China
April 2, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Further to Paul Mirengoff’s “Don’t let China off the hook,” I want to offer a few resources that I have found to be helpful so far: • First and foremost among those I have saved is Jim Geraghty’s NR Morning Jolt The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies.” Subhead: “A day-by-day, month-by-month breakdown of China’s coronavirus coverup and the irreparable damage it has caused around the globe.” The whole thing
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March 31, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Our friend Michael Auslin explains the importance of pushing back against China’s effort to deflect blame for the origin and spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. The case for holding China accountable is founded in morality, global governance, and the need to protect against future pandemics. The moral case stems from the Chinese government’s reprehensible response to the early outbreak of the pandemic there. Auslin reminds us: Chinese officials knew of
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March 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Michael Auslin reviews the quandaries of Chinese behavior concealing the facts surrounding the Wuhan virus in the RealClearPolitics column “Has the U.S.-China Cold War Now Begun?” The text includes a valuable collection of links. Today a reader provides this eyewitness testimony via email from Beijing: Skepticism of China remains healthy. Yesterday there was an 8-plus hour escalating protest by Hubei citizens AND Hubei police against neighboring Jiangxi province police. Why?
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March 28, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I doubt anyone does. No one should. The Washington Post is skeptical: China is winning its “people’s war” against the coronavirus. That’s the message being sent by Chinese leaders and diplomats and amplified by the Communist Party-controlled press. A central part of the narrative is that Wuhan, the onetime center of the outbreak and the site of a recent visit from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, has stopped transmission in its
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March 19, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This comes, I think, from today’s COVID-19 press briefing. A reporter from One America News asks President Trump whether he considers it alarming that American reporters–“even in this room”–are echoing Chinese Communist narratives by asserting that calling a Chinese virus a Chinese virus is “racist.” Trump responds: The faces made in the room as @ChanelRion asks Trump: Is it alarming that major media players…are consistently siding with a foreign state
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March 19, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Marc Thiessen argues that the Wuhan coronavirus “should be forever linked to [China], the regime that facilitated its spread.” He’s right. I’ll let him explain: We are in the midst of a pandemic lockdown today because the Chinese Communist regime cared more about suppressing information than suppressing a virus. Doctors in Wuhan knew in December that the coronavirus was capable of human-to-human transmission because medical workers were getting sick. But
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March 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It may be too strong to say that China and the United States are engaged in “germ warfare,” but the Chinese propaganda effort, aided by our own irrepressible fifth column in the media that seems to want to take China’s side against the U.S., reveals that the COVID-19 episode may prove an inflection point—a crisis for the Chinese regime akin to the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union—that results in
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March 17, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Italy and Iran have been two of the countries hardest hit by the Wuhan coronavirus, outside of China. Why? Helen Raleigh explains at The Federalist: The reason these two countries are suffering the most outside China is mainly due to their close ties with Beijing, primarily through the “One Belt and One Road” (OBOR) initiative. OBOR is Beijing’s foreign policy play disguised as infrastructure investment. Here’s how it works: China
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March 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
China is slowly but surely going back to work, according to the Asian Times: Statistics on Gaode’s “work resumption index” showed that “coastal export powerhouse provinces” in the southeast were taking tentative steps to return to normal, Trivium China, the research and policy advisory company, reported. The leading city was Dongguan in Guangdong province with a “work resumption” figure of around 49.5% while Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak,
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March 2, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Disease is bad, but coronavirus has some positive aspects. It has exposed the frailty of the Communist Chinese regime, which reportedly is now sending some of the one million Uyghurs they have been holding in concentration camps to factories that have been vacated on account of the virus. No doubt Tom Friedman and other Democratic advocates for the Communist regime will hail this as one more sign of the superiority
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February 27, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Walter Russell Mead is a leading foreign policy expert. He writes a regular column for the Wall Street Journal. Recently, Mead published a WSJ column called “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” Much of the article pertained to the coronavirus and its economic impact. But Mead also argued that “China’s financial markets are probably more dangerous in the long run than China’s wildlife markets,” which are thought to
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February 25, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The London Times reports on the discovery of a major spy ring in Australia. The guilty country is not named, but obviously is China: Australia’s national intelligence agency has broken up a large foreign spy ring but faces an unprecedented level of espionage directed from overseas, its director-general has revealed. Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), said it had stopped a “sleeper” agent running a spy
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February 25, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I enjoyed Walter Russell Mead’s February 3 Wall Street Journal Global View column published under the headline “China is the real sick man of Asia.” Beginning with China’s respose to the coronavirus outbreak, Mead widened the scope to economic issues: China’s initial response to the crisis was less than impressive. The Wuhan government was secretive and self-serving; national authorities responded vigorously but, it currently appears, ineffectively. China’s cities and factories
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February 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and the Freedom Forum, paid for a sign in Red Square that said, “Freedom Works.” Actually, freedom doesn’t always work. However, it works far more often than the denial of freedom. Indeed, it seems to me that the denial of freedom never really works for a society in any strong sense. China is the latest test
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January 26, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your Sunday afternoon walk or Monday morning commute, an early edition of this week’s podcast. With the media hyping and perhaps overhyping the coronavirus epidemic that has broken out in China, I decided to check in with someone on the scene: Spencer Case. Spencer is a young philosopher currently on a postdoc fellowship at Wuhan University, observing the eerie scene from his 17th floor apartment building. He
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January 25, 2020 — John Hinderaker
From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the
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December 29, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
George Will argues that “nothing more momentous happened in 2019 than Hong Kong’s heroic insurrection.” I would amend this comment to say “potentially momentous.” We can’t say with confidence what bearing the events in Hong Kong will have on the future. Events on the periphery of a great power can portend what that power will one day experience. This was true of the Soviet Union. However, it was decades from
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