies

May 9, 2020 | By Haiming (Minghui.org)

China revised the coronavirus death toll in Wuhan from 2,579 to 3,869 (an increase of 50.02%) on April 17. But many still question the accuracy of the updated number, given the constant lying by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the pandemic broke out a few months ago.

There have been many pieces of evidence pointing to a much higher death toll. For example, Wuhan residents were told on March 23 to pick up the urns of their loved ones who had died of the virus. In Hankou Funeral Home alone, two truckloads of urns (5,000 in total) were unloaded on March 26-27 to prepare for later distribution.

There were long waiting lines at the funeral homes, where an average of 500 urns per funeral home were scheduled for distribution each day until Qingming Festival (also known as Tomb-sweeping Day, falling on April 4 in 2020). With seven funeral homes in Wuhan, the number of urns distributed over the 13-day period would translate into 45,500 deaths (500 x 7 x 13).

Multiple sources have also confirmed that Wuhan’s crematories have been working non-stop over the past few months. On February 3, Huang, a Wuchang Funeral Home employee, revealed to Gu-yu Lab, a Chinese media platform affiliated with Tencent, that beginning January 26, the second day of the Chinese New Year, employees were required to report to work, no exceptions. “We work 24 hours a day. Our four phone lines are operating 24 hours a day, and the staff is exhausted,” Huang said.

Li Zehua, a former host of China Central TV (CCTV), visited Qingshan Funeral Home on February 21 and confirmed Huang’s account of the heavy workload in Wuhan’s crematoriums. Li reported that by the time he left around 11 p.m., the furnaces were still running.

It usually takes one hour for a furnace to cremate one body. Counting the 26 days between January 26 and February 21, and assuming that each of the 74 furnaces (that Wuhan has) worked 24 hours each day, then a total of 46,176 (26 x 24 x 74) bodies could have been cremated.

Li found out that the average number of non-coronavirus-related deaths in Wuhan was 137 per day. Excluding the 3,562 (137 x 26) non-coronavirus-related deaths, the coronavirus deaths during the 26-day period would be 42,614 (46,176 – 3,562), a number on par with the figure of 45,000 derived from the number of urns distributed.

If the death toll was 42,614 in a 26-day period, one may infer that the three-month toll of fatalities in Wuhan would be more than 120,000.

It is apparent that the CCP has been lying about the actual coronavirus casualties. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time that the CCP has been lying since it came to power several decades ago.

Great Chinese Famine

Following the Great Leap Forward, a political campaign aimed at turning China from an agrarian economy into an industrialized nation, a great famine took place in China between 1959 and 1961. Several decades passed and the CCP still considers it taboo to publicize how many people were starved to death during the famine.

Numerous analyses were conducted based on census data. Cao Shuji from The Chinese University of Hong Kong published an article on Chinese Journal of Population Science in 2005 and found the number of unnatural deaths between 1959 and 1961 were at least 33 million.

Frank Dikötter, chair professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, concluded the loss was at least 45 million in his book Mao’s Great Famine.

Tangshan Earthquake

The Tangshan earthquake, a major disaster that happened on July 28, 1976, is another example. The CCP initially announced a death toll of 655,000 and changed it to 240,000 later without any explanation.

However, the coupons needed to buy fabric or food at the time distributed by the government at the end of 1976 hinted at a much higher death toll. Only 650,000 coupons were handed out when around 1.2 million coupons were distributed the year before. Many believe that the difference of 550,000 was closer to the real number of casualties based on independent research.

Deaths Suppressed by Ten-Fold in an Accident

The CCP not only lies about natural and man-made disasters, but also major accidents. An explosion took place in Tianjin in August 2015 and quite a few firefighters died in addition to other casualties. An official report from the CCP mentioned a death toll of 21 firefighters.

According to sources, however, all members of Tianjin’s nine fire brigades and three special firefighting teams who had gone to the explosion site died. Each fire brigade consisted of 20 to 30 people and each special firefighting team had at least 15 people. This would make the total death toll between 200 and 300.

Organ Harvesting

Among all the lies by the CCP, the largest one might be those fabricated against practitioners of Falun Gong, a meditation group based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. More than one hundred million people have taken up Falun Gong since it was introduced to the public in 1992.

Fearing its soaring popularity, the CCP made up numerous lies about Falun Gong and launched a nationwide campaign against it in July 1999. Since then, a large number of practitioners have been detained, imprisoned, tortured, or even had their organs harvested for their belief.

Gan Nan, a former customs officer at Beijing Capital Airport, was detained in Xin’an Women’s Forced Labor Camp for the third time in 2001 for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. She told of her experience while held at the labor camp.

“We received comprehensive physical examinations including a blood test, X-rays, electrocardiogram (ECG) and cornea inspections,” recalled Gan, who currently lives in Toronto, Canada.

Her experience was not unique. At the now-defunct Masanjia Forced Labor Camp, one of the facilities where Falun Gong practitioners were treated the worst, all practitioners admitted had thorough physical exams in September 2000, and each practitioner was assigned a unique ID. Those with special blood types were highlighted and doctors asked them if they had any genetic diseases in their family.

Evidence that surfaced later would reveal that the CCP detention facilities’ thorough medical examinations of Falun Gong practitioners were for the purpose of harvesting organs from healthy, living practitioners to make huge profits.

According to one witness who revealed the following in 2006, “My ex-husband did cornea removal. At the beginning, he didn’t know whether those people had been granted permission. People who were on operation tables were not conscious. They were alive. He knew it after performing a few. He said that the person who asked him to do this kind of thing told him: you are already on this boat. Killing one is murder. Killing several is also murder. He said that later on he also knew that the people were alive. Where the organs and corpses were sent, he didn’t ask.”

According to a military doctor in Shenyang Military region, there were 36 military concentration camps in China. Among them, held over 120,000 inmates at one time and the majority of them were Falun Gong practitioners. “The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee decided to treat Falun Gong practitioners as ‘class enemies’ and handle them in any manner that was economically profitable. In other words, Falun Gong practitioners were no longer regarded as human beings, but as raw material for commercial products,” he explained.

Practitioner Gan was fortunate to have fled China, but many other practitioners remain missing or may have long perished after their organs were harvested.

According to Guo Guoting, a lawyer who currently lives overseas and defended Falun Gong practitioners while he was still in China, said that many practitioners had gone missing. One example was Huang Xiong, a student of the renowned Shanghai Jiaotong University. “We searched everywhere and could not find his information,” explained Guo.

To avoid further persecution or implicating others, practitioners who were detained often refused to report their names or residence. As a result, many of them were sent to Tianjin or northeast China, where they may have become unwilling victims of organ harvesting.

The Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China (the China Tribunal), led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC – a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – was established in London to investigate accusations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.

The tribunal announced its findings on June 17, 2019. The panel concluded that the CCP has been harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners in China for many years and that this brutality still continues today.

While the CCP publicly announced in 2015 that it would stop sourcing organs from executed prisoners, research shows that it is still falsifying organ donation numbers. BMC Medical Ethics published an article titled “Analysis of official deceased organ donation data casts doubt on the credibility of China’s organ transplant reform” on November 14, 2019. The authors studied China’s official organ donation data and found “highly compelling evidence they are being falsified.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/9/184397.html

C ommunist China Continues to Target American Creativity

May 18, 2020

By Daily Editorials

In mid-April, a senior FBI official warned that cyber spies were attacking U.S. and allied medical research institutions developing coronavirus vaccines. The U.S. Department of Justice later pegged China as the chief witch doctor of medical espionage and suggested a crash American COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project nicknamed Operation Warp Speed is Beijing’s major target.

During World War II, American leaders feared Nazi Germany sought a nuclear weapons program. So at warp speed, the Manhattan Project split atoms in an experimental reactor and then developed and deployed operational atomic bombs.

The “crash” Manhattan Project gave the United States and its allies a decisive strategic-warfare edge. A-bombs ended the conflict and saved lives by avoiding a bloody, Okinawa-type invasion of Japan.

My opinion: Nuclear proliferation remains the sane world’s major security threat. However, the COVID-19/Wuhan virus’ global proliferation (attention: it originated in Wuhan) has demonstrated (once again) that pandemics are an international security threat to human life. They also savage 21st-century economies.

That means the nation that develops and deploys the first safe and clinically effective vaccine will be able to do many things. Protecting your nation’s population is more than a material medical advantage. A vaccinated population has an economic advantage over adversaries.

Developing an effective vaccine enhances diplomatic power. Obviously, the discoverer’s allies are in line to benefit. But don’t underestimate prestige power of an effective vaccine’s quick discovery and rapid employment. Effectiveness is primary. However, speed demonstrates a society’s ability to rapidly face new, threatening conditions and produce a response that benefits the world.

A Nobel Prize isn’t the only measure of a nation’s creative scientific vitality, but it is a measure even television gab shows understand. Hence this column’s side bet: An effective COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine developed by fall 2020 will warrant a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

I repeat from last week’s column, for the sake of Chinese communist propagandist idiots, that Wuhan is a place, just like the Rocky Mountains (Rocky Mountain spotted fever), Uganda’s West Nile province (West Nile virus), Old Lyme, Connecticut (Lyme disease), and Congo’s Ebola River (Ebola virus).

Why hammer that fact? Because attempting to disconnect the virus from its country of origin—China—is a Chinese Communist Party propaganda ploy to shield CCP leaders from taking responsibility for having spread the virus.

The agitprop campaign has failed. In fact, the pandemic has focused attention on communist China’s global depredations and in particular its “unrestricted warfare” attack on the U.S.

“Unrestricted Warfare” (also known as “Warfare Without Limits”) is the title of a book authored by two People’s Liberation Army Air Force colonels. Published in 1999, the colonels propose weakening and then defeating an adversary using an array of operations—for example, theft, bribery, economic gimmicks, disinformation, spying, co-optation of an adversary’s media and educational institutions.

Who do the authors seek to defeat? The U.S.A.

In May 2019, I wrote a column noting spies have always sought more than military secrets. Gathering political intelligence and economic information aren’t new, though global competition has enhanced the value of “proprietary knowledge,” particularly when the intellectual property involves technology or techniques with national security application.

Intellectual property originally indicated that a creative intellect owned it, which led to that column’s central point: China targets American creativity because its system retards creativity. Dictatorships fear creativity, but Beijing’s dictators covet American creativity’s economic, military and cultural benefits.

An April 2019 Houston Chronicle and Science magazine investigative report detailing pervasive Chinese espionage at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center spurred that column. Why target a medical institution? My take: “China’s communist elites seek to steal the creative genius, decades of training and years of cancer research of some of the world’s finest specialists and most brilliant doctors.”

Targeting America’s COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project is just the latest vicious attempt by the CCP to steal the genius of American medicine.

Austin Bay is a colonel (ret.) in the U.S. Army Reserve, author, syndicated columnist, and a teacher in strategy and strategic theory at the University of Texas. His latest book is “Cocktails from Hell: Five Wars Shaping the 21st Century.”

https://www.creators.com/read/daily-editorials/05/20/communist-china-continues-to-target-american-creativity-02ee0

New Evidence Shows the CCP’s Cover-Up of the Coronavirus Outbreak

May 19, 2020 | By Zhang Hua, (Minghui.org)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists that it has not covered up any information about the coronavirus outbreak. However, more substantial evidence has surfaced to invalidate the CCP’s claim. The following are some of such evidence.

Document Issued by the National Health Commission on January 3

On January 3, 2020, China’s National Health Commission issued a confidential document:

(1) All regional governments and health commissions are to manage samples of coronavirus that caused Wuhan pneumonia according to regulations on “Highly Pathogenic Microorganisms (Type 2)”;(2) All related organizations must not provide or release test results to any other organizations or individuals without permission;(3) all medical facilities must immediately stop any ongoing viral testing;(4) all medical facilities must destroy all samples from patients;(5) frontline doctors in Wuhan must not disclose any information about Wuhan pneumonia.

Around the same time, eight doctors, including Dr. Li Wenliang (who would later die of coronavirus) were reprimanded by police for sharing their concerns with their colleagues on social media about the virus infection symptoms.

Clearly, the CCP authorities had been informed of the danger of the highly contagious coronavirus by January 3, but instead of warning people in China and around the world, they concealed vital information and tried to cover up the outbreak.

Human-to-Human Transmission Known by the End of 2019

Nature-Microbiology, an online journal, published a paper by Liu Manqing, deputy director of the Pathogen Biology Lab of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control. Liu stated in the paper that he and his team re-analyzed 640 throat swabs collected from patients in Wuhan with influenza-like-illness from October 6, 2019 to January 21, 2020, and found that 9 were positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA, suggesting community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan in late 2019 or early 2020.

New News in Taiwan obtained two internal documents for senior CCP government officials, which revealed that several gene companies had discovered “SARS-like coronaviruses” in late December 2019 and reported them to relevant departments in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and the National Health Commission.

However, on January 1, the Health Commission of Hubei Province notified those gene companies by phone to stop further testing, destroy all virus samples, and ban the publication of relevant papers and data.

Two days later, on January 3, China’s National Health Commission issued the same instruction as detailed at the beginning of this article.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported on February 28, 2020, that a team led by the Shanghai Public Health Center and the School of Public Health of Fudan University, headed by Zhang Yongzhen, isolated and completed the genome sequence of the new coronavirus on January 5 and published the results of their investigation on January 11.

However, on January 12, the Shanghai Public Health Center was ordered to shut down by the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission without explanation.

It was revealed in notes by Xiao Hui, an investigative journalist with Tsaixin, that South Central Hospital in Wuhan had repeatedly reported suspected cases to the Wuhan Public Health Commission before Wuhan was locked down, but instead of having their reports taken seriously, the hospital was criticized for “not being politically conscious” and required to “pay attention to political impact and the way they speak” when WHO experts visited the hospital.

CCP authorities didn’t publicly acknowledge human-to-human transmission until January 20.

Intentional Cover-Ups

The Associated Press reported on April 15 that, based on internal documents from the Chinese communist regime, Ma Xiaowei, director of China’s National Health Commission, held a secret video conference with provincial health officials on January 14.

A memo revealed that “clusters of infection cases” were brought up at the conference, saying “the current situation of the contagious disease is complex and severe, posing the biggest challenge since the SARS epidemic in 2003.”

In the memo, Ma Xiaowei specially asked local health officials to “prioritize” political and social stability, particularly in view of the upcoming “Two Sessions” (annual meetings of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature).

According to a number of classified CCP documents obtained by The Epoch Times on April 19, China’s National Health Commission held a nationwide video training session on how to respond to and control the epidemic on January 15, which was relayed through branch venues at provincial and county levels to officials in the health sector.

For example, the Inner Mongolian Health Commission issued an “Urgent Notice” to its subordinate regional health departments to pass down the instructions from above. The document was marked “Express” and “for internal use, and should not be transmitted on the internet.” At least seven follow-up notices about the epidemic were issued on January 19 and 20, and all of them were marked “Not to Disclose.”

The CCP secretary of the Inner Mongolian Health Commission delivered a work report of more than 10,000 words on January 18, in which nothing was mentioned about the Wuhan coronavirus; instead, it glorified the CCP and the “achievements” of the health commission.

During the six days between January 14 and January 19 that were considered critical in controlling the virus, CCP leader Xi Jinping remained completely silent, and it was not until January 20 when he made a public comment about the virus infection. By then, a large number of people had already been infected, mostly in Wuhan.

It was not until January 25 that China’s National Health Commission issued a notice to “strengthen community prevention and control.” By then, nearly two months had passed since infection became known at the beginning of December.

Delayed Response in Wuhan

The Wuhan coronavirus infection was known as of December 1 or even earlier, and cases of human-to-human transmission became more prominent by mid-December. A total of 47 such cases were reported by January 1, including infections of 7 medical professionals. By January 22, the number of patients increased to 425, and 8 more medical professionals were infected, indicating it was already a very serious health hazard.

However, the Wuhan Health Commission still stated in its bulletin on January 11 that it had “not seen any infection of health workers, and there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

According to the CCP’s bureaucratic regulations, health commissions at municipal and county levels must not release information about a disease outbreak to media outlets without permission from the provincial health commission, which may also need to seek approval from higher authorities.

Therefore, Hubei Province did not take corresponding measures in response to the devastating outbreak until January 24, a day after the lockdown of Wuhan, and after CCP leader Xi Jinping publicly addressed the issue. There was a full month delay in their response, and by then the virus had spread to other places in China and across the world.

Similar delays in response were also seen in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and other regions.

WHO Complicit in the CCP’s Cover-Up

For the past decade, the CCP has pushed aggressively to have pro-CCP figures elected to the top positions of specialized UN agencies so they would act in favor of the CCP on international issues.

“It already controls five of the 15, by using proxies, colonial-like proxies, like Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] at the WHO,” said the White House trade adviser Peter Navarro in an interview with Fox News.

“The damage done by the CCP’s control of the key health organization has been ‘absolutely enormous,’” Navarro said in the interview. “They suppressed the human to human transmission [data], they refused to call it a pandemic. They basically discouraged travel bans.”

Below is a brief recap of how the WHO, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. responded to the coronavirus outbreak.

December 31 – Taiwan alerted the WHO that atypical pneumonia occurred in Wuhan, China, suggesting the possibility of human-to-human transmission. The WHO did not respond.

January 21 – When infections went out of control in China, the WHO downplayed the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan, saying there was “no clear evidence” to indicate “continued human-to-human transmission” and that it was unnecessary to put travel restrictions on China.

January 26 – The mayor of Wuhan revealed that more than 5 million people left Wuhan before the lockdown of the city on January 23. Among those who fled the city, more than 20,000 flew to Bangkok, 7,078 flew to Hong Kong, and 6,145 to Macau.

January 28 – WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus flew to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping, saying “China’s speed and massive scale of China’s moves are rarely seen in the world,” that “it shows China’s efficiency and the advantages of China’s system” and that “the experience of China is worth learning for other countries.”

January 30 – The coronavirus had spread to 18 countries outside of China, with a total of around 98 confirmed cases. The WHO declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” but still refused to recommend any travel or trade restrictions, mostly out of concern for China’s economic interests.

Tedros said, “Let me be clear: This declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China. On the contrary, WHO continues to have confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak.”

February 26 – When infection cases exploded in South Korea, Iran and Italy, Tedros still said “there is no evidence of community transmission of the virus.”

March 2 – when the coronavirus had spread to at least 65 countries, Tedros still claimed that it was not yet a “pandemic.”

It was not until March 11 that Tedros declared the outbreak a “global pandemic” in the face of undeniable evidence.

The delayed statement from him resulted in some member states losing precious and critical opportunities for prevention and suffering disastrous losses.

Repression of “Rumors” about the Infection

After the lockdown in Wuhan was lifted on April 8, it appeared that the pandemic had ended in China.

But only days later, clusters of coronavirus cases broke out in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, according to a “Warning Notice” issued by Heilongjiang Provincial Coronavirus Work Force on April 13.

Local residents also revealed that thousands of people were lined up outside hospital emergency departments. Some hospitals had to shut down because many doctors and nurses were infected as well. Harbin is now locked down for the second time.

Just like the Wuhan authorities who underreported their local cases, the authorities in Harbin did the same thing. According to an internal document obtained by The Epoch Times, the CDC of Daowai District in Harbin reported 34 positive cases on April 10, but only two confirmed cases appeared on the official tally.

The Heilongjiang Provincial Committee of Discipline Inspection issued an internal notice on April 20, requiring public servants to “keep work secrets” and not to discuss the local epidemic situation on the Internet or social media. Those who violate the rule would be dealt with as “spreading rumors.”

Meanwhile, the same cover-up policy still continues in Wuhan. In recent weeks, Dr. Yu Xiangdong, a frontline doctor in Hubei, was punished and demoted from his position as deputy director of Wuhan Central Hospital for voicing his personal views about wearing face masks, household management, the lockdown of the city, admission screening, CT detection and the use of unproven Chinese herbal medicine. He was accused of “defaming national epidemic prevention policies.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/5/19/185087.html

Chinese Communist Party’s Decades-Long Propaganda Breeds Next-Generation “Wolf Warriors”

June 13, 2020 | By a Minghui correspondent

Violent aggression and deception are two distinctive traits of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in both its rule of the Chinese people and its maneuvering on the international stage to gain the upper hand over its opponents. It has shown such traits more explicitly during the current pandemic.

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots.

“We culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans,” researchers stated.

Even though they could not say conclusively which individuals or groups are behind the bot accounts, the tweets appeared to be aimed at sowing division in America. “…It looks like it’s a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks,” said Professor Kathleen Carley at Carnegie Mellon University.

What the CCP’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in his tweet on March 12 and the Party’s behavior seem to affirm the assumption. In his tweet, Zhao claimed with little supporting evidence that “It might be US army [sic] who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” The CCP has mobilized tens of thousands of “network supervisors” (paid social media users who censor information and post pro-CCP content) to propagate the idea to instill hatred against the U.S. among the Chinese people.

Next-Generation “Wolf Warriors”

Its Twitter campaign is only one of many examples of how the CCP spreads propaganda and disinformation to the world. And it is during the coronavirus pandemic that the magnitude and depth of its propaganda campaign, both at home andabroad, are being put on full display.

For decades, the CCP has been systematically replacing traditional values with the fighting and “struggle” ideology of communism. Growing up on wolf’s milk, many young minds were nursed with high esteem and pride in the CCP’s “supreme leadership” while bearing a deep, xenophobic grudge against the West.

After the Wuhan coronavirus spread outside of China and more and more people became infected around the world, countless posts appeared on Chinese social media platforms that took great pleasure in the situation, such as “Go, coronavirus!” or “Well done!” There were also rumors such as how “Brazil’s president came down with the infection” and “won the first place in getting the virus among prominent world politicians,” and so on and so forth.

While some of the posts were made by bots or internet trolls as indicated above, many more were from China’s next generation of die-hard young digital warriors known as “Little Pinks,” who fanatically defend the CCP with name-calling rhetoric to attack anyone who is “anti-CCP” or “anti-China” by their definition.

At one point, a giant inflated arch was erected outside a well-known restaurant named “Grandma Yang’s Congee Store” in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, with a slogan on top reading “Wish Japan a Long-Lasting Epidemic.” A photo of the arch was quickly spread with cheers among social media groups in China.

When the British Prime Minister was fighting for his life due to coronavirus infection, more than 440,000 paid posters gave their thumbs-up. Even a state-controlled TV station congratulated the U.S. on “winning first place” when the U.S. became the country with most infected cases. Likewise, the cyber warriors celebrated when Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Japan and others were hit hard by the virus.

Taking a Look Back

To fully understand how the CCP’s propaganda machine grew to the size it is today, it might be helpful to look at its history.

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the CCP’s leading “Cultural Revolution Group” announced openly that “Newspapers can set a higher tone than government statements; the masses can set a higher tone than newspapers.” Such directives set the tone for the “Big Character Posters” encouraged by Mao Zedong to criticize, abuse, and frame “bourgeois counter-revolutionaries.” Many innocent people were so unscrupulously attacked that they resorted to suicide to escape the suffering, while the perpetrators did not need to bear any legal responsibility for their conduct because they were acting in the Party’s interest.

Such lawlessness was also extended overseas and to foreign embassies in Beijing, encouraged by Mao’s directive of March 1967 that Red Guards “should not only be internal revolutionaries but also international revolutionaries.” Embassies of “unfriendly countries” were violated, and their staff were harassed and beaten.

Most shocking of all was the siege and destruction of the British Charge D’affaires Office in Beijing on the evening of August 22, 1967. Thousands of rebels flocked in front of the office and held a mass meeting to “condemn British imperialist anti-China crimes” before setting fire to the building and cars. Charge d’Affaires Donald Hopson and his staff had retreated to a secure area but had to come out later when the building was set ablaze. They were beaten, kicked and humiliated. Donald Hopson was also forced to bow to Mao Zedong’s portrait to admit his “guilt.”

“The mob greeted us with howls of exultation and immediately set about us with everything they had,” Hopson later wrote about the violent incident. “We were hauled by our hair, half-strangled with our ties, kicked, and beaten on the head with long bamboo poles. I do not know how long this lasted.”

The CCP’s mouthpiece People’s Daily supported the lawless hoodlums and praised them in its report the next day: “Over 10,000 Red Guards and revolutionary masses in Peking surged to the British charge d’ affaires yesterday evening in a mighty demonstration against the British imperialists’ frantic fascist persecution of patriotic Chinese in Hong Kong…A meeting in condemnation of the British imperialist anti-China crimes was held in front of the office. The enraged demonstrators took strong actions against the British charge d’ affaires office.”

Fifty years have since passed. Though the West had long hoped that China would reform into a more democratic and open society along with its economic development, the thought has largely been reduced to wishful thinking.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/6/13/185494.html

Five Secrets of the CCP Pandemic Coverup Revealed in Leaked Documents

News Analysis by He Jian

June 23, 2020, Updated June 24, 2020

Internal documents from China’s National Health Commission (NHC), revealing comments from top health officials about the Chinese regime’s handling of the CCP virus outbreak, have exposed five key secrets about the authorities’ coverup.

The Epoch Times recently obtained a trove of documents, including an internal notice about a confidential teleconference on Jan. 14 with provincial and municipal health officials.

This confidential notice asked all relevant officials to attend an online training at 10 a.m. on Jan. 15.

The training session focused on how to proceed with the diagnosis and treatment of CCP virus infection, containment policy, and deployment of medical assistance in hospitals according to instructions of the NHC.

Another document is titled, “Teleconference talk on new coronavirus by director Jiao.” Jiao refers to Jiao Yahui from the commission’s Medical Administration and Supervision Department.

The document was a transcript of a presentation given by Jiao Yahui on Jan. 15 regarding the CCP virus.

According to an Associated Press (AP) report published on April 15, internal documents obtained by AP revealed that the head of China’s NHC, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the coronavirus situation during a confidential teleconference on Jan. 14 with provincial health officials.

The transcript obtained by The Epoch Times revealed that Jiao Yahui mentioned that “Director Ma gave an important talk on the teleconference report on the coronavirus situation yesterday morning.” From this comment, it can be inferred that the teleconference Jiao Yahui participated in was the one held on Jan. 15.

Five Secrets Revealed in the Transcript

During the teleconference’s training session, Jiao Yahui’s presentation disclosed five major key points that have been hidden by the regime.

1. The CCP was aware of the outbreak

At the beginning of the talk, Jiao asked “everyone to maintain a high degree of vigilance,” because “everyone’s perception of this work is indeed different (from what’s demanded), and there is a big gap.”

When Jiao reminded officials of all localities to “keep a high degree of vigilance,” it was during the peak season of travel during the Chinese New Year. At that time, the CCP vehemently denied human-to-human transmission of the virus, and eight doctors were punished for “rumor-mongering.” The truth of the epidemic was kept not only from the general public, but also from medical staff at the grassroots level.

Jiao Yahui, as a senior health care committee member and insider, issued warnings at internal meetings. This shows that the CCP was very clear on the fact that the CCP virus was highly contagious and concealing the truth would lead to a severe epidemic.

2. The regime prioritizes discipline and stability over public health

Before discussing the specific work, Jiao repeatedly emphasized discipline, “that is, we want to make the inside tight and the outside loose.”

Jiao said, “Don’t create panic and instability in society” because Chinese New Year is coming. She specifically emphasized, “Everyone should not disclose in the circle of friends and the internet, but only for internal use at work.”

Jiao’s statement confirmed what’s believed to be the regime’s decision to conceal the truth, to preserve the festive holiday atmosphere and social stability, at the cost of missing the golden time to prevent the spread of the outbreak.

A Hong Kong media report in February indicated that Xi Jinping was notified in early January, about the outbreak and prevention mechanisms, but at the Politburo Standing Committee meeting on Jan. 7, Xi requested such measures not to affect the festive atmosphere. An opportunity to prevent the spread of the epidemic was thus missed.

3. Infection prevention comes second

Jiao talked about the formation of a team of experts specializing in “respiratory, infectious, acute care, imaging, and examination,” and “preparations” of supplies including protective gear, disinfectants, and anti-virus products and medicines.

These requirements are clearly in preparation for human-to-human transmission. However, authorities did not publicly acknowledge the possibility of human transmission until Jan. 20.

4. The “rule” to confirm a case

It is worth mentioning what Jiao specifically emphasized: “to strictly implement the diagnosis (procedure) of the first case.”

It is required that diagnosis and publishing the first confirmed case cannot be done by local authorities. It must be “confirmed by state and published by province.” That is, the testing and confirmation will be done by China’s National Disease Control Center (CDC).

Jiao also emphasized that even after the first confirmed case is made, subsequent cases still need to be “reviewed and approved by the national CDC laboratory,” and the diagnosis and public announcement are organized by the province.

Jiao said, “This is a discipline.” She also said, “The first case in each province must be diagnosed by a national agency, and then released in the province.”

5. Avoid “social panic” caused by deaths

Jiao said, “Especially if there are many death cases, it will easily cause panic in society, panic about disease and an epidemic situation.” Jiao said about reducing the mortality rate, “this is the focus of our critical care.”

Political commentator Li Linyi pointed out that the critical care and mortality rate proposed by the NHC and Jiao Yahui are more to prevent “triggering social panic” than to respect and save life under the CCP rule. Li Linyi believes Jiao was following Xi Jinping’s instructions, that is, she was implementing a policy of maintaining stability, not following standard medical procedures.

Chengdu Epidemiologic Investigation Report Confirms Part of Jiao’s Talk

A Jan. 16 report from the CDC of Chengdu city, Sichuan Province, proved that the “rule” of prohibiting local authorities from confirming cases was strictly followed.

According to this report, a patient surnamed Yang developed a fever on Jan. 3 in Wuhan. He returned to Chengdu on Jan. 9 after receiving treatment. Afterward, he repeatedly developed a fever and sought medical treatment. He was admitted to Chengdu First People’s Hospital on Jan. 11 and was treated in isolation.

The report said that on Jan. 15, the hospital took a sample from Yang onsite and sent it to the CDCs of both Chengdu and Sichuan for testing. On Jan. 16, the provincial CDC reported that his sample tested positive in a nucleic acid test.

Based on this, the Chengdu CDC made a “preliminary investigation conclusion” in the report: “This case is an observation case and diagnosed as a new coronavirus-infected pneumonia case. Further confirmation is required to combine with the national CDC diagnosis.” In other words, the case was not confirmed at that time.

In fact, according to China’s Jan. 21 epidemic briefing, as of Jan. 20, only Hubei Province, Guangdong Province, Beijing, and Shanghai had “confirmed” cases. This shows that the national CDC failed to confirm Yang’s test on Jan. 16.

This report from Chengdu city confirmed part of Jiao’s talk—that is, local officials are not authorized to “confirm” cases. Even if the patient samples test positive by the provincial CDC, they have to wait for the national CDC’s review and approval to be recognized as confirmed cases.

The Epoch Times Reports Numerous Coverups by the CCP

The Epoch Times has repeatedly exposed internal documents that revealed the CCP’s coverup of the epidemic.

For example, a document from the regional health commission in northern China’s Inner Mongolia, revealed details about the NHC’s instructions on how local health agencies should deal with the new disease (now known as COVID-19).

It asked hospitals to take measures to prevent the disease from spreading inside their facilities and train staff on such actions. It also asked hospitals to set up fever clinics and to “pre-screen and triage” anyone experiencing a fever, to determine levels of urgency for treating patients.

The notice was marked “for internal use only, and cannot be distributed on the internet.”

Commentator Li Linyi said this document shows, that the CCP long knew that the virus was highly contagious and may spread rapidly, but insisted on concealing that information from the public.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-five-secrets-of-the-ccp-pandemic-coverup-revealed-in-leaked-documents_3399062.html

Comparing the Pandemic Cover-Up to the CCP’s Latest Persecution Campaign

June 27, 2020 | By a Falun Dafa practitioner outside of China

Every few years since it took power, the CCP has ordered a political campaign to target a specific group to renew its intimidation of the Chinese people. As qigong became trendy in the 1990s, Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual and meditation discipline based on the principles of “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance,” quickly stood out from thousands of qigong schools because of its free instruction, profound spiritual teachings, and powerful health benefits.

Even though the government initially promoted Falun Gong as it brought down the country’s healthcare costs, its overwhelming popularity and complete independence from government control eventually prompted the CCP to choose it as the target of a new political campaign. In 1999, ten years after the massacre of pro-democracy students at Tiananmen Square, the CCP ordered the persecution of Falun Gong.

Combining its decades of experience in carrying out political struggles with the fast development of modern technology, the CCP was able to make the persecution of Falun Gong more covert, cunning, and sophisticated than all its previous campaigns. With strict online censorship and the promise of economic benefits to the West, not only the Chinese but also the rest of the world have turned a blind eye to the massive arrests, detention, torture, and killing of Falun Gong practitioners.

Looking back at how the persecution of Falun Gong has evolved in the past two decades, one can’t help but see the astonishing similarity in the cover-up tactics used in both the persecution of Falun Gong and the coronavirus pandemic.

“If the rest of the world had been more aggressive in combating all this misrepresentation and cover-up and denial and counter factual narrative in dealing with organ transplant abuse; if the global system had insisted on transparency and accountability in dealing with organ transplant abuse; and if China had [faced] global pressure for transparency and accountability in its health system in dealing with organ transplant abuse, we wouldn’t have this coronavirus now,” said David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer who has investigated the CCP’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.

“One can assume the Chinese Communist Party did not intend to cause the spread of the coronavirus, but what they have been actively engaged in is willful blindness. And I would say that the rest of the world also has joined them in this willful blindness. And we are now all suffering its consequence.” Matas continued. [1]

Below, we look back at the CCP’s history in hopes that it can provide some clues in how to prevent this tragedy from happening again.

Censorship

Just as the CCP didn’t allow anyone with information about the coronavirus outbreak to disclose it, they also prevented Falun Gong practitioners from exposing the persecution of their faith. Both private and state-run media outlets, websites, and personal blogs were ordered not to publish information about the persecution.

Similarly, the authorities’ blocking the publication of coronavirus genome sequences is akin to its banning the publication of Falun Gong books and audiovisual materials. As a result, people couldn’t see authentic information, only government propaganda.

A Falun Gong practitioner told Minghui.org in 2011 that he attended a county-level work meeting about starting another round of editing local chronicles. The chief editor said, “It’s absolutely not allowed to put down a word related to the 610 Office (an extralegal agency created specifically to persecute Falun Gong) or Falun Gong in the articles. The international society is criticizing China’s human rights situation. The persecution of Falun Gong can’t appear in the local chronicles. In some areas, the articles were rejected and had to be re-edited just because they put down information related to Falun Gong.” [2]

According to an employee of Baidu, the largest search engine in China, a significant portion of “sensitive words” it censored were related to Falun Gong, such as variations of the name; torture methods described by practitioners; Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese lawyer known for defending Falun Gong practitioners; and the book Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, which sheds light on the CCP’s history of deception and killing.[3]

After arresting and torturing Falun Gong practitioners, the police often threaten them not to report the incident to Minghui.org, the central news and communications platform for Falun Gong practitioners around the world. Meanwhile, the police also monitor practitioners’ cellphones, landlines and emails in attempts to prevent them from raising awareness of the persecution. At the beginning of the pandemic, authorities monitored Dr. Li Wenliang’s social media and reprimanded him for “spreading rumors” about the outbreak.

But the censorship didn’t stop Falun Gong practitioners from getting the word out. With all information channels strictly controlled by the CCP, some practitioners chose to intercept TV signals to broadcast information about the persecution. Between 2001 and 2005, a total of 129 practitioners, nearly one-third female, were arrested for tapping into TV cables to get the word out. More than 85% of the practitioners, numbering 110, were given prison terms ranging from 3 to 20 years, with an average length of 12.5 years.

By 2017, 11 of the sentenced practitioners had died from torture-induced injuries or health problems, while 10 other practitioners have also lost their lives over the years. Some of the surviving practitioners are still serving time in prison, while others, though released, struggle to deal with the long-term injuries they sustained while in detention. [4]

Other practitioners have been sentenced and tortured simply for talking to people about Falun Gong or distributing literature about the persecution. Ms. Liu Wei, a resident of Tonghua City, Jilin Province, was arrested on August 17, 2011, for talking to people about Falun Gong. She was sentenced to 4.5 years twenty days later by Ji’an City Court. [5]

In another case, Mr. Wang Baoshan, a practitioner in Tangshan City, Hebei Province, was arrested at work on July 3, 2017, days after a banner reading “The World Needs Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance” was found in a neighborhood. He was later sentenced to 5.5 years and fined 20,000 yuan. [6]

Disinformation

Alongside the coverup of the persecution, the CCP also spread disinformation and propaganda to demonize Falun Gong practitioners and justify the persecution.

By the end of 2000–a year and a half after the CCP launched the suppression of Falun Gong–the campaign had failed to garner support among many of the CCP’s rank and file. Then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin had toured southern provinces earlier in 2000 to shore up support for the campaign among local leaders. Meanwhile, public support for the campaign had waned.

On January 23, 2001, five individuals allegedly set themselves on fire at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The entire scene was caught on camera from multiple angles. Beginning just hours after the event, state-controlled media was flooded with reports that the self-immolators were Falun Gong practitioners. These reports included grisly footage of the victims, portraying Falun Gong teachings as directly responsible for the tragedy.

In the next few weeks, state-run media continued to report on it non-stop, quickly turning people across China from respecting and sympathizing with Falun Gong to becoming infuriated and attacking the practice. Hate crimes targeting Falun Gong practitioners increased, and the CCP escalated its persecution with increased arrests, torture, killing, and forced organ harvesting.

Two decades later, the self-immolation hoax remains the biggest misconception most Chinese have about Falun Gong. [7]

Mislabeling

In the pandemic, coronavirus patients were recategorized as having other diseases in order for the CCP to cover up the severity of the outbreak. In the persecution of Falun Gong, however, such mislabels went both ways: healthy practitioners were labeled as mentally ill, taken to mental hospitals, and injected with toxic drugs, thus becoming real patients; meanwhile, others with mental illnesses but who never practiced Falun Gong were labeled as practitioners and said to have become crazy after learning the practice.

In another propaganda campaign against Falun Gong, the CCP fabricated “1,400 death cases” and claimed that these people died from practicing Falun Gong. A closer look at the cases revealed that some of the “victims” never existed, some never practiced Falun Gong, and one who was said to have refused medical intervention died in the arms of the physicians who treated her. [8]

In one example, Wang Anshou, a worker at the Taishan Machinery Factory in Xingtai City, Shandong Province, killed his parents with a spade when he experienced a relapse of a mental disorder. The Xingtai City People’s Court civil case verdict given on November 10, 1999, states, “It is the court’s observation that the defendant suffered from a mental disorder before he got married and had tried to hide the fact. After getting married, the defendant had recurrences of mental illness many times and he had problems for a long time trying to cure his mental disorder. The defendant killed his parents with a spade when his mental illness relapsed…” “The defendant’s wife’s firm request for a divorce is supported by the court.”

The CCP blamed Wang’s killing spree on his practicing Falun Gong, despite the fact that the court verdict says nothing about him practicing Falun Gong. In addition, he had had a mental disorder since 1988, four years before Falun Gong’s public introduction in 1992. [9]

Concealment

Practitioners’ resilience and persistent efforts to counteract the slander have led more people to see through the CCP’s lies. This turned into a dilemma for the Party. Beginning in 2003, the CCP adopted a strategy called “loose outside but tight inside,” turning the persecution from a public spectacle into a hidden, underground agenda. CCP insiders called it “a war without smoke.” [10]

After the persecution went underground, the CCP claimed that Falun Gong had been defeated and that it had disappeared from China, trying to direct international attention away from its human rights abuses. This tactic mirrors the CCP’s claim of victory in fighting off the virus.

Destruction of Evidence

In 2006, “Annie,” the ex-wife of a surgeon, became the first whistleblower to expose the CCP’s forcible removal of vital organs from living Falun Gong practitioners for sale to wealthy Chinese and foreigners. This explained why the number of organ transplants skyrocketed in China after the persecution of Falun Gong began, despite the lack of an established organ donation system.

Annie, who made her first public statement about the organ harvesting atrocity in March 2006, said that her husband told her that he had personally removed the corneas from approximately 2,000 Falun Gong prisoners in Sujiatun hospital in Shenyang City within two years before October 2003. He said that none of the cornea “donors” survived after the procedure because most of their vital organs were also removed and their bodies were then burned. [11]

In response to that allegations and international investigations about forced organ harvesting, the Heilongjiang Province CCP Office issued an announcement on March 25, 2006, ordering all relevant departments to destroy classified documents, much like how the CCP destroyed virus samples in the current pandemic.

The announcement mandates, “In destroying these documents, one shall make sure there is no way to recover the original documents. Documents on paper shall be burned or shredded and turned into pulp. The paper shredders used should meet the requirements for shredding classified documents. Shredded documents shall be sent to designated places to be destroyed. Two or more people are required to be present, and no one shall leave the scene before the documents are fully destroyed.” [12]

In fact, many more orders in the persecution were given verbally, especially those by the extralegal, Gestapo-like 610 Office, and those who received the orders were forbidden to record the instructions.

In its attempts to cover up the organ harvesting crime, the CCP established a voluntary deceased donor program in 2010 but received few registrations due to culture barriers discouraging Chinese from donating their organs. According to the China Organ Harvest Research Center (COHRC), “Official accounts indicate that the percentage of organs sourced from donations jumped from 23% in 2013 to 80% in 2014, with voluntary donations becoming the sole official organ source in 2015. It is not plausible that such a complete transition in this system could have taken place in just one or two years.” [13]

A study reported in BMC Medical Ethics concluded that “rather than the ‘untarnished voluntary system promised by officials,’ a ‘voluntary system appears to operate alongside the continued use of nonvoluntary donors (most plausibly prisoners) who are misclassified as ‘voluntary.’ The study also said the goal of the manufactured data was ‘to create a misleading impression to the international transplantation community about the successes of China’s voluntary organ donation reform, and to neutralize the criticism of activists who allege that crimes against humanity have been committed in the acquisition of organs for transplant.’”[14]

Redirecting Blame

Oftentimes, when countries like the United States condemn the CCP for its notorious human rights record, the CCP criticizes them for interfering with China’s internal affairs. Meanwhile, inside China, the CCP blames overseas Falun Gong practitioners who expose the persecution for “colluding with foreign anti-China forces” and “damaging China’s image.”

When CCP spokesperson Zhao Lijian blamed the U.S. Army for bringing the virus to Wuhan during the Military World Games in October 2019, one can’t help but remember how former CCP chairman Jiang Zemin personally handed out a pamphlet defaming Falun Gong to more than ten heads of state during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit held in New Zealand at the end of 1999. In France, Jiang Zemin labeled Falun Gong an “evil cult” to foreign media in order to advance his persecution policy. [15]

History repeats itself. Whatever the case, the “always glorious” CCP never admits wrongdoing. Sometimes it plays the victim, and sometimes it plays the savior of the world. But whatever face it puts on each time, its repressive and authoritarian nature will never change.

References

[1] Minghui.org Renowned Human Rights Lawyer: “We Are Suffering the Consequences of Turning a Blind Eye to China’s Human Rights Abuses”

[2] Minghui.org The Chinese Communist Party Dares Not Document the 610 Office’s Persecution of Falun Gong in Local Chronicles

[3] Jonathan Stray. “What China is Censoring This Week.” May 5, 2009.

[4] Minghui.org. Intercepting TV Signals in China: A Look Back at Falun Gong Practitioners’ Peaceful Resistance to the Persecution

[5] Minghui.org. Ms. Liu Wei Sentenced to Prison for Talking to People about Falun Gong

[6] Minghui.org. One Banner Leads to a Five-and-a-Half-Year Prison Term

[7] Minghui.org. Self-Immolation Hoax on Tiananmen Square

[8] Minghui.org. 1,400 Alleged Deaths

[9] Minghui.org. Exposing the Lies of “1,400 Death Cases”

[10] Minghui.org. Why the Persecution of Falun Gong Went from Public Spectacle to Hidden Agenda

[11] China Organ Harvest Research Center. “The Killing of Prisoners of Conscience for Organs in China – Whistleblowers.”

[12] Minghui.org. CCP Orders Destruction of Classified Documents

[13] Minghui.org. New Report: “Transplant Abuse Continues in China Despite Claims of Reform”

[14] Minghui.org. New Religious Freedom Report Highlights Minghui’s Daily Reporting on Persecution of Falun Gong in China

[15] Minghui.org. The Collusion of Jiang Zemin with the Chinese Communist Party to Persecute Falun Gong

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/6/27/185663.html

Chinese Communist Party’s Disregard for Human Life Revealed in One Catastrophe after Another

July 25, 2020 | By Xing Min(Minghui.org)

While the CCP virus (the novel coronavirus named after the Chinese Communist Party) is still ravaging China, 26 Chinese provinces are being hit by severe flooding.

In a month of the ongoing flooding, there has been very little action or response from the Chinese communist government or reports by the state controlled media.

Some netizens asked on social media, “How can the mainstream media be collectively muffled while over ten million people are suffering? Why do the media keep focusing on news of the United States rather than reporting on the domestic flooding? Who is the central TV station serving?”

So far the only governmental assistance was the allocation of 150 million yuan to three provinces, which is about 0.5 to 2 yuan per capita in those regions and not even amounting to the cost of a single meal. The CCP propaganda has been using the pandemic as an excuse for not providing more rescue and emergency resources to combat the flood.

In early June, the Chinese government suspended debt repayment from 77 countries. According to the Global Times, China has loaned over six trillion yuan in the recent four years to developing countries in Africa. This figure is forty thousand times the money allotted to combat flooding.

Every level of government in China has a plaque hanging on their headquarter building that says “People’s Government.” However, such plaques are merely a disguise, and they are truly the CCP’s government that only serves the Party’s interests. History has made this abundantly clear for all of us.

A Forgotten Dam Failure 45 Years Ago

A TV program by the Discovery channel in 2005 revealed a list of man-made disasters. At the top of the list was not the Chernobyl nuclear accident, rather it was the Banqiao Dam failure in 1975 that was rarely known to Chinese people.

According to Discovery, the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province collapsed due to heavy rain on August 8, 1975, flooding nine counties of an area 150 kilometers by 75 kilometers. Over 100,000 floating corpses were collected and another 140,000 died from the famine and plague that followed the flood.

