by A. Freeman
Religions and legends believe that the Divine created man. The Bible at Genesis 1:27 says that God created human beings in his own image … The Chinese legend has it that the Goddess Nü Wa molded yellow earth to create human figures in her shape. {1} Continue reading
Guangzhou Daily reported that China’s central bank, The People’s Bank of China, is testing the use of digital currency in the accounts of the Bank of Agriculture through transportation subsidies.
According to the central bank’s Digital Currency Research Institute, the digital renminbi is being used in pilot tests in Shenzhen, Suzhou, Xiong’an, Chengdu, and the future Winter Olympics site. Because these are internal, closed pilot tests, such testing does not mean that the digital RMB is officially issued or will affect commercial operations. Nor will it affect the RMB issuance and circulation system, the financial market, and the social economy beyond the testing environment.
The central bank has been studying official digital currency since 2014. At the end of 2017, with the approval of China’s State Council, the central bank organized some commercial banks and relevant institutions to research and develop a digital RMB system jointly.
It is expected that the central bank will follow a gradual promotion for its digital currency, starting with the four major banks’ payroll payment clients and public service clients, and then gradually expand to online companies and operators.
Unlike Alipay and WeChat Pay, the functions and attributes of the central bank’s digital currency are similar to paper money, except that it is digital. Third-party Internet payments such as Alipay and WeChat Pay use commercial bank deposit currency settlements.
Source: Xinhua, April 20
http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2020-04/20/c_1125878094.htm
Recently reporters from two Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled media attended a White House briefing and tried to hide their employer’s identity.
The first reporter was from Pheonix Television. (See Chinascope post: Propaganda and Lies: Background of Phoenix TV Whose Reporter Spoke for the CCP at the White House Press Release).
The second reporter is Zhang Jingyi. On April 8, 2020, Zhang Jingyi asked President Trump a question at the briefing. President Trump inquired where he was from. Zhang said “Taiwan.”
However, Zhang was not disclosing the full truth. He was from Taiwan, but he worked for Phoenix Television in 2010 and joined Dragon Television under the Shanghai Media Group which is one of the largest state-owned media and cultural conglomerates in China. In the context of President Trump’s question, he should have replied with the name of the company he is working for, which is the Shanghai Media Group.
The Taiwan Mainland Affairs Council spokesperson expressed that they will investigate Zhang’s case since his working for a state-owned media in China has violated the “Regulation on the Relationship between People from the Taiwan Region and the People from the Mainland,” which prohibits Taiwan citizens to taking positions in mainland China’s communist party, military, and political organizations.
Charlie Kirk (Founder and CEO of Turning Point USA) tweeted on April 17:
“How do agents of the CCP keep getting access to the White House Briefing Room? This “journalist” LIED to the president, said he was from Taiwan, but he is actually with Shanghai Media Group, a CCP propaganda arm RT if he should be arrested and deported!”
Trump responded to his tweet:
“Cut him off now!”
Related postings on Chinascope:
On April 15, BILD, a German newspaper, published an article, ‘What China Already Owes Us,” presenting an “accounting” for the German “corona invoice,” (which the German government did not endorse and called “illusory”) with an amount of nearly €150 billion (US $163 billion) to China, including a €24 billion bill for lost tourism, €1 million per hour for Lufthansa and €50 billion for small businesses affected by the standstill.
The Chinese embassy responded with a furious letter which accused the paper of “stirring up nationalism” and prejudice towards China.
(reference #1)
Your report is not only missing crucial facts and exact timings but also any modicum of journalistic diligence and fairness.
Anyone who makes calculations like this is stirring up nationalism and prejudice as well as xenophobia and animosity towards China.
It does not live up to either the traditional friendship between our people or to a serious understanding of journalism.
Against this background, I ask myself where in your newsroom this dislike of our people and our country has come from?”
BILD editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt responded to the Chinese embassy’s accusation with an open letter addressed to Xi Jinping, titled “You are endangering the world”
(reference #2)
Dear President Xi Jinping
Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper BILD whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the corona virus is inflicting worldwide.
Let me respond:
1. You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.
You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.
2. Surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own. The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is Corona.
3. You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that Corona is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan.
You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.
4. The “Washington Post” reports that your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching corona viruses in bats, but without maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of Corona victims all over the world?
5. In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.
That is your political legacy.
Your embassy tells me that I am not living up to the “traditional friendship of our peoples.” I suppose you consider it a great “friendship” when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship. I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse.
You plan to strengthen China through a plague that you exported. You will not succeed. Corona will be your political end, sooner or later.
Yours sincerely
Julian Reichelt
Related postings on Chinascope:
1. Source: Daily Mail, April 22, 2020
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8244487/China-blasts-Bild-newspaper-demanding-coronavirus-reparations.html
2. Source: BILD, April 17, 2020
https://www.bild.de/politik/international/bild-international/bild-chief-editor-responds-to-the-chinese-president-70098436.bild.html
The Epoch Times reported that it has obtained provincial documents from China that supported the evidence the Associated Press (AP) reported earlier: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew of the severity of the coronavirus and the likelihood of person-to-person transmission on January 14, 2020; it passed down instructions to local health officials to take cautious measures immediately but did not disclose the information to the public until January 20, six days later. (See Chinascope post: Hiding Information: Document Showed the CCP Hid Information for Six Critical Days of Virus Containment).
