Tag: china

Judge Halts $800-a-Day Fines Against Investigative Journalist Catherine Herridge for Refusing to Betray Confidential Sources in China-Tied Case

Investigative reporter Catherine Herridge secured a major, though temporary, victory for press freedom after a federal judge clarified that she will not have to keep paying an $800-per-day contempt fine while her legal team asks the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her First Amendment case.

The court also denied plaintiff Yanping Chen’s request to increase the daily fine to a staggering $5,000 and ordered that the money Herridge has already paid be returned, Herridge announced Friday in a statement on X.

The district court has clarified that I don’t have to pay the $800 daily contempt fine for refusing to disclose my confidential sources while our team asks the Supreme Court to hear our First Amendment case.

The court also denied the plaintiff, Yanping Chen’s request to raise the daily contempt fines to 5K. The court ordered reimbursement for the fines I have already paid.

This case is much bigger than one journalist, one story, or one news outlet. The outcome will impact every newsroom in this country and the ability of reporters to protect their sources and do investigative reporting that seeks accountability.

Yet, critical evidence remains hidden from the public and under seal by the District Court.

At a time when many corporate media outlets choose to settle or pressure journalists to surrender their notes, I want to acknowledge that Fox News has continued to stand behind me and fully support the First Amendment and investigative journalism by paying my attorney’s fees.

I remain committed to safeguarding the principles of investigative journalism and a free press.

Keep reading

China Punishes U.S. Companies After Being Called Out for Slavery

The Chinese Communist government announced “countermeasures” on Wednesday against the U.S. designation of more Chinese entities under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).

China denounced the U.S. listings as “illegal,” without addressing the actual issue of slave labor extracted from oppressed minorities like the Uyghurs.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) added 43 more Chinese companies to the list of entities presumed to use slavery last Friday. The affected industries included apparel, agriculture, and aluminum.

“The American worker must not be undercut and cheated by foreign companies that use slave labor. Our job is to defend the Homeland, and that includes protecting our citizens from unfair competition that not only disadvantages Americans, but harms human dignity,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said when announcing the expanded list.

China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) responded on Wednesday with:

countermeasures that include strengthening export controls on dual-use items related to UAVs and their key components and technologies to the US; placing six US entities on the countermeasure list for ‘assisting and supporting the US in imposing illegal sanctions related to China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region’; placing a US compliance testing company on the countermeasure list; and initiating a national security investigation into the import of printing and copying office equipment.

“China has decided to strengthen export controls on drone-related dual-use items to the US, in order to safeguard national security and interests and fulfill international obligations such as non-proliferation,” MOFCOM added.

Keep reading

DeepSeek Resumes $74BN Mega-Raise – Then Warns It’s Jacking-Up Prices

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is looking to raise roughly 50 billion yuan at a valuation of 500 billion yuan (US$74 billion) – while the company warned developers a day later that it’s raising prices. The resumed funding round, first reported by Chinese business outlet Caijing (via The Standard), is expected to be signed by the end of the month, with the process kept deliberately quiet; some participating institutions reportedly haven’t even been formally told the deal is back on. The pricing notice, posted Thursday to DeepSeek’s developer platform, warns that API rates will rise across the board and that the increase is expected to be “significant.”

The round restarts barely two weeks after it was shelved, and roughly six weeks after DeepSeek’s first-ever external raise in June, which pulled in some $7.4 billion from Tencent, CATL, Beijing’s National AI Industry Investment Fund, NetEase, JD.com, Monolith Management and IDG Capital at a valuation north of $50 billion (corporate filings later implied a figure closer to $52 billion). The new target is a steep markup on a deal that closed weeks ago, and the prospective investor list reportedly blends returning backers with new money that couldn’t get into round one.

As we noted last month, the round stalled because a transcript of founder Liang Wenfeng’s May 20 closed-door meeting with investors leaked onto GitHub and went viral – a document in which Liang admitted China still trails the US in AI (a gap of compute and capital, not talent, per Liang), conceded DeepSeek remains heavily dependent on Nvidia hardware, described Huawei’s substitutes as falling well short, and acknowledged the company could get its hands on processors he called “noncompliant.” 

Liang – reportedly furious over the leak – simply froze the deal.

Meanwhile, questions about how DeepSeek is obtaining restricted silicon go back to the very beginning – with federal investigators probing whether Singapore-based third parties funneled blacklisted Nvidia chips to the lab as far back as early 2025, and by that April the House Select Committee on the CCP had formally concluded that DeepSeek’s model appeared to run on tens of thousands of export-restricted Nvidia chips, branding the company a tool for “subverting” US export controls. Congress alleged it and now the founder has all but confirmed it, on (leaked) record telling investors the workaround exists – even as the company lays groundwork for a Shanghai STAR Market IPO it reportedly hopes to file this year. Should be a fun prospectus to read. 

Liang was able to hit the pause button so easily because DeepSeek’s first round routed nearly every investor’s money into a limited partnership Liang personally controls, complete with a five-year lock-up and zero voting rights. The lone exception was the state AI fund, which bought direct equity and kept its vote. Liang holds roughly 84% of the company and near-total voting control – meaning Tencent and CATL wired in billions for the privilege of watching, while Beijing holds the only outside seat at the table.

In the leaked transcript, he told investors that GPUs are the single best use of the company’s capital, that he would happily convert the entire war chest into Nvidia hardware if supply allowed, and that spending 20 billion yuan a year on processors would count as a triumph for his purchasing team. He also told them the money doesn’t go as far as it looks: even 50 billion yuan, he said, wouldn’t train a model at the scale of the largest U.S. systems, which he estimated would take roughly 50,000 Nvidia GB300s or 200,000 Huawei Ascend 950s – before the experiments that precede any final training run. Beyond the hardware, the company plans to double headcount and push into data centers and AI agents, and Reuters reports it is quietly hiring chip designers to develop in-house inference silicon – an attempt to engineer its way out of the very dependence Liang lamented.

Keep reading

Dear America, We Do Not Beat China in the AI Race if We Become China in the AI Race

America is in an AI arms race. That’s the official story, anyway — a convenient narrative blasted from the teleprompters of corporate media and the podiums of bought-off politicians. We’re told that to question the wholesale surrender of our power grids, our water aquifers, and now our public lands to the data center boom is not just naive, but unpatriotic. This is the oldest trick in the book of statecraft: wrap a corporate giveaway in the flag and dare anyone to question it. The moment dissent gets reframed as disloyalty, you know you’re being scammed.

This was the raw, unfiltered message from Donald Trump at his Ratepayer Protection Pledge event, where he looked at his own constituents and told them, regarding the industrialization of their communities, “You can’t fight it. You have to go with it.” There is no clearer definition of tyranny than that. It’s the voice of an apparatus that has stopped asking for consent and started issuing commands.

Before we go further, let’s be crystal clear about what a free market actually is, and how it relates to the building of these data centers, because the term has been so grotesquely twisted it’s nearly lost its meaning. A free market is what happens when private individuals or companies make consensual deals. It is the opposite of the centrally planned, state-subsidized, resource-commandeering binge we are currently watching unfold.

And the most damning evidence that this AI boom has nothing to do with free enterprise is the simple fact that they are building it on your land. This isn’t private companies buying private property from willing sellers. This is the state acting as a real estate agent for the corporate elite, handing over vast tracts of public and military land in negotiated deals that the communities sitting next to them never got a real vote on.

Consider the facts. In Nevada, the federal Bureau of Land Management just approved the first commercial AI data center ever authorized on public land, waving aside desert tortoise habitat and the already-drought-stricken Colorado River. The agency did it, according to the conservation groups now suing to stop it, by reusing an old environmental review written for an entirely different solar project — meaning no new review and no public comment period were ever required, and the city of Boulder City itself says it was never consulted. The Department of Energy is running the same play with the wreckage of the Cold War: it has tapped SoftBank to build a 10-gigawatt AI campus at the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant in Ohio, selected Brookfield and NextEra for a $100 billion complex at the former Paducah uranium plant in Kentucky, and picked Amentum and DC Blox to develop a gigawatt-scale campus at the Savannah River nuclear-weapons site in South Carolina.

The Department of Defense has gotten in on it too, conditionally selecting Carlyle and CyrusOne to build hyperscale data centers on Army land at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, while the Air Force has offered up nearly 4,700 acres across three bases in Alaska for the same purpose. It has even trickled down to city hall: back in 2023, the Manassas, Virginia city council voted unanimously to sell 21 acres of city-owned airport land directly to Amazon for a new data center, with no ballot, no referendum, and barely a public hearing.

When the state is auctioning off the very land it supposedly holds in trust for the public, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. It is a direct transfer of public assets into private, politically connected hands, and it makes a complete mockery of any claim to a “free market.”

With every one of these backroom deals comes the same tired promise: jobs. But the state’s own numbers expose the fraud. At a cost of roughly $13 million in investment per permanent job in Virginia, or $11 million per job in a recent New York deal, these are not job-creation programs. They are handouts to automate human labor. You’re being asked to celebrate a system where your own tax dollars subsidize the very automation that renders you obsolete.

The real costs — the ones that never make it onto the glossy brochures — are being socialized and dumped on an unwilling public. Residential electricity prices have shot up more than 36 percent since 2020, with data centers a primary driver. Dominion Energy in Virginia pushed through its first base-rate hike since 1992, and Baltimore residents saw their bills climb by more than $17 a month after a record power auction. The grid is being strained toward the breaking point, and the cost of every upgrade flows directly to ratepayers who never consented to any of it. It’s a textbook case of privatized profit and socialized loss: politically connected corporations reap the rewards, and you get handed the bill.

These facilities are also vampires, and they are draining the aquifers dry. U.S. data centers consumed more than 200 billion gallons of water last year, with roughly 93 percent of that footprint hidden inside off-site power plants where nobody’s looking. In drought-stricken Texas, consumption is projected to explode 714 percent by 2030, yet a state legislative hearing revealed that a staggering 83 percent of the state’s data centers simply refused to comply with mandatory water reporting. This stops being a negotiation and becomes the outright seizure of a shared public resource, with the state acting as armed lookout for the plunder.

It becomes something far more sinister when you remember what a lot of this infrastructure is actually for. Data centers themselves are neutral, but their deployment by the state is not. When the Department of Defense leases military land to build data centers, it isn’t for hosting cat videos. It is the physical construction of a turnkey surveillance apparatus, built on the one category of American ground that is already unambiguously controlled by the government, with none of the normal local checks that even a private developer would face. We are being told to subsidize the very infrastructure that is increasingly being used to watch our every move — and to do it on land we collectively own.

Keep reading

FBI Pressured U.S. Customs to Ditch Plan to Question Key Fauci Ally on Return Trip From Wuhan

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul. Three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York, a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

The documents show that in February 2021, Daszak, a key ally to Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

CBP planned to stop and question Daszak on his return to the U.S. that month. But in an email dated Feb. 2, 2021 — three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York — a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team was prepared to question Daszak about the business he conducted in China, his contacts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether he collected or was carrying any samples of viruses or other pathogens.

One document states that CBP viewed Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest” due to his longstanding ties with the Wuhan laboratory.

A Jan. 11, 2021, CBP email flagged Daszak’s participation in the WHO’s team investigating the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan as a potential “conflict of interest.”

A Feb. 2, 2021, email noted that much of the funding Daszak was receiving was “put toward gain of function research.”

Notably, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security email contained within the documents, which provided background information on Daszak’s research activity, referenced an article The Defender published in January 2021.

Paul released the documents as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In a post on X earlier this week, he said the documents challenge the narrative that a lab leak was implausible.

“The American people can finally judge the evidence for themselves,” Paul wrote.

Keep reading

CCP Bans Sale Of Retired Military Equipment, Citing Security Risks

The Chinese regime’s military and public security authorities have jointly issued an order banning the sale, assembly, and marketing of retired military equipment, citing “security risks to military secrets.”

The Notice on Prohibiting Sales Activities Involving Retired or Scrapped Military Equipment was issued on July 28 by the Chinese regime’s six central governmental departments, including the top defense command and decision-making body of the Chinese military – Central Military Commission’s Logistics Support Department, Equipment Development Department, and Political and Legal Affairs Commission, along with the Ministry of Public Security, the State Administration for Market Regulation, and the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

The notice acknowledges that, in recent years, some vendors have openly sold – both online and offline – retired or scrapped military equipment containing sensitive information, resulting in “adverse effects” and creating “security risks.” It also said one of the purposes of the ban is “to uphold the positive image of the people’s military.”

The notice stipulates that no entity or individual may sell retired or scrapped military equipment. Such equipment – as defined by the military – encompasses various types of hardware, ammunition, devices, related components, and materials that have been officially retired from service and designated for disposal as scrap.

The notice also prohibits any unit or individual from using dismantled parts of decommissioned equipment to produce, modify, and re-assemble them, and then sell them as imitations of military equipment that the public might believe was real. Commercial marketing and promotion of decommissioned and scrapped equipment and related imitations are also prohibited.

The official notice did not disclose the types, quantities, or sources of decommissioned equipment currently on the market, nor did it state whether any military information had been leaked.

Li Yuansong, a Chinese military equipment and memorabilia collector, told The Epoch Times that Chinese military-issued gear has long been collected by enthusiasts.

“Much of the Chinese weaponry is derived from technology dating back to the former Soviet era [1922-91]. While a small number of firearms produced after the ‘Reform and Opening-up’ incorporated Western technology, the majority remain updated versions of Soviet-based hardware,” he said. “The craftsmanship is crude and hardly advanced. If Western weapons experts were to dismantle and analyze them, they would likely laugh about them.

“The real fear isn’t so much about leaking secrets, but rather that foreigners might discover just how backward China’s conventional weaponry actually is,” Li said of the new ban.

Li Xiangyang, a Chinese military scholar who used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times that in recent years, individuals have been reselling military equipment online.

“Some components bear serial numbers, model designations, and signs of use. In the eyes of the authorities, these could reveal information regarding production batches, maintenance standards, and quality,” Li said.

“Regulations dictate that many decommissioned items must be destroyed, with metal materials collected and melted down. This notice is primarily aimed at enforcing the Anti-Espionage Law, as the authorities do not want foreign entities to gain insight into the Chinese regime’s military-industrial technology.”

Su Pei, a China-based military scholar who used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times that the mention of upholding “the positive image of the people’s military” in the ban notice shows that the Chinese regime is concerned about more than just so-called secret leaks, but also about hiding the backwardness of the Chinese weaponry.

“It also worries that individuals within the military might sell used military equipment through underground channels – goods that could ultimately be resold to foreign adversaries. Such incidents have already occurred in coastal regions,” he said.

Keep reading

SpaceX Purges Chinese Personnel And Parts From Supply Chain as Space Force Awards $1.6 Billion Launch Contract

SpaceX is conducting what sources close to the company describe as an unprecedented supply chain purge — systematically removing Chinese nationals and Chinese-manufactured components from every facility that touches its hardware. The move, first reported by Nikkei Asia, represents the most aggressive decoupling of a major American defense contractor from the Chinese Communist Party’s industrial ecosystem in recent memory.

According to Nikkei’s reporting, SpaceX is instructing its suppliers in writing not to assign Chinese nationals to any facility producing SpaceX hardware and to prohibit equipment manufactured by Chinese companies — including surveillance cameras and routers — from those production floors. Audit teams dispatched by SpaceX are actively verifying compliance. The company is simultaneously building what it internally calls an “NCNT” supply chain — Non-China, Non-Taiwan — to insulate production against any potential disruption in the Taiwan Strait. “We work hard to adhere to the requests and it is understandable,” one supplier source told Nikkei. “The technology is a matter of national security, especially as SpaceX also has commercial partnerships with NASA.”

The timing could not be more significant. On Thursday, the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command awarded SpaceX two task orders totaling $1.6 billion to execute 18 Falcon 9 launches under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program. All 18 missions will lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and are designed to deliver Space Based Sensing and Targeting capabilities — satellites providing real-time tracking of airborne threats and near-instantaneous data relay to joint warfighters. Space Force Col. Eric Zarybnisky called the two-month acquisition timeline from requirement identification to award “unprecedented,” emphasizing that “the speed our warfighter demands” drove the compressed schedule.

This is what economic nationalism looks like when it has teeth. For years, Washington demanded that defense contractors clean up their China dependencies while quietly tolerating the status quo. SpaceX is doing what the Pentagon has talked about endlessly but rarely enforced: hard-wiring the CCP out of systems that underpin American military supremacy in space. The Space Force contract ceiling for Lane 1 was raised from $5.6 billion to $17 billion just weeks ago — a signal that the U.S. military’s appetite for sovereign, China-free launch capacity is accelerating fast.

The broader context matters too. SpaceX already holds a $2.29 billion contract to build the Space Force’s low Earth orbit satellite communications backbone for low-latency warfighter data relay. Rocket Lab last week landed a parallel NSSL contract for up to 18 missile defense launches. America is rebuilding its space arsenal at speed — and the new rule is simple: no Chinese hands, no Chinese chips, no exceptions. The establishment media will frame this as xenophobia or Musk politics. What it actually is, is industrial policy that matches the threat.

Keep reading

Belgium Arrests Canadian NATO Intern on Charges of Spying for China

Belgian prosecutors this week announced the arrest of a Canadian intern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who was accused of espionage.

Media investigations soon revealed the suspect is a Chinese-born Canadian national who was allegedly spying for China.

The Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office said it made the arrest based on a tip from NATO security services, who warned the female suspect was spending an excessive amount of time at sensitive NATO facilities and asking too many questions.

The suspect was employed as an intern at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which is located in the city of Mons, Belgium. SHAPE handles planning and execution for all NATO operations.

“She is suspected of spying on behalf of a third country and of being a member of a criminal organization,” prosecutors said in a statement released Saturday.

The suspect’s home and workspace in SHAPE’s information technology department were raided when she was taken into custody. On Tuesday, prosecutors extended her pretrial detention by one month and the suspect immediately filed an appeal.

Canada’s CBC News on Wednesday identified the suspect as Biwei Zhang, a systems engineer who previously worked for the Canadian Space Agency and Statistics Canada. She has also used the names Claire Zhang and Catina Zhang.

CBC said Zhang’s personal and professional profiles matched the limited information provided by Belgian prosecutors, as do numerous posts she made on Facebook and LinkedIn. A group of European news outlets reached the same conclusion about her identity.

Zhang appears to be 32 or 33 years old and holds a master’s degree from the University of Ottawa, class of 2022. She reportedly worked as an economist for Statistics Canada from 2018 to 2022, then took a job as a systems engineer for the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) in May 2022. Her resume also includes work as a policy analyst for the European Space Agency (ESA) and a researcher for the World Trade Organization (WTO).

To date, there have been no details of the allegations against Zhang from Belgium, Canada, or NATO, beyond the vague description of her alarming behavior and assurances from SHAPE that her questionable activities did not interfere with operational readiness. The week since her arrest was announced has included some awkward excuses about who was supposed to vet her for a security clearance and how thorough a job they did.

The ESA told Reuters on Thursday that Zhang’s position with the agency did not require a security clearance, but she was subjected to “standard human resources screening procedures.” The WTO declined a request for comment about her work history.

NATO officials said responsibility for security clearances lay with contributing member nations, which in this case would mean Canada. Canadian Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree said on Monday that national screