“Chinese Exclusion Act 2.0”
Originally published: Peoples Voice by Cindy Li (March 31, 2022 ) - Posted Apr 15, 2022
Last April, the Toronto Star ran a hit piece on Bill Yee, a retired provincial court judge and a member of BC’s Chinese-Canadian Community Advisory Committee. Yee had stated in an interview on A-1, a Toronto-based Cantonese radio station, that the Canadian response to the Uyghur situation in China is not based on facts.
The polemic–complete with a giant, looming photo of Yee–was alarming in its clear intent to smear an individual for his opinion. Authors Joanna Chiu and Jeremy Nuttall argued that Yee is unqualified to hold his employment position due to his skepticism towards the highly questionable claims of Uyghur genocide. Cherie Wong, one of the individuals interviewed for the piece and the Executive Director of Alliance Canada Hong Kong, directly accused Yee of “repeating the same talking points” as the Communist Party of China. Chiu and Nuttall even pulled out a quote from 1993 in which Yee suggested there may be another “perspective” to the Tiananmen Square protests.
This story was similar to the case of Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian-American computer engineering professor who was indicted in February, 2003 on seventeen counts under the U.S. Patriot Act. Al-Arian worked for decades to promote dialogue between the West and the Middle East, particularly on the plight of the Palestinians, and was interviewed on The O’Reilly Factor under the ruse of discussing Arab-American reactions to the September 11 attacks. Bill O’Reilly confronted Al-Arian about comments against Israel which he had made 13 years prior, accused him of “jihadism” and calling for the CIA to shadow him. The fallout from this included death threats to Al-Arian and his 2003 indictment and subsequent 10 years of house arrest. While the charges were dropped, he was deported to Turkey in 2015.
Within days of Chiu and Nuttall’s hit piece, Bill Yee received so much negative fallout that he announced he would not seek reappointment to the Advisory Committee. A pressure campaign led by 13 prominent Chinese-Canadian activists called to have Yee removed from the board of the Chinese Canadian Museum. The group, which seems intent on Yee’s complete banishment and joblessness, argues that such appointees must have a “track record of allegiance to Canada, upholding Canadian values of human rights and justice, providing independent opinion on community issues rather than becoming a mouth-piece for a foreign regime.”
Appeals to “Canadian values” and pearl-clutching over “foreign influence” are notions that have become increasingly normalized in this new Cold War against China. This is similar to the 1950s McCarthyite era when academics and cultural workers lost their livelihood or were exiled over perceived associations with communism and against “American values.”
The West has always had a complicated relationship with China. Who can forget the exploited Chinese labourers who built the first transcontinental railroads in North America? Or the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned Chinese immigration? The relationship has long been an unequal one in which China is a piece of land to be divided and conquered and its people a perennial source of cheap labour and cheaper goods.
As China grew after the 1949 revolution from an impoverished and colonized country into an economic and political power, Western imperialism determined that something would have to be done to put it back in its place. This manifested in many ways including weaponizing human rights discourse (with respect to Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan) as well as intensifying construction of U.S. and allied military bases around the Chinese mainland (the “Pivot to Asia”). After Huawei did the unspeakable and breached unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran, Canada stepped in and helped Trump illegally arrest its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou. All along there have been explicit and implied allegations and insinuations of China as being inherently untrustworthy, “rogue” and breaching “rules-based” societies.
And then came COVID-19.
Just as 9/11 turbocharged Western Islamophobia, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a tsunami of anti-China propaganda and vitriol which was always quietly simmering beneath the surface of polite Western society. The current torrent of hate and prejudice has not just targeted the Communist Party of China but has had far-reaching effects on random Chinese-passing East and Southeast Asian people in Western countries.
As early as March 2020, members of the Chinese diaspora reported attacks and verbal assaults about “going back to China” in the streets of U.S. and Canadian cities. One woman in New York had acid thrown on her face while taking out the trash. Countless others were accused of causing the virus, being “CCP agents” or “evil” communists. Some were spat or coughed on, and Asian shop owners reported instances of violence and racist comments from customers.
This state-backed hate campaign against everything Chinese swelled to a fever pitch in 2021. In Orange County alone, anti-Asian hate incidents increased by an estimated 1,200 percent. Increasingly, the victims were women and seniors from the working class or living in poverty. In March 2021, a gunman targeted a series of Asian spas in Atlanta and murdered eight people including six Asian women workers. A 61-year-old Chinese man in New York died after being head-stomped while collecting recyclables for money. A 36-year-old Hmong woman was brutally gang-raped and beaten to death in Milwaukee. A 61-year-old Filipino-American man was slashed in the face with a box cutter in Brooklyn. An 89-year-old Chinese woman was set on fire in Brooklyn. A 65-year-old Filipino woman was beaten outside a hotel in Manhattan. An 83-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman were violently assaulted in Oakland, separately, by the same man. Most of these victims were walking to or from work, all were alone, and all were attacked in broad daylight.
In the midst of all this were daily articles in the media that can only be described as the “Xinjiang atrocity exhibition.” Reports from U.S. intelligence, weapons-industry-funded think tanks and CIA cutouts like the NED alleged wildly inconsistent stories that only grew more and more ridiculous. Most of them came from evangelical anti-communist Adrian Zenz, who contrived the infamous “one million Uyghurs in concentration camps” narrative based on approximations from only eight people. Most of the supporting documents consisted of misattributed photographs, satellite images of random buildings and witness testimonies from Langley-based (CIA) and U.S. State Department-funded Uyghur activists.
Alongside these stories are other “China-bad” narratives. These include Nigel Farage’s statements that China needs to pay reparations to the UK for COVID-19, the “China as the perpetual thief of intellectual property from the West” trope, assertions that “China is paying Uyghurs to look happy during Eid in Urumqi” and the absurd “China is ‘colonizing’ Hong Kong.” More recently, this includes revamping and refueling the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is the result of the Wuhan virology lab leak. A Pew Research survey released in March, 2021 showed that 66 percent of Americans hold unfavourable views of China compared to 47 percent in 2018. The share of Americans who give China the lowest possible rating of zero has nearly tripled from nine percent in 2018 to around 24 percent in 2021. A Nanos Research poll found that nearly seven out of 10 people in Canada oppose deepening business ties with the Chinese government and nearly 87 percent support Canada joining with the United States, Britain and Australia “to contain China’s growing power.”
What further complicates the matter is that hate crimes are incredibly difficult to prove and even harder to link to a particular propaganda narrative. Many of the previously mentioned attacks seem to have been perpetrated by those who are themselves at the margins of society: individuals who are houseless, have a history of prior arrests or struggle with mental health issues. The inaction of the U.S. government during the pandemic to support millions of newly unemployed or evicted Americans who also lost their health insurance has undoubtedly had a massive impact on petty crime, robberies and random acts of assault. While the economic recession is a huge trigger for the rise in crime overall, it could be argued that having a powerful state and corporate propaganda machine which scapegoats a visible minority is what led to Asians becoming the ideal target. How many more instances of hateful attacks have occurred which the media never reported on due to the tendency of diaspora Asians to underreport racism and crime?
Within the Pew study, it is notable that among those with unfavourable views of China, the difference between Democrats (62 percent) and Republicans (72 percent) is only 10 points. Anti-China hate is a bipartisan issue. The only way it differs is how it is manifested. On the right, people like Republican Marsha Blackburn rant that Chinese civilization has a 5,000-year history of “cheating and stealing” and Republican Senator Tom Cotton states that all mainland Chinese students should be banned from the U.S.. Among centrist and liberal Democrats, it is common to find allegations of China being akin to Nazi Germany. They also throw around wild and unverified allegations of forced labour, organ harvesting, forced sterilization and human experimentation. In Canada, the NDP broke from the norm to join Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party in declaring the Uyghur experience in China a “genocide.” Even the oft-praised independent journalist Glenn Greenwald continues to push the Wuhan virology lab leak conspiracy.
No matter what the accusation from the center is, it is always grounded in the classic bleeding-heart liberal notions of human rights. This is a liberal, imperialist tactic that has been weaponized time and time again including through the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect and “humanitarian intervention.” But what makes this situation different from those of Iraq and Afghanistan is that China is a world power and an economic threat to Western hegemony. As such, Western media presents China as an oppressive colonial power, no different from the British or American empires (“Neither Washington Nor Beijing”) with NATO propagandists often projecting the West’s own imperialist crimes onto China.