The Epoch Times obtained eight documents from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (AR), which the government marked as secret, including the “Notice on Participating in the National Video Conference Training on the Novel Coronavirus Prevention and Control Work,” and the “Urgent Notice on the (Inner Mongolia) AR Video Conference Training on the Novel Coronavirus Prevention and Control Work.”
The documents showed that the government passed the coronavirus training from the central government down to local healthcare practitioners in teleconferences, but informed participants that the information in the teleconferences were “not allowed to be released to public.”
On January 15, the China’s National Health Commission held a confidential national teleconference with provincial health officials on coronavirus treatment. (AP reported the date as January 14, 2020).
On January 17, the Inner Mongolia Health Commission held an AR-level teleconference with the healthcare officials from the AR’s cities and Leagues (an administrative region under the Inner Mongolia AR, similar to Prefectures in the other provinces of China), to provide training on infection case identification and monitoring, management of suspected infectors and people who have had close contact with infected patients, the epidemiological investigation plan, the pneumonia laboratory test plan, etc.
On January 20, the Xilingol League Health Commission held a League-level teleconference with its own healthcare officials, to provide the related training.
Related postings on Chinascope:
It is hard to get true coronavirus infection information from China as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hides it from the public. Recently, information from media inside and outside of China seems to indicate that some places in China are facing the threat of the coronavirus outbreak again.
#1: Some provinces have treated Guangzhou and a few other Chinese cities as high risk regions.
#2: Wang Dingyu, a Legislative member of Taiwan, published a few documents from mainland China on his Facebook account warning of the danger of a second wave of the Wuhan Pneumonia which might occur in China. His documents showed that around mid-April:
#3: On April 10, Wuchang District Novel Coronavirus Prevention and Control Command Center issued a notice to search for any un-quarantined asymptomatic carriers, suspected infectors, confirmed patients, and people with close contacts with the confirmed patients, and to award 200 yuan (US $30) to people reporting information. (China Business Network)
#4: On April 15, Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province held an education system meeting and decided to lock down all senior high school students and their teachers inside their schools for over 80 days until they finish the National College Entrance Examination, which is scheduled for July 7 and July 8 of this year. (United Daily News)
#5: In April, the Chongqing Health Commission issued a “Notice on Re-sending the National Emergency Medical Rescue Team” to 17 recipients, most of which were the major hospitals in Chongqing. The notice requires each institute to ensure that the team members, automobiles, and equipment are always ready in an “on-call” state and can be dispatched quickly. (Epoch Times)
#6: On April 1, Jia County, Henan Province announced the lockdown of villages and community neighborhoods throughout the county after three doctors at People’s Hospital were identified as asymptomatic carriers. (Apple Daily)
Related postings on Chinascope:
Taiwanese technology news site Tech News recently reported that, despite China’s global propaganda, a new scientific study showed that the Chinese economy did not rebound. According to the Broad Activity Index (BAI), provided by U.S economic analysis vendor SpaceKnow, Chinese supply chain industrial activities continued to shrink. As of early April, the Chinese BAI was -0.2 percent. The company deployed cutting-edge technology which uses three satellites to monitor over 5,000 supply chain checkpoints in China. Satellite based methane and ozone studies also showed Chinese economic activities remain on a very low level compared to “normal” times. However, the night-time lighting level did not change much. It was discovered that factory closures were replaced by hospital openings. The study concluded that the Chinese economy didn’t even start to rebound.
Source: Tech News, April 13, 2020
https://finance.technews.tw/2020/04/13/spaceknow-survey-china-economy/
Beijing News recently published an important interview with Cao Dewang, Chairman of the Fuyao Group, which is the world’s largest automobile glass manufacturer. According to Cao, the de-globalization trend will be unavoidable after the pandemic concludes. The countries will seek to establish a more independent, complete, and safe industrial chain. The current situation fully exposed the high risk of having a long global industrial chain. It will introduce more distrust among nations, which will justify policy adjustments to simplify the industrial chain structure. China must stay vigilant to the fact that most nations may start to reduce their dependency on China. However, it will be very hard for countries like the U.S. and those in the EU to re-establish a fully self-sufficient industrial chain due to a lack of investors, the lack of low-cost labor, the lack of qualified managers in manufacturing, and the lack of money. Additionally, labor unions will add to the difficulties. In regions like Southeast Asia, infrastructure challenges will make building a new factory take two to three years. So, in the short term, China is irreplaceable. However, it is time to do some introspection on China’s long-term risks.
Source: Beijing News, April 13, 2020
http://www.bjnews.com.cn/finance/2020/04/13/716271.html