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Leadership: China Postponed the “Lianghui” (“The Two Conferences”)

The “Lianghui,” or the “Two Conferences,” is a common Mandarin Chinese abbreviation for the national or local People’s Congress and the national or local committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. It’s a rubber stamp process to show that representatives of the people in the country or in a local region review and approve the work of the central or local government and make decisions on the personnel in the committees of the People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference.

The national level of the “Lianghui” was scheduled to be held in Beijing in early March. There had been reports that Beijing would postpone them due to the coronavirus outbreak. On February 24, Beijing officially announced the suspension decision without a specific date for when the meetings would be rescheduled.

Ming Pao, a Hong Kong based media with ties to Beijing, reported on February 20 that Xi Jinping did not want to postpone the meetings. Most of the Politburo Standing Committee members preferred to do so. There were three reasons against holding the conferences:

Gathering over 10,000 people in Beijing presents a big risk of coronavirus infection.
Li Keqiang strongly requested that the meeting be postponed because he needed to rewrite the government work report to re-adjust for the impact of the epidemic .
Officials are tied to fighting the coronavirus and do not have time to prepare for the two conferences.

Military: PLA Biological and Chemical Protection Soldiers Died in Wuhan

Gu Zhuheng, the owner of Sing Pao Daily News, one of the oldest Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, tweeted on February 23, that soldiers from the Guangdong Army Biological and Chemical Protection Regiment that was recently sent to Wuhan had died three weeks ago. He also posted a picture of himself in military uniform and his ID when he worked with that regiment. Gu was exiled to the U.S. in 2017 after Beijing wanted to arrest him for a financial matter.

Qi Leyi, a host of a military program for Radio Free Asia, talked about the Biological and Chemical Protection troops in the PLA. She said that each army has such a unit at the regiment or battalion level. They participated in the rescue mission during the 2003 SARS outbreak in China.

She also pointed out that three things were needed to develop lethal biological weapon and China had all of them. One was the relevant technology, facility, and raw materials. Two was a laboratory of the highest safety level. Three was access to the original virus. Qiu Xiangguo and Cheng Keding, the couple and expert virologists in Canada had been visiting the Wuhan P4 lab multiple times. Canadian police arrested them for taking virus samples to China from the Canadian P4 lab that they worked at.

Military: Wuhan Lab Has Close Ties to the PLA

Radio France International reported that Major General Chen Wei, China’s chief biochemical weapon defense expert, took over the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, China’s first Biocontainment Level 4 (BL4) lab (Chinese call it a P4 lab) in Wuhan, after the coronavirus outbreak. A news report on February 7 mentioned that she had been in Wuhan for over ten days, so she probably took over the P4 lab around the same time as Wuhan locked down the city (on January 23, 2020).

Radio France International also reported that China requested France to help it build this lab in 2003. Despite the warning from its Intelligence offices that China could use it to develop biochemical weapons, France still signed the agreement with China on 2004. The agreement stated that Beijing should not apply the technology to activities of an attacking nature.

In 2005, China designated a local company IPPR in Wuhan to manage the project. That company had close ties with some units affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA); the CIA had been monitoring those units.

It is unclear whether Beijing has honored its promise not to develop biochemical weapons at the lab. A government official in France told news reporters that China has broken its promises several times in the past. For example, China promised to build only one lab, but now it has built several and some labs look suspicious.

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