Despite the fact that Asians have recently outpaced Black Americans as the group facing the greatest income inequality, Chinese and Asian diaspora continue to be labeled white-adjacent, privileged, wealthy and having little experience with oppression. This is how people convince themselves they are not being racist when they cast all 1.4 billion people in China and all 7 million Chinese diaspora in Canada and the U.S. as foot soldiers of the Communist Party of China when they reject western propaganda.
On social media, it has become increasingly commonplace for people who are skeptical of Western anti-China propaganda to be labeled “wumao,” brainwashed, a spy, a bot or someone who should be deported. Only those who hate the Communist Party of China are telling the “truth,” while everyone else is forced to say nice things with a gun pointed to their heads. On YouTube and Twitter, all Chinese state media is blatantly labeled as such. Western state media like the CBC and BBC–which are literally funded by their respective governments–do not on the other hand bear the same label. It is no wonder that some online commenters have referred to this as the Chinese Exclusion Act 2.0.
https://mronline.org/2022/04/15/chinese ... n-act-2-0/
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Alarmism About China Distracts from Ongoing Western Imperialism
By Chris Kasper de Ploeg - April 15, 2022
West projecting its own image onto China when labeling it imperialist
According to many Western commentators—from the center-left to the far-right—China is the major threat to democracy, climate, peace and sovereignty in the 21st century. It is an issue where Donald Trump and Joe Biden are completely aligned. On the other side of the Atlantic too, Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer are closing ranks behind a sinophobic story-line.
Supposedly “critical” voices add that the Chinese behaviour “is not that different from the European imperialism of the 16th to 19th century.” And so the West projects its own image onto China. In reality, the alarmism surrounding China distracts from the ongoing Western imperialism that still holds the greatest power on the world stage.
Western powers remain dominant
It is true that China, a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, has become the largest economy in the world. But there is a great deal of nuance to be added to that statement. For instance, foreign multinational corporations dominate 40% of the Chinese domestic market and even capture 53% of the added value within the Chinese export market. In the age of multinationals, GDP is clearly not a good parameter for measuring economic power.
A study looking at the profits of the 2,000 largest corporations in 2013 confirmed that U.S. multinationals continued to dominate 12 corporate sectors (reaping over 40% of total profits); Japan dominated one sector and China zero.
The same pattern holds for the total wealth of countries. In 2020, the Global North still owned 71% of global assets whilst China owned 17.9%, almost exactly the same as its share of the world population. In other words, Western power has not so much declined as it has globalized.
Exploiting the Global South
More important than the size of the economy is its structure. The most significant mechanisms for extracting rents from the Global South are illegal financial flows, profit repatriation by multinationals and unequal trade, totaling about $3 trillion of stolen wealth every year.
By comparison: That is 20 times the annual development aid that rich countries “donate,” but in reality abuse, for political influence at the UN and for deals surrounding fishing rights and deadly border controls. In all three financial flows, China is a victim not an exploiter.[1]
If we look at foreign investments, China is equally irrelevant. In 2018, China suffered a net loss of $63 billion in foreign investment, meaning that China lost more to foreign investors than it gained from its own investments abroad. On all seven continents, the Global North as a whole remains the largest foreign investor.
The military threat of the West
Western countries have an estimated 935 military bases in other countries and colonies. China has eight, even if we include its bases in the South China Sea. Outside of its own region, China has only one military base—in Djibouti, where there are also American, French, Japanese, Italian and Saudi-Arabian military installations.
Yet the West is directly threatening China. The United States and the United Kingdom have 290 military bases encircling China and the U.S. is threatening with a nuclear “first-strike capability.” The military budget of NATO is $1.2 trillion, six times that of China. So who is actually threatening whom here?
U.S. military bases around China, and world. [Source: inf.news]
The West is the biggest claimant of debts
The Western press loves to repeat that China is “the largest bilateral creditor” to developing countries. But that is an utterly meaningless statement. In 2020, according to World Bank data, China had $171 billion in outstanding debts with low and middle income countries. Rich countries and the multilateral banks where they have a majority stake (the IMF, World Bank, ADB and IADB) had a total combined debt claim that was almost ten times bigger—$1,100 billion.
More importantly, the private sector—which demands vastly higher interest rates—was responsible for an even greater sum: $2,825 billion in outstanding loans and bonds. The ten largest private creditors in the Global South are all banks and investment funds located in Western Europe and the United States. So who is really driving the debt crisis?
Debt imperialism
An oft-heard accusation against China is that it abuses its loans to confiscate harbors and other sovereign assets in low-income countries. Yet a comprehensive investigation by Johns Hopkins University of more than a thousand Chinese loan commitments between 2000 and 2019 found the accusation to be patently untrue. China never even went to a judge to demand payment, let alone confiscate sovereign assets.
Compare that with reality: one French billionaire who single-handedly controls 16 harbors in West Africa and 12 African countries that are still using a French-controlled currency. Can the real imperialists please stand up?
Multiple studies have shown that Chinese loans are often used as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank. These Western-dominated banks do actually make harsh demands when they lend out money, mostly surrounding budget cuts in health care, education and social welfare.
In many cases the Chinese loans actually help low and middle-income countries evade Western pressure. Chinese finance and trade, for example, was crucial for the Pink Tide in Latin America, when several left and anti-imperialist governments made major strides in the eradication of poverty. That is the real story behind the so-called “debt-trap diplomacy.”
[Source: devex.com]
Western coups and electoral interference
There is also a perception that China, contrary to the West, does not make any demands on human rights and democracy when it comes to diplomatic and financial support. That is partially true, because China has an official policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The silver lining, of course, is that China also does not bomb or overthrow other governments to bring “freedom and democracy.”
Since the end of the Second World War the United States has attempted to overthrow 71 foreign governments and has interfered in 81 foreign elections, the latter already before the turn of the millenium. And such practices have certainly not ended. CIA agents brag about them openly.
The list of foreign electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000 comes from a comprehensive study by Dov Levin. The list of (attempted) coups since WW2 comes from William Blum based on his book Killing Hope. To that list I added Turkey (1980), Burkina Faso (1987) Azerbaijan (1993), Palestine (2006-7), Bolivia (2008), Ecuador (2010), Paraguay (2012), Brazil (2016), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (ongoing).
[Source: sundial.csun.edu]
Conversely, against China there are only five “accusations”—often with very little evidence—of foreign electoral interference and China has not overthrown any government, with the exception of Tibet. When it comes to respecting the sovereignty of other countries, China is clearly doing a better job.
The United States is the biggest threat to democracy
Furthermore, the idea that the West values human rights and democracy simply does not align with the facts. The United States has military ties to 74% of all dictators around the world. And mind you: That is based on the categorization of Freedom House, a notoriously pro-American think tank that is almost completely funded by the U.S. government.
Joe Biden with Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in October 2011. [Source: cnn.com]
Even the closest allies of the United States—with a mutual defense agreement, such as NATO—have been responsible for a disproportionate decline in democracy over the last ten years, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
It is no wonder that a global survey last year found that the United States is perceived as the biggest threat to democracy.
The Chinese people do not want Western meddling
Various academic studies—from Western universities such as Harvard—have shown that the Chinese government enjoys overwhelming support among the Chinese people, more than 95 percent. That is vastly superior to all Western countries and not actually that surprising.
[Source: scmp.com]
The Chinese government has lifted 620 million people out of poverty since 1981—based on an “ethical poverty line” of 7.40 dollars a day—whilst the number of people in poverty elsewhere has increased by 1.3 billion.
[Source: bbc.com]
The zero-Covid strategy of China—so often dismissed as an authoritarian show of force in the West—also enjoys enormous support. China has the lowest covid death rate in the world. Even in absolute terms, China has one-seventh the number of deaths than Belgium, a country of little more than 11 million people.
Because of its targeted and proactive policies only a little more than one in five Chinese people have endured a lockdown. And this was often for a limited amount of time. The longest lockdown of a major city was in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, and lasted for two months.
[Source: axios.com]
Living standards in China have continued to climb, even during the pandemic. That is why China is one of the few countries with a mortality deficit during the pandemic. A major achievement that is also combined with large-scale exports of vaccines to low and middle-income countries, leaving Western Covid aid completely in the dust.
If you follow the news about China, you might get the idea the the population needs to be saved by the West. But that is complete nonsense. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Chinese people view the West as a threat.
Sanctions are insincere, brutal and counterproductive
Of course, none of this means that China does not abuse human rights, especially against a number of minorities. But the Western condemnation of a (cultural) genocide in Xinjiang—a severe accusation that is questioned by experts—has absolutely nothing to do with the otherwise very real oppression of the Uyghurs.
In Yemen a physical genocide has been unfolding since 2015—fully perpetrated with Western arms—already with 259,000 murdered children under the age of five, primarily starved by a humanitarian blockade and systematic bombardments against civilian targets. That is a genocide that could stop tomorrow, if only there were enough political will in Europe and the United States. The West’s supposed “concern” for human rights is a complete farce.
[Source: melgurtov.com]
Nearly all countries that do not receive military support, training or weapons from the United States are sanctioned. It is a brutal method that has already killed an estimated 100,000 people in Venezuela. Yet sanctions are also counterproductive, because the anger of the population logically turns against a clear external enemy.
According to a comprehensive study of 115 sanction regimes, “external pressure is more likely to enhance the nationalist legitimacy of rulers than to undermine it.” Sanctions are clearly not humanitarian interventions. They are better understood as a collective punishment (a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention) against any country that refuses to submit to Western hegemony.
Colonization of the atmosphere
Just as important as the economic colonization of the Global South, is the colonization of the atmosphere. Because of the enormous greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the Global North, low and middle-income countries have very little space to improve their living standards. A recent study in Nature confirmed that the Global North was responsible for 92% of the climate catastrophe that is engulfing the planet.
The study uses a simple method: Every country has a right to the same amount of emissions in proportion to its average population size since 1850. If you go over your fair share, you have a climate debt. Based on a 1.5 degrees carbon budget—in line with the Paris accords—China will likely never exceed its fair share. Most Western countries, on the other hand, exceeded their fair share decades ago.
In 2018 the IPCC of the UN determined that a maximum of 580 Gton of CO2 could be emitted to stand a decent chance (50%) of not exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming. The Indian scientists Jayaraman and Kanitkar subsequently calculated when the Global North should achieve zero emissions to stay within their fair share of that remaining budget, discarding for the moment all previous emissions.
Based on these calculations Jayaraman and Kanitkar came up with the year 2025 for the United States, 2031 for Japan and 2033 for the European Union. These power blocs—to this day—have much higher per capita emissions than the rest of the world. Regardless, they have all set their carbon neutrality targets at 2050.
[Source: rollingstone.com]
The historic climate debt preceding 2018 can subsequently be paid off through climate finance for the Global South. Based on a $135 carbon price—the minimum for achieving 1.5 degrees of warming, according to the IPCC—the rich G7 countries have a climate debt of $114 trillion, provided they fulfill the ambitious targets of the Indian scientists.
Oxfam research shows that G7 countries provided only $17.5 billion in climate support in 2017-18. At that rate, we will have paid off our debts by the year 6500, when the planet is long cooked. So who is really responsible for the climate catastrophe?
Western imperialism is still the issue
Compared to the Global North, China remains a relatively poor country. Its per capita GDP lies between that of Botswana, Suriname, the Dominican Republic and Thailand. This makes the constant Western finger-pointing at China, seemingly for every problem in the world, all the more perverse.
The facts show: Even in an absolute sense, the West still has the most financial, economic and military power. The West supports most dictatorships, overthrows most governments and interferes in the most foreign elections. The West is complicit in genocide, colonizes the atmosphere and punishes any country that refuses to bow to its dictates.
The International People’s Assembly has issued a comprehensive plan to challenge this global medical, financial and food apartheid. Join them. And do not let the alarmism surrounding China distract you. The fight for a just world begins at home and nowhere else.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... perialism/
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Ian Goodrum: Shanghai’s situation is grim, but Omicron is not ‘unstoppable’
We are pleased to republish this insightful article by Ian Goodrum in China Daily discussing the recent Covid-19 outbreak in Shanghai and questioning the logic and motives of those in the West claiming that China’s dynamic Zero Covid strategy is unsustainable.
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There’s no denying Shanghai is going through hard times.
As a local COVID-19 outbreak has grown there, so have the measures to keep it in check. Residents in some areas have been in lockdown for weeks, and the whole city has been at a standstill since the beginning of the month. Daily case counts there have eclipsed the peaks in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic, and the city has yet to see a drop for several days. At present, tens of thousands of new cases are being reported every 24 hours. We can only hope those figures start to change and the city can overcome this dark moment together.
But along with these troubling numbers come familiar refrains from a chorus we know all too well. Just as they did in previous waves, corporate media outlets are practically foaming at the mouth in their rush to declare the end of China’s zero-COVID policy. We heard this with last year’s Delta variant, we heard it as Omicron began its reign as the dominant strain, we’ve heard it since the enormity of the US and Europe’s epidemic control failure was impossible to ignore. They’ve been singing the same tune for so long the record’s not just broken, it’s fused to the phonograph.
As always, these people are either willfully ignorant or pushing an agenda, and that’s a distinction without a difference these days. Yes, the situation in Shanghai is dire, but China is a big country. There are plenty of cities that have had their own Omicron outbreaks but made it through with minimal consequences. Shenzhen, for example — an international hub in its own right and a massive population center — nipped Omicron in the bud with an early lockdown and a mass mobilization of personnel to handle testing and supply delivery. Qingdao, Tianjin, Dongguan and many other places have been able to tamp down this supposedly unavoidable variant with relative ease.
Meanwhile, virologists and epidemiologists based in the West are on the verge of tearing their hair out. Despite their warnings, an apparent mass delusion is taking hold of populations there, spurred by governments, corporations and media that want a return to business as usual. Now that danger to the wealthy has dropped to practically nil, and those most vulnerable to infection have been pushed back to work in face-to-face service jobs by the expiration of pandemic benefits, it’s been decided oh-so-conveniently that COVID is over.
But as it turns out, viruses don’t care if you want them to stop spreading. The notion Omicron was a pandemic off-ramp, and a “let ‘er rip” strategy —a laissez-faire attitude toward the virus that amounted to holding nationwide chicken pox parties —the best way forward have yet to be vindicated. We don’t have conclusive data yet on the length of immunity Omicron confers, or whether it can reliably prevent reinfection.
Everything we know about this virus tells us vigilance should remain our watchword, so declaring victory against the pandemic feels like a “Mission Accomplished”-style act of desperation to spin the narrative. It’s happened before; remember last July 4, when US President Joe Biden celebrated a “summer of freedom”? That embarrassing incident was consigned to the memory hole not long after, once the country saw its worst-ever infection numbers and a catastrophic daily death toll.
While this latest infection wave seems to be on the ebb, we don’t know what the future holds. New variants and subvariants threaten to shuffle everything back to square one, and the risk of “long COVID” — lasting symptoms which can debilitate even the vaccinated for months — shouldn’t be taken lightly. I for one value having functional lungs, and it would be fair to say the people of China do too.
It may be inconvenient to keeping the money train rolling, but if public health is to be preserved politics must follow the science and not the other way around. To that end, policies should make hewing to best practices as smooth as possible. Testing should be free along with vaccination to make sure cases are caught early and those who do get infected are less likely to develop severe symptoms. And when viral spread makes lockdown essential, those unable to work should not be made to worry over a lack of necessary supplies, nor a loss of income or housing.
It’s that uncertainty and fear that’s led to so many believing what they’re told about this pandemic, including conspiracies about a “lab leak” or “Chinese cover-up”. When people have no choice but to endanger their lives to avoid unemployment or homelessness, they become fertile ground for bad actors sowing doubt and misinformation. Rather than accept the reality their societies have failed them — or worse, treated them as disposable in the interest of jump-starting economic growth — they retreat to comfortable fictions about countries they’ve already been conditioned to despise.
The situation in Shanghai shows us how easily things can get out of hand, but China as a whole shows us Omicron is far from unbeatable. We have a tool kit built over years of experience, and thus far it has proven to work even against variants corporate media have called inevitable. But it is still too early to throw open the proverbial doors by declaring an end to zero-COVID, dynamic or otherwise. Until a critical mass of people — particularly the immunocompromised and the elderly — have received the three doses necessary to reduce risk of hospitalization or death to a manageable percentage, a “live with it” strategy will become a “die with it” strategy in record time.
China will only have one chance to open up, and we’ve seen what happens when countries get it wrong — hundreds of thousands, even millions of preventable deaths. Such grim statistics should be cause for mass outrage, but western mainstream media has managed to normalize this shocking state of affairs to a disturbing degree. The New York Times called 100,000 dead Americans an “incalculable loss” in May 2020, with 1,000 of their names taking up its entire front page. When that number had gone up nine times this February, what did that same newspaper run as its headline? “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.” The story didn’t even make it above the fold.
It is profoundly immoral to demand human lives be sacrificed at the altar of profit, and that’s precisely what calls for a 180-degree reversal of policy in China amount to. Just because the advanced capitalist economies have priced hundreds or thousands of excess deaths per day into the cost of doing business doesn’t make it right.
So many have sacrificed to prevent the virus’ spread in China, especially the medical workers and volunteers who have joined the front lines of pandemic control time and again. They are in Shanghai now, doing their utmost to stop this new outbreak. We dishonor them with complacency and callous language about an “unstoppable” variant we need to “live with”, which is surrender by another name.
They’re not giving up. Neither should we.
https://socialistchina.org/2022/04/12/i ... stoppable/
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Genetic resource rules to have wide impact
By ZHANG ZHIHAO | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-04-15 07:42
[Photo/IC]
China's new rules in the pipeline on human genetic resources will clarify jurisdictions of regulatory bodies and enhance supervision related to biopharmaceutical research, and will have a lasting impact on international cooperation regarding the nation's biomaterials, experts said.
Last month, the Ministry of Science and Technology released the draft implementation rules for human genetic resources management. The proposal, now in its public consultation phase, will be a major addition to China's regulation of human genetic resources following the adoption of the Biosecurity Law and the Data Security Law, both of which took effect last year.
Academia has deemed the 21st century as "the century of biology", given the fact that biology plays a key role in tackling global challenges such as pandemic prevention, food security and treatment of cancer. New technologies including artificial intelligence and big data are also being used to drive biological innovations.
Therefore, the new rules may help China mitigate risks and promote the healthy development of its biopharmaceutical sector, making its companies and products more competitive and in tune with international standards, experts said.
Chu Jiayou, former director of the Institute of Medical Biology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said China's biopharmaceutical research has advanced rapidly in recent years, so there is a massive need for human genetic resources during drug development.
According to a report by McKinsey & Co last year, the combined market value of publicly listed Chinese biopharmaceutical companies on Nasdaq, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Innovation Board surged from $3 billion in 2016 to over $380 billion in July last year.
However, some entities have used human genetic materials to conduct risky and even illegal research, so protecting human genetic resources will play a key role in safeguarding the rights of individuals and national biosecurity, Chu told a newspaper affiliated with the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
In recent decades, the United States, Brazil, Japan and many European countries have strengthened their management of human genetic resources. "This subject has gradually become a field with global strategic importance," he added.
China's new rules define human genetic resources as genetic materials, including organs, tissues and cells, as well as genetic information, such as the human genome and genes.
The new rules state that foreign organizations and individuals, as well as entities formed or controlled by foreign stakeholders, are prohibited from collecting and preserving Chinese human genetic resources inside China or taking them outside of the country.
The collection, storage and supply of Chinese human genetic resources must be carried out by Chinese scientific research institutions, universities, medical institutions and enterprises, it added.
According to British law firm Simmons & Simmons, the new rules may affect China's international cooperation in biomedical research, since it will grant the country's Ministry of Science and Technology significantly increased capacity and efficiency in processing project applications related to human genetic resources.
The new rules also clarify the definition of a foreign controlled entity as an organization in which foreigners hold more than 50 percent of equity or wield major influence over decision-making, internal management and contractual or other arrangements.
Data security related to human genetic resources is strongly emphasized in the draft rules. The proposal also dedicates a chapter to the procedures for administrative penalties.
The proposed new rules have fleshed out many details of the regulatory framework on human genetic resources that was issued in 2019 by the State Council, China's Cabinet, according to a chief scientist of a Tianjin-based biotech company who requested anonymity.
"It is a very instructive and meticulous piece of regulation that will have a lasting impact on how bio-research will be conducted in China and with global partners," the scientist said.
"Bio-ethics regarding human genetic research has always been a pressing issue for the global biotechnology sector. I believe China's latest effort to optimize its management of human genetic resources will ensure the positive growth of its bio-industry."
http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 57129.html