At the time when the dam needed an emergency discharge, the local authorities telephoned their superior for permission but did not get a response. As disclosed by Ji Pomin, son of the then vice prime minister Ji Dengkui, when a local official called Deng Xiaoping (then Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army) and reported the urgent status, Deng’s family told the official that he had gone to sleep. They said that he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t be woken up.

But Ji later found out Deng wasn’t sick or sleeping at that time. Instead, he was playing mahjong with others at the residence of Wan Li, another top CCP official, that night. Deng played until five o’clock the next morning.

After repeated urgent calls for permission for flood discharge went unanswered, the disaster finally came and the dam collapsed.

In addition to the unnecessary delay in the flood discharge, the dam had inherent flaws. The Banqiao Dam was one of the many that were constructed in the early 1950’s as a product of the Great Leap Forward movement. Under the irresponsible policy, the dam was constructed in a rush with little quality control and lacked regular maintenance in the years after it was built. In times of urgent need, only five out of a total of 17 floodgates were able to lift properly and the rest were all rusted shut.

News of such a man-made disaster was suppressed by the CCP authorities. No memorial monument was built in the name of the perished. Instead, the government built one to praise and commemorate the feat of the CCP combating the flood.

Rescue That Came 72 Hours After Wenchuan Earthquake

A deadly earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 in Wenchuan County of Sichuan Province. While many people were watching closely the development of the situation, only 1,000 bare-handed soldiers arrived 42 hours later to rescue over a hundred thousand people who were buried under rubble.

Even toward the end of the most precious 72-hour period post earthquake, the total number of troops in the epicenter region was less than 10,000. In most instances, a minimum of three people are required on average to pull one out of the rubble.

About 79 hours after the earthquake, the military’s engineering troops finally began to repair and restore the roads leading into Wenchuan County. Most of those buried had already died by then. Also, 34 out of 58 affected towns did not get any rescue personnel whatsoever.

Just like what had happened in previous disasters, the CCP ordered all media in China to praise the government for days after the earthquake. The deaths of over a hundred thousand Chinese people were somehow turned into another episode of glorifying the CCP’s governance.

The CCP’s Nature and Chinese People’s Way Out

The CCP has never taken any responsibility for the man-made or natural disasters under its rule. They are very clear that if someone admits any wrongdoing, the CCP’s perfect image would be blemished and their control would be breached.

What is the fundamental nature of the CCP? The Nine Commentaries on Communist Party has revealed it to us.

“The Communist Party does not hold universal standards for human nature. The concepts of good and evil, as well as all laws and rules, are arbitrarily manipulated. Communists do not allow murder, except for those categorized as enemies by the Communist Party. Filial piety is welcomed, except for those parents deemed class enemies. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness are all good, but not applicable when the Party is not willing or doesn’t want to consider these traditional virtues. The Communist Party completely overthrows the universal standards for human nature, and builds itself on principles that oppose human nature.”

“The Chinese traditionally believe in the unity of heaven and human beings. Laozi said in Dao de Jing (Tao-Te Ching), ‘Man follows the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Dao, and the Dao follows what is natural’. Human beings and nature exist within a harmonious relationship in the continuous cosmos. The communist party is a kind of being. However, it opposes nature, heaven, earth and mankind. It is an evil specter against the universe.”

“The Communist movement was then introduced to China as an experiment, and the CCP has set itself above all, conquering all in its path, thereby bringing endless catastrophe to China.”

“To eliminate from our lives the iniquitous doctrines instilled by the CCP, to discern the CCP’s utterly unscrupulous nature, and to restore our human nature and conscience— this is the first and essential step on the path toward a smooth transition to a society free from the Communist Party.”

“Even though the CCP appears to possess all the resources and violent apparatus in the country, if every citizen believes in the power of the truth and safeguards morality, the evil specter of the CCP will lose the foundation for its existence. All resources may instantly return to the hands of the just. That is when the rebirth of China will take place.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/25/186017.html

The CCP’s Deep Infiltration into Social Media and News Media in the Free World

Sept. 8, 2020 | By Qing Yu and Qin Yan (Minghui.org)

Kalen Keegan, a college student at the University of Nebraska, had her Twitter account hacked. Her old posts disappeared and were replaced by content accusing protesters in the Hong Kong democratic movement of “fomenting a ‘color revolution’ backed by an ‘anti-Chinese American conspiracy,’ a message aligned with the tone of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As time went on, the posts were updated to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, again closely following the CCP’s narratives.

Above was a case covered by News Break in a March 2020 article titled “How China Built a Twitter Propaganda Machine Then Let It Loose on Coronavirus.” Since August 2019, the authors of the article have “tracked more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts involved in a coordinated influence campaign with ties to the Chinese government.”

Hijacked Social Media Accounts

These hacked accounts were used to spread propaganda and disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak, the Hong Kong protests, and other topics of interest to the CCP. The owners of these hijacked accounts came from all walks of the life. “They included a professor in North Carolina; a graphic artist and a mother in Massachusetts; a web designer in the U.K.; and a business analyst in Australia,” the article wrote.

The article couldn’t tell “whether the current fake account holders hacked the accounts themselves or purchased them from elsewhere,” but it indicates that the true scale of the CCP influence campaign is likely much bigger than previously thought. “Our tracking suggests that the accounts we identified comprise only a portion of the operation,” the article added.

The author was able to identify at least one company behind some of these hacked accounts. OneSight (Beijing) Technology Ltd. is an internet marketing company based in Beijing and “held a contract to boost the Twitter following of China News Service, the country’s second-largest state-owned news agency. The news service operates under the United Front Work Department, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party long responsible for influence operations in foreign countries.”

The article found that operators of these accounts often work together. For example, one fake account may have many other fake accounts as followers, and even the same approved comment could be reused many times in various accounts for numerous articles.

The operators of the fake accounts also offer payments to prominent Twitter users with large followings to post pro-CCP videos. Chinese dissident Baidiucao in Australia, who had 70,000 followers on Twitter, was once approached by an account that claimed to be a cultural exchange company and offered 1,700 yuan (or $240) per post.

Propaganda in the Orwellian State

British author George Orwell wrote a novel in 1949 titled Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he explored the consequences of an imaginary totalitarian regime. One slogan used by the ruling party was, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It means that because the Inner Party has the capability to rewrite history, it can manipulate public opinion. Similarly, due to its totalitarian power, it believes it has the authority to rewrite history.

Winston Smith, a main character of the book, works in the Ministry of Truth. His responsibility is rewriting historical records that conforms to the Party’s ever-changing views of history. To some degree, it has functions similar to the CCP’s Propaganda Department (later renamed to the Publicity Department) and the United Front. With censorship and lies inside China, as well as disinformation outside China, the CCP actively pushes false narratives to Chinese people and the rest of the world.

Interestingly, the Orwellian state also has several ministries that resemble how the CCP mistreats people. For example, the Ministry of Plenty rations and controls food in the name of raising the standard of living while causing starvation in reality. Under the CCP, officials exaggerated grain production by tens or hundreds of times during the Great Leap Forward movement in 1958, causing the collection of a high levy and leading to the starvation deaths of at least 45 million people between 1959 and 1961.

In Orwell’s novel, Thought Police constantly surveil citizens through two-way televisions and hidden cameras. The Ministry of Love monitors and arrests both real and imagined dissidents. In China, officials track people through social media such as WeChat and countless surveillance cameras. Dissidents are suppressed and arrested, and people of faith such as Falun Gong practitioners are detained and tortured for their belief in the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.

White Paper: Overt and Covert Influences from the CCP

The Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University published a white paper in July with the title of “Telling China’s Story: The Chinese Communist Party’s Campaign to Shape Global Narratives.” This 52-page report analyzed how the CCP uses its extensive apparatus to “advance both its domestic monopoly on power and its claims to global leadership.”

Authors of the white paper include Renee DiTesta, Technical Research Manager from the Stanford Internet Observatory, and John Pomfret, former Beijing Bureau chief for the Washington Post.

The report started with an anecdote from the Korean War in which the CCP claimed in 1952 that the U.S. had waged germ warfare that led to the outbreak of bubonic plague, anthrax, and cholera. “[The CCP] established a base of operations in Prague from which they cultivated Western leftist and pacifist sympathizers who amplified their claims in Western media,” wrote the report.

Although this episode has become history, such tactics from the CCP continues. “The CCP succeeded in clouding the record so that belief in American perfidy endures in certain circles,” wrote the report. “This disinformation campaign blended overt propaganda and the recruitment of credulous authorities to amplify and legitimate CCP talking points, seed doubt and suspicion, and build up the domestic and international standing of the CCP at the expense of its adversaries.”

To dominate narratives in international society, the CCP has continually expanded its overseas operations. Xinhua has become one of the largest news agencies in the world, while CGTN operates through dozens of foreign bureaus and broadcasts in seven languages. “China Radio International has contracts to broadcast from more than a dozen radio stations in the United States alone, while China Daily places inserts in newspapers such as the Washington Post, for as much as $250,000 an issue,” the report explained.

It was estimated that the CCP has spent at least 45 billion yuan (or $6.6 billion) on overseas propaganda since 2009. In 2011, Xinhua rented a large digital bulletin board overlooking Times Square at the price of $300,000 to $400,000 per month. Panda, Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Three Gorges soon became buzz words for the CCP to market itself.

After an international court ruled in July 2016 over contested waters in South China Sea in favor of the Philippines, the CCP immediately launched a campaign through the Times Square bulletin board and played a video lasting three minutes and twelve seconds for 120 times per day for 12 days straight.

Overseas Agents Who Work for the CCP

As a result of extensive investment and infiltration by the CCP, many overseas news media—including those in Chinese—yielded to the regime and now serve as its mouthpiece.

“Thirty years ago, Chinese-language media outside of China reflected a diverse range of political perspectives. Today, after significant investment from China and pro-CCP interests, Chinese language publications that echo and amplify CCP narratives dominate,” wrote the white paper.

The regime also put in more effort to gain influence in international news media. “China’s government has brought hundreds of journalists from developing countries to China for training courses that showcase the economic and technological achievements of China’s governance model,” the white paper continued. “The Chinese government typically pays their expenses, offers stipends, and provides generous accommodations and sightseeing opportunities, which return dividends in goodwill and favorable coverage when the journalists return home.”

This strategy dates back to before the CCP took power in 1949. American journalist Edgar Snow interviewed Mao Zedong in 1930 and, based on the one-sided story, published the book of Red Star Over China. This book misled many Chinese and Westerners to support communism.

Snow died in 1972, and his wife, Lois Wheeler, did not truly understand the CCP until the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The money she donated to some families of the victims was confiscated. As she visited China again in 2000 with her son, planning to see a mother whose son died in the Massacre, “they were surrounded at the gate of People’s University in Beijing… at least two dozen plainclothes police officers, filmed surreptitiously and prevented [them] from entering,” reported an article in the New York Times in April 2018 with the title of “Lois Wheeler Snow, Critic of Human Rights Abuses in China, Dies at 97.”

Compared to decades ago, the CCP now has much more influence on public opinion. This includes traditional news oulets and various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Wang Liqiang, a Chinese spy who fled to Australia, stated that he had participated in the CCP’s meddling in the 2018 Taiwanese local elections by creating 200,000 fake social media accounts. In addition, a Hong Kong front company created twenty other “internet companies” to attack the political party that the CCP disliked. Wang said he also gave 1.5 billion RMB (over $200 million USD) to Taiwanese media properties to promote a candidate that the CCP favored for the Mayor of Kaohsiung.

A State Apparatus That Produces Lies

Although Chinese scientists confirmed the coronavirus infection in December 2019, the CCP did not acknowledge it until January 20, three days before the lockdown of the epicenter Wuhan. One day after the World Health Organizations (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian bluntly blamed the United States for being the origin of the virus.

Amplified through Twitter, WeChat, and TikTok, and pro-CCP media and agents claimed the virus came from Fort Detrick, a U.S. military base in Maryland. Although it is widely known as a hoax outside China, it deceived many people inside China and sparked confusion in the international community.

Since the totalitarian CCP regime mobilizes the entire state apparatus for disinformation and lying, the consequences are severe. “The Chinese Communist Party’s initial mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent attempts to exploit the crisis have produced enduring problems for the rest of the world,” wrote an article in Foreign Affairs on August 11 with the title “An Answer to Aggression: How to Push Back Against Beijing.”

“But the CCP’s behavior has also helped clarify the threat that China poses to the security, prosperity, and well-being of other countries,” the article continues. “The United States can no longer afford to treat China as just another trading partner.”

“Big brother is watching you” is a well-known slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In today’s China, however, the state-of-art censorship has surpassed what was described in the novel. From various social media platforms to internet control, from omnipresent surveillance cameras to mandatory facial scans even when using public bathrooms, the intensity of monitoring and control has reached an unprecedented level.

Those who dare to challenge the CCP often face serious punishment. Ren Zhiqiang, a property tycoon, has been detained and faces charges for criticizing the CCP leadership. Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun was fired for expressing unfavorable opinions about the CCP. Scholars such as Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin have been missing for months after criticizing the CCP for covering up the coronavirus outbreak.

Inside China, Falun Gong practitioners have been the largest group persecuted for their faith by the CCP. Because of the CCP’s recent disinformation campaigns, more government officials in the international community have come to understand the Chinese regime’s threat to the world. Members of the Virginia General Assembly, the oldest continuous lawmaking body in the United States since 1619, wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on July 29, urging him to help stop forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China.

“We are writing in solidarity with survivors and those who can no longer speak for themselves. We ask for your leadership, and the considerable leverage of the United States, to ensure that next year we are not observing 22 years of persecution,” wrote the letter.

http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/9/8/186678.html

Chinese Communists’ Germ Warfare Research

The Epoch Times Commentary by Betsy McCaughey

March 31, 2021

The Chinese Communist Party is good at hiding mass killings. There are no monuments in China to the millions who were starved during the Great Leap Forward under Mao in the 1960s or to the throngs mowed down at Tiananmen Square. Now, the CCP is covering up the origins of COVID-19, which has killed 2.7 million so far.

The CCP’s fingerprints are all over the joint World Health Organization-China report on the virus’s origins leaked Monday. China barred international scientists from collecting data, inspecting labs, scrutinizing medical records, or even having unmonitored talks with Chinese scientists. WHO even gave China veto power over the report’s contents. It’s a coverup.

The report argues that the virus probably spread from bats to another animal species (yet to be identified, despite testing thousands of species) and then leaped to humans in the city of Wuhan.

A tragic fluke of nature that coincidentally unfolded in the only city in China with a maximum security research lab investigating viruses.

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doesn’t buy it. The most likely scenario, he says, is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. A mountain of circumstantial evidence supports that idea, though international investigators are being blocked from confirming it.

Wuhan Institute scientists collected viral samples from bat caves, including the virus most closely resembling the cause of COVID-19. At the lab, scientists used mice genetically engineered to have lungs like humans and infected these mice with the virus.

In the fall of 2019, just before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute took its virus data offline, according to the MIT Technology Review. The Institute is stonewalling.

The WHO-China report argues that a lab leak is an “extremely unlikely” explanation for the pandemic because lab accidents are “rare.” That’s laughable. They’re not rare. Viruses can leak out of high security labs on workers’ clothing or accidentally infect a worker. In 2018, U.S. embassy personnel in Beijing alerted the State Department of the low safety standards at the Wuhan Institute, but China resisted international monitoring.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cautions that “most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of COVID-19.”

Though Pompeo is suggesting an accident, Chinese researchers admit their research goal is biological weapons, including viruses that “target specific ethnicities.” That’s horrifying.

The United States must prepare for this threat. Biological warfare is a top priority of China’s President Xi Jinping. Defending against it has to be a top U.S. priority.

Yet, Washington pols are complacent. The United States lacks an extensive system of surveillance testing. When commercial and government labs test specimens for routine medical reasons, they should also be randomly sampling for new viruses and bacteria invisibly invading the country. That will alert the nation early, instead of being caught off guard when emergency rooms are suddenly flooded with patients sickened by an unknown disease.

The CARES Act, passed last March, provides only $500 million for surveillance testing, a token 1/60th of 1 percent of the trillions spent in response to COVID this past year. Washington pols have used the pandemic as a pretext to ramp up spending on their favorite causes—from teachers unions and performing arts centers to high-spending Democratic-run state and city governments—instead of preparing the nation to defend against future viral attacks.

There will be future pandemics. But information about China’s bioweaponry research is a valuable wake-up call. Now politicians must heed it.

Instead, Democrats in Maryland attacked Redfield on Monday, insisting that blaming China for the pandemic “put a big bull’s-eye” on people of Asian descent. That’s nonsense. Hate crimes against Asian Americans are deplorable, but the U.S. government must not be deterred from seeking the truth about the pandemic or China’s biological weaponry.

Most Chinese Americans understand that China is a rogue nation with no respect for human life. That’s why they choose to live here.

Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., is a political commentator, constitutional expert, syndicated columnist, and author of several books, including “The Obama Health Law: What It Says and How to Overturn,” and “The Next Pandemic.” She is also a former lieutenant governor of New York.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-communists-germ-warfare-research_3757183.html

E vidence Reveals That Military Team Collaborated With Lab Where COVID-19 Pandemic Originated

BY NICOLE HAO   May 3, 2021

The Chinese regime has said its controversial virology institute had no relationship with the military, but the institute worked with military leaders on a government-sponsored project for almost a decade.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology  (WIV) participated in a project, sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)—a regime-funded scientific research institution—from 2012 to 2018. The project was comprised of a team of five military and civil experts, who conducted research at WIV labs, military labs, and other civil labs leading to “the discovery of animal pathogens [biological agents that causes disease] in wild animals.”

The WIV is located in central China’s Wuhan City, the COVID-19 pandemic ground zero. As an advanced virology institution, the WIV has the only P4 lab—the highest biosafety level lab—in China and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus , commonly known as novel coronavirus, is “96 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus,” Chinese researchers wrote in a research article ( pdf ) published in February 2020.

In recent months, the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry and Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her research on coronaviruses of bat origin, denied there is a connection between the WIV and military, and said that no WIV researchers were infected with COVID-19.

However, according to an investigation conducted by the U.S. State Department, “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

“The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” states a State Department fact sheet .

However, Shi denied that the WIV engaged in research with the Chinese military. “I don’t know of any military work at the WIV. That information is incorrect,” Shi said at a public webinar on March 23. Shi didn’t mention that the WIV was used by a Chinese military medical team in early 2020 for developing COVID-19 vaccines.

Shi told Science magazine  in July 2020 that no pathogen leaks or personnel infections had occurred. The magazine reported that according to Shi, “there is ‘zero infection’ among staff or students with SARS-CoV-2 [2019 novel coronavirus] or SARS-related viruses.”

In late March, overseas Chinese media reported that three WIV staff members started to have symptoms similar to COVID-19 as early as November 2019. Soon thereafter, Chinese state-run media China News reported that the news was based on rumors.

China News reported that a Chinese specialist told the WHO investigation team—which visited China in February to investigate the origin of the CCP virus—that cases dating back to 2019 were patients at WIV-related hospitals, rather than members of WIV staff.

The NSFC put research results about the animal pathogens on its website on Feb. 1, 2018. It also stated that the project “discovered over 1,640 types of new viruses by using the metagenomics technology,” and the research was performed by a civil and military team.

Cao Wuchun, 58, a member of the project’s military team, is a colonel and top epidemiologist in the Chinese military. He has been a researcher at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences since September 2017, but has worked there for the last 21 years. He served as the academy’s director from 2007 to 2017, according to his official resume. Cao served on the team as second in command to Major General Chen Wei , China’s top biowarfare expert.

On Jan. 26, 2020, Cao accompanied Chen to Wuhan and they took over command of the WIV. Chinese state-run media reported, at that time, that the main purpose of the military take-over was to develop a vaccine against the CCP virus.

Cao also co-led the NSFC project with Shi (the WIV virologist), and the Chen-Cao team had taken over the WIV when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan.

The other three team leaders of the NSFC project were Liang Guodong, Zhang Yongzhen, and Xu Jianguo, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Among them, Xu was the project leader or the manager of the other four team members.

Xu, 69, is the director of the CDC’s state key laboratory for communicable disease prevention and control, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and director of the Research Institute of Public Health at Nankai University. Xu’s resume states that he received $987,820 in funding from the NSFC for the project.

As one of China’s top virus specialists, Xu went to Wuhan to serve as a team leader in early 2020. On Jan. 14, 2020, Xu told China’s Science magazine, “All 763 close contacts aren’t infected. The pandemic isn’t severe, and it might stop next week if there’s no more new infection.”

In fact, Wuhan people started to crowd inside hospitals for their pneumonia symptoms from early January 2020, but the regime refused to recognize  that the virus can transmit among humans until Jan. 20, 2020. The late announcements fooled people into traveling and allowed the virus to spread all around the world from Wuhan.

Bat Woman

Shi, 56, directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV. In 2000, she received her Ph. D. degree in virology from the University of Montpellier II in France, after studying there for four years.

Shi started to investigate coronaviruses when China suffered from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002 and 2003.

Beijing authorities said the SARS virus was transmitted from civets (a meat-eating animal) to humans in southern China’s Guangdong Province in November 2002, and spread to other Chinese cities and neighboring Hong Kong because the regime didn’t allow people to discuss this infectious disease in the first two months. SARS eventually killed at least  774 people, and infected 8,096 people from 31 countries.

Chinese state-run CCTV reported on Dec. 29, 2017, that Shi and her team didn’t believe that civets were the natural hosts of SARS, and were only the intermediate host. They started to investigate bats from different Chinese regions in 2004.

In 2011, Shi’s team detected a SARS-like virus from bats living in a cave in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. They then named this virus “WIV1” and conducted further studies. CCTV didn’t report the details of the virus, but said Shi’s team continued to get samples from the same cave for five years.

Since 2015, Shi’s team has been publishing  their test results in international magazines, including Virologica Sinica, Nature, and Lancet.

Weeks after the Chinese regime publicly announced the COVID-19 outbreak, Shi and her team published an article in Nature, linking COVID-19 to bats.

Shi’s team discovered the bat coronavirus in the bats that they had collected from an abandoned copper mine in Tongguan township, Mojiang county in Yunnan Province. The WIV researchers had visited the mine for several days even after six workers had gotten infected while working there.

On July 15, 2020, virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson from Ithaca, N.Y., co-published an article  in Independent Science News after translating a 66-page master’s thesis by Li Xu, a Chinese medical doctor who treated the miners and sent their tissue samples to the WIV for testing.

Li’s thesis was submitted in May 2013. He wrote that six miners removed the bat feces from a mine in April 2012. After working there for 14 days, all workers felt sick with severe symptoms, such as high fever, dry cough, and sore limbs.

Kunming Medical University, School of Clinical Medicine, where Li studied, received and treated the miners. Finally, three of the miners died. Their samples were sent to WIV for further investigation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/evidence-reveals-that-military-team-collaborated-with-lab-where-covid-pandemic-originated_3798920.html

Mysterious Origins of COVID-19 Raise Some Alarming Possibilities

Victor Davis Hanson

June 17, 2021

Commentary

For over a year, the American establishment and media have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” conceded that the Wuhan lab may well have been the most likely genesis.

Why the abrupt change?

For one thing, Donald Trump is no longer president.

There is now no need for progressives to declare everything that Trump once asserted as truth to be a lie. That includes Trump’s insistence that the Wuhan lab, not a wet market full of sliced-up bats, was the source of the outbreak.

The recent release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails, along with new information about the gain-of-function research by Dr. Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, make it clear that U.S. taxpayer dollars were being funneled to the Chinese for coronavirus research in Wuhan.

So now what?

We are left with a number of lose-lose scenarios regarding China’s efforts to lie about the origins of COVID-19.

Will China continually deny what is appearing to be undeniable? Perhaps. We should remember that this is a country with a Communist Party hierarchy that once killed many millions of its own citizens under Mao Zedong, and with a current apparat that has put 1 million Muslim Uyghurs into internment camps.

A stonewalling China likely will conclude that the risk of appearing guilty for causing one of the greatest “natural” global disasters in a century is not nearly as destructive to its interests as admitting it.

Will China then wait us out, denying the obvious facts, until weary Americans move onto another of their media frenzies?

Or, could China confess that the virus was birthed in the Wuhan lab but claim its appearance was a “joint” effort with the United States? The Chinese could insist that combined efforts with the United States were aimed at finding a “cure” for coronavirus epidemics, and thus China should not be blamed—or at least not solely blamed.

China could claim that it, too, was misled by its own sloppy researchers. It might even assert that its prior code of silence was meant to shield the role of U.S. funders of what turned into a pandemic disaster.

Americans then would end up wondering to what degree our own doctors and institutions not only lied to us throughout the crisis but, in some bizarre way, may have shared responsibility for engineering the virus.

Or, Chinese officials could privately wink and nod to our intelligence and military communities that their researchers were in fact pursuing “legitimate” viral gain-of-function research when a terrible Chernobyl-like accident took place. They might unofficially remind our officials that such things have also happened at Bhopal, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.

In back channels, Beijing might express regret over the resulting global economic catastrophe, the millions dead, the even more millions sickened, the billions of lives harmed by the lockdown, and the 2020–2021 American political, economic, social, and cultural meltdown.

China additionally might lament its “mistaken” lack of transparency and the “confusion” that accounted for misleading the world. And yet, China would still smile and promise off the record that such an unforeseen disaster would never, ever happen again.

We tend to block out the unthinkable. It’s possible more information could leak out that the virus was a weaponized creation of civilian virologists and the Chinese military. How the virus escaped would not be clear, but millions the world over would suspect the worst of any involvement of the Chinese military.

In all these scenarios, we are left with the suspicion that an embryonic engineered virus was mysteriously released, doing more damage to the Western world than any weapon deliberately employed since World War II. And we will become terrified that it could happen again. More importantly, we still have no idea what to do: whether to act in a punitive or deterrent fashion, or both or neither.

Washington strategists are no doubt gaming all these rumors and unthinkables.

Many Americans are naively hopeful that COVID-19 was a one-off, laboratory accident. But some are terrified that it was a proto-bioweapon that, regardless of whether it was accidentally released, became a “never let a crisis go to waste” moment.

Victor Davis Hanson is a conservative commentator, classicist, and military historian. He is a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Hanson has written 16 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” and “The Case for Trump.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mysterious-origins-of-covid-19-raise-some-alarming-possibilities_3862792.html

Chinese Scientist Who Shipped Deadly Pathogens to Wuhan Held 2 Patents

Documents withheld in case possibly related to espionage, biological warfare

Lloyd Billingsley

June 26, 2021 Updated: June 27, 2021

Commentary

“The high-profile scientist who was fired from Canada’s top infectious disease lab collaborated with Chinese government scientists on inventions registered in Beijing, but closely related to her federal job,” reports National Post reporter Tom Blackwell.

Xiangguo Qiu was “a long-time federal civil servant when the patents were registered in 2017 and 2019 for innovations related to the Ebola and Marburg viruses, key focuses of her work at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML),” according to Blackwell’s article. Qiu shipped a load of the deadly pathogens from the NML to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a likely source of the virus that causes COVID-19.

Epoch Times Photo

The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Canadian government employees cannot file a patent outside the country without permission from the health minister. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) refused to disclose whether Qiu had obtained such permission and whether the PHAC was even aware of the patents. The whereabouts of Qui and her husband Keding Cheng are unknown and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) will not disclose if they know where they are.

As CTV News reports, PHAC President Iain Stewart “refused to provide further paperwork containing more details related to why scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were removed from [NML] in July 2019 and then later fired by the agency.”

Canadian officials called it a policy breach but others see a case of espionage related to biological warfare. The “main culprit” behind the breach is Qiu, according to “China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu,” a January 2020 paper from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA).

According to the paper, the “outstanding Chinese scientist” came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996 and until recently headed the Special Pathogens program at the NML. Since 2006, Dr. Qiu has been “studying powerful viruses—Ebola most of all—at the NML.” The viruses that were “surreptitiously shipped from the NML to China” include Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, and Hendra.

“China and Viruses” author Dr. Dany Shoham, a microbiologist and expert in biological and chemical warfare, says Dr. Qiu “maintains a close bond with China and visits frequently, and many Chinese students from a notable range of Chinese scientific facilities have joined her at the NML over the past decade.” Of those facilities, four are believed to be involved in Chinese biological weapons development: the Institute of Military Veterinary, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Changchun; Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Chengdu Military Region; Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei; and the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing.

One of the graduate students Qiu and Cheng brought to the NML, Radio Canada reports, was Feihu Yan, from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences. PHAC spokesperson Eric Morrissette declined to answer questions about Yan’s work at the sensitive Winnipeg lab.

Security expert Christian Leuprecht of Canada’s Royal Military College and Queen’s University told Radio Canada that “China has a very active, very aggressive and extremely dangerous bioweapons program. So all the research that’s being generated here could easily be reappropriated by the Chinese authorities to advance rather nefarious causes.” And “It appears that what you might well call Chinese agents infiltrated one of the highest prized national security elements when it comes to biosecurity and biodefence.”

Qui and Cheng were last seen publicly in February 2020. They have been absent from their Canadian properties, reportedly worth nearly $2 million. According to former co-workers, Dr. Qiu has bragged about owning a mansion in China. If the RCMP has any clue where Qiu and Cheng might be, they aren’t saying, and on all fronts, Canadian officials are withholding crucial documents.

Dr. Qui holding Chinese patents “should be a cautionary tale,” University of Windsor professor Myra Tawfik, a specialist in intellectual property, told The National Post. On the prospect of espionage related to biological warfare, Canadian Health Minister Patty Hajdu claimed, “We will never put Canadians’ national security at risk.” If Canadians thought their government had already done so it would hard to blame them.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of “Yes I Con: United Fakes of America,” “Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation,” “Hollywood Party,” and other books. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Frontpage Magazine, City Journal, The Wall Street Journal, and American Greatness. Billingsley serves as a policy fellow with the Independent Institute.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/missing-chinese-scientist-who-shipped-deadly-pathogens-to-wuhan-held-2-patents_3873518.html

Timeline of China’s COVID Vaccine Development Raises Serious Concerns

Cheng Xiaonong, Contributor

July 5, 2021

Commentary

Ever since the CCP virus began spreading in China around the fall of 2019, its vaccine development was once ahead of the rest of the world. However, as one analyzes the timeline of the R&D process of Chinese-made vaccines, a series of anomalies occur, prompting the international community to question the origin of COVID-19. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) vaccine production plan reveals the regime’s attempt of profiting from the pandemic.

The Starting Date of China’s Vaccine R&D

According to official data, the first case of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, was identified on Dec. 1, 2019; and by Jan. 21, 2020, only 440 people were confirmed to have contracted the virus. On Jan. 15, 2020, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s 8th public health report stated that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found so far.” If this information was accurate, then it appears the regime did not expect the virus to spread globally and weren’t prepared for such an event.

However, on March 25 this year, an article in the state-run media Beijing Daily blew the narrative in the opposite direction. This report mentioned that the CCP had formulated five R&D strategies for vaccine developments in early 2020 and began to roll out various prototypes; and one of these five vaccine technologies came from Major General Chen Wei, the chief expert of the CCP’s military biochemical weapons, and her team. This news is both suspicious and thought-provoking.

According to Chinese state media, immediately after scientists in Hubei Province isolated suitable virus strains on Jan. 9, 2020, local authorities created a joint team between Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Wuhan Institute of Biological Products to develop vaccines against the CCP virus.

Among all the vaccine R&D teams involved, specific starting dates were publicized for two companies: Sinopharm’s vaccine R&D was officially approved and started on Jan. 19, 2020, and Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics’ COVID-19 vaccine project was approved and started on Jan. 20, 2020.

Three questions can be discerned from this.

First, if the initial virus sequence really evolved from natural origins (for example, all the harm is to be blamed on a few bats) as the CCP said, and it is not transmissible between people, then why did the CCP mobilize all available forces, including its military biological warfare units for the large-scale research and development of vaccines?

Second, the CCP set off the research and development of multiple vaccines before the Wuhan lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020, indicating that it was very clear to the CCP that the virus would spread on a global scale. That being the case, why would they fabricate lies on how the virus is not easily contagious? Such nonsense will only let the virus spread even faster across the world.

Third, at the beginning of 2020, all types of vaccines at that time have entered the application-oriented stage (not all were commercialized). Why wasn’t Wuhan locked down then? Wouldn’t the number of infections and deaths be minimized this way? People with common sense can deduce that the CCP’s actions in the early stages of the pandemic were questionable, which exposed that the regime was not trying to contain the virus and prevent it from spreading around the world.

Were Chinese Vaccines Already Prepared Before Pandemic?

Prashant Yadav, a healthcare supply chain expert at the Center for Global Development, an international think tank, pointed out that “vaccine manufacturing is an endeavor where an almost infinite combination of things have to work perfectly.”

“There’s variability in the raw materials, the microorganisms needed to grow vaccine products, the conditions of the culture in which those microorganisms are grown, and more,” Yadav told USA today.

Therefore, it usually takes several years to design a vaccine prototype and then develop new vaccines. However, China seemed to be very familiar with the development of this vaccine.

It is common knowledge that vaccine prototypes used in clinical trials must first be developed over a lengthy time. The Pfizer vaccine began research and development on March 20, 2020 and it took them at least four months to produce a feasible prototype; Chinese state media reported the Sinopharm vaccine began its R&D on Jan. 19, 2020, and started clinical trials on April 12 in the same year.

Sinopharm was faster at creating a vaccine than Pfizer, which implies that the CCP was prepared for a pandemic before it all began, including getting a head start on the vaccine.

How China Swiftly Mass Produced COVID Vaccines

There are currently at least seven vaccine producers in the world, including Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J/Janssen, Sinopharm, Sinovac, and Covishield. When the American vaccines were launched at the end of 2020, the production capacity of the Pfizer vaccine was quite small at that time; only until today has their manufacturing rate reached 100 million doses per month. However, Chinese vaccines have been made at a pace preceding Pfizer’s by almost one year.

The Pfizer vaccine in the United States began research and development in late March last year; they then moved forward with prototypes, the three phases of clinical trials until the final approval and market launch. This process took them about nine months. The Pfizer team itself couldn’t even believe how fast this happened. It took the company another few months to get the production speed up to 100 million doses a month. So, it took Pfizer about a year from initiating their vaccine program to the full scale market launch.

China joined the World Health Organization’s “COVAX” in early October 2020, providing vaccines and funding for the purchase of vaccines for 92 low- and middle-income countries. When China joined the plan, Zheng Zhongwei, head of the vaccine R&D team of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the CCP State Council, said that by the end of 2020, China’s annual vaccine production capacity could reach 610 million doses. In other words, as early as the end of summer and early autumn of 2020, the production capacity of Chinese vaccines would be close to the monthly output of hundreds of millions of doses. This is why in the first few months of this year, only the Chinese vaccines dominated the world’s vaccine supply. Vaccines in Europe and the United States started being manufactured only by the end of 2020, and it would take them three more months to mass-produce them. Compared with the Chinese vaccine, European and American vaccines had a late start in the world, and the supply of their vaccines was far behind domestic and foreign demand. This left a window of almost six months for the Chinese vaccines to become ubiquitous in the world.

Even if China’s vaccine research skills and manufacturing capacity have reached the same level as that of the United States, the cultivation process of the microorganisms required for clinical trials and vaccine production cannot be compressed or accelerated. Therefore, the shortest time required for China to achieve mass production of vaccines on a large scale should be roughly the same as the United States, which was about one year. However, considering that China’s vaccine had reached the scale of 100 million doses per month in early autumn last year, the CCP must have begun preparation work for microorganism cultivation, screening, testing, and packaging by the fall of 2019.

Chinese authorities claimed that the first patient who was infected with the virus was reported in Wuhan on Dec. 1, 2019, but this lie was overturned by its timeline showing rapid mass production of vaccines. Based on the above information, in the autumn of 2019, the CCP not only had the novel coronavirus in its hands, but also mastered a number of vaccine types that could be used, and even began to prepare for mass vaccine production. It must have made the assumption that the epidemic would soon spread from China to other countries, wreaking havoc around the globe.

CCP Prioritizes Vaccine Exports, Delays Domestic Vaccinations

When the Chinese vaccines were produced at a massive scale, they were not used in China. On the one hand, China stocked hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine, and on the other hand, the vaccines were sent to other countries for clinical trials, opening up the gate for large-scale vaccine export. As early as July 2020, the Sinopharm vaccine started Phase III of clinical trials in the United Arab Emirates. This clinical trial included 40,832 people in the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan. Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine also started a Phase III trial in Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and Chile on July 21, 2020. At that time, the United States was still at the initial research stage for vaccine development.

Why didn’t the CCP preemptively announce in June 2020 that it was ready for mass production for Chinese-made vaccines when it was set to arrange clinical trials in other countries?

The CCP, well known for being a habitual liar, chose not to bluff this time because there were two factors it had to take into consideration. First, if the vaccine had been announced to be ready for mass production in June last year, it would inevitably expose its secret and the whole world would suspect that the CCP had prepared the vaccine before the virus spread all over the world. Second, the CCP had to wait for the epidemic to spread to other countries before it could arrange clinical trials in selected countries, so as to obtain the necessary qualifications for the global sales of its vaccines.

This first factor determined that when the CCP had the capacity of vaccine mass production in June 2020, it had to keep the information confidential. Therefore, Chinese authorities did not launch mass inoculation domestically, although it was urgently needed for containing the virus.

In addition, the CCP intentionally delayed the domestic vaccination timeline for the sake of promoting its vaccines to foreign countries. According to a recent report from Taiwan’s United Daily News, Beijing had pledged to sell or donate nearly 700 million doses of vaccines to more than 90 countries as of June 7, 2021.

Chinese state-run media Xinhua News Agency reported that by Jan. 13, 2021, only 10 million doses of vaccine were administered in China. At that time, China’s annual vaccine production capacity had already reached 600 million doses.

According to public information released by the National Health Commission, China’s mass vaccination didn’t start until March this year, and the total vaccination was as small as 80 million doses as of March 23, 2021, which was one-eighth of China’s annual production capacity.

Then the total vaccine administered reached 250 million by the end of April, and 1 billion doses by June 21.

Why was China’s domestic mass inoculation delayed until March? Because during that month, European-made and American-made COVID vaccines entered the stage of mass production, and the vaccines the West developed are far superior compared to the Chinese-made vaccines. As China knew that it could hardly compete with the West in vaccine effectiveness, the CCP had to seize the opportunity to act quickly within a limited time frame—the few months before the West could produce large quantities of vaccines, to make profits from its vaccine exports. The CCP’s prioritization of vaccine exports over domestic inoculation reveals its sinister intention to deliberately allow the virus to spread globally and then profit from the pandemic.

China Fools International Buyers With Unreliable Clinical Trials

In order to quickly sell large quantities of Chinese vaccines before the U.S. vaccines became available, the CCP’s clinical trials in foreign countries were all conducted in a sloppy manner. China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines both completed Phase III clinical trials as early as fall of 2020, but Sinopharm’s Phase III clinical trial report was delayed until March 2021. It was then published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on May 26, 2021. Before May 26, the CCP had already made a lot of money from the pandemic.

As soon as the Phase III clinical report of Sinopharm’s vaccine was published, the international medical community immediately raised concerns.

Bloomberg reported on May 27 of this year that Chinese vaccine manufacturers have been criticized because they did not share enough data on vaccine safety and effectiveness.

“The testing was heavily skewed toward men, who accounted for nearly 85 percent of the participants. Less than 2 percent were aged 60 or older, and most were healthy. As a result, there is little evidence about the efficacy and safety among women, the elderly, and those with underlying diseases,” the report said.

Dong Yuhong, a Europe-based virology expert, believes that such clinical trials lack sufficient data to prove the vaccine’s capability to protect recipients from developing severe symptoms.

The Bloomberg report pointed out that the World Health Organization (WHO) gave the green light to China’s Sinopharm vaccine to be sold globally despite the sloppy trials. As of today, the WHO has not officially cleared China’s Sinovac vaccine because its clinical trial report has not been publicized. However, the CCP has already sold 380 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine worldwide.

Voice of America published a report on June 27, summarizing the three new discoveries on the origins of the virus, from research all across the world.

The conclusions are: 1) the first case of the virus infection identified in China was at least two months earlier than the date China currently reported, and the virus had spread globally before Wuhan was placed under lockdown; 2) the virus that emerged during the earliest time already showed amazing adaptability to the human body, indicating that the possibility of lab leaks cannot be ruled out; 3) Chinese experts destroyed the early-stage virus samples, which is considered to be an attempt to destroy evidence and to cover up the origins of the virus.

I believe that we are moving forward in discovering the truth about the CCP’s cover-up on the source of COVID-19.

Cheng Xiaonong is a scholar of China’s politics and economy based in New Jersey. Cheng was a policy researcher and aide to former Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang. He also served as chief editor of Modern China Studies.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/timeline-of-chinas-covid-vaccine-development-raises-serious-concerns_3882991.html

Exclusive: Samples From Early Wuhan COVID Patients Had Genetically Modified Henipah, One of Two Types of Viruses Sent From Canadian Lab

The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in a file photo. (John Woods/The Canadian Press)

By Omid Ghoreishi

August 25, 2021

Samples from early Wuhan COVID-19 patients show the presence of genetically modified Henipah virus, an American scientist has found.

Henipah was one of the two types of viruses sent to China by Chinese-born scientists from a Canadian laboratory at the centre of a controversy over the firing of the scientists and collaboration with Chinese military researchers. It is not clear whether the virus found in the Chinese samples is related to the virus samples sent by the Canadian lab, which were shipped in late March 2019.

The finding was confirmed for The Epoch Times by another qualified scientist.

The evidence was first found by Dr. Steven Quay, a Seattle-based physician-scientist and former faculty member at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who looked at early COVID-19 samples uploaded by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) shortly after China informed the World Health Organization about the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

The samples from the patients, who reportedly were found to have the “unknown pneumonia” in December 2019, were uploaded to the genetic sequence database, GenBank, on the website of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH).

Quay says that while other scientists around the world were mostly interested in examining the genome of SARS-CoV-2 in the samples uploaded by the WIV scientists, he wanted to see what else was in the samples collected from the patients.

So he collaborated with a few other scientists to analyze sequences from the samples.

“We started fishing inside for weird things,” Quay told The Epoch Times.

What they found, he says, are the results of what could likely be contamination from different experiments in the lab making their way into the samples, as well as evidence of Henipah virus.

“We found genetic manipulation of the Nipah virus, which is more lethal than Ebola.” Nipah is a type of Henipah virus.

The Epoch Times asked Joe Wang, PhD, who formerly spearheaded a vaccine development program for SARS in Canada with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, to verify the finding. Wang is currently the president of NTD Television Canada, the sister company of The Epoch Times in Canada.

After examining the evidence, Wang said he was able to replicate Quay’s findings on the Henipah virus. He explains that the genetic manipulation of the virus was likely for the purposes of vaccine development.

Documents released by the Canadian government state WIV’s intended use of the virus samples sent by Canada as “stock virus culturing,” which in simpler terms means storage of the viruses while keeping them alive. Genetic manipulation would not be within the scope of this description.

Winnipeg Lab

The firing of Chinese-born scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from the National Microbiology laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg has been the subject of much controversy in Canada, with opposition parties pressing the government for more details on the case, and the government refusing to release information citing national security and privacy concerns.

Qiu and Cheng along with several Chinese students were escorted out of NML, Canada’s only Level 4 lab, in July 2019, amid a police investigation. The two scientists were formally fired in January 2021.

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which is in charge of NML, said the termination was the result of an “administrative matter” and “possible breaches of security protocols,” but has declined to provide further details, citing security and privacy concerns.

House Speaker Anthony Rota admonishes Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart in the House of Commons on June 21, 2021, for failing to provide documents related to the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

During her time at NML, Qiu travelled several times in an official capacity to WIV, helping train personnel on Level 4 safety. The Globe and Mail later reported that scientists at NML have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers on deadly pathogens, and that one of the Chinese military researchers worked at the high-security Winnipeg lab for a period of time.

Documents and emails released by PHAC show that the shipment of Henipah and Ebola samples was done with the permission of NML authorities.

In one of the emails sent in September 2018, David Safronetz, chief of special pathogens at PHAC, informs then-head of NML Matthew Gilmour and other lab administrators about the request from WIV for the shipment of the samples, saying “I trust the lab.”

In response, Gilmour asks about the nature of the work that will be done at the Wuhan lab, and why the lab doesn’t get the material from “other, more local labs.” He also tells Safronetz that it’s “good to know that you trust this group,” asking how NML was connected with them.

In his reply, Safronetz doesn’t specifically say what the samples will be used for in China, but notes they will only be sent once all paperwork and certification is completed. He also says the WIV is requesting the material from NML “due to collaboration” with Qiu.

He adds, “Historically, it’s also been easier to obtain material from us as opposed to US labs. I don’t think other, closer labs have the ability to ship these materials.”

Gilmour resigned from his position at NML in May 2020 and joined a UK-based bioresearch company.

MPs have asked NML management why shipment of the samples was allowed and whether they knew if China performs any Gain of Function (GoF) research at WIV. GoF research involves increasing the lethal level (virulence) or transmissibility of pathogens.

NML’s acting scientific director general Guillaume Poliquin told MPs during a parliamentary committee meeting on March 22 that the lab only sent the samples to WIV after receiving assurance that no GoF research would take place.

Conservative MP John Williamson pressed for more answers, saying the word of the state-run Chinese lab can’t be trusted as the Chinese regime “has a history of theft and lies.”

The issue of GoF research at WIV has been a point of contention in the United States between lawmakers and Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIH’s head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose organization has funded research (through EcoHealth Alliance) on coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul says published work from WIV on coronaviruses shows the lab is conducting GoF research, a charge Fauci denies.

The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

The Epoch Times sought comment from PHAC, including as to how the agency addressed issues of intellectual property and the development of any products such as vaccines with WIV, but didn’t hear back by time of publication.

Despite repeated requests by opposition parties for more details related to the firing of the two NML scientists, the Liberal government has refused to provide records, saying there are national security and privacy concerns.

After the House of Commons issued an order for the government to disclose the information, the government took the Speaker of the House to court to obtain confirmation from a judge that it can withhold the documents. The government later dropped its court case once Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an election and Parliament was dissolved.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to include more information from Canadian government documents.

Omid Ghoreishi is a journalist based in Toronto.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/samples-from-early-wuhan-covid-patients-had-genetically-modified-henipa-one-of-two-types-of-viruses-sent-from-canadian-lab_3963836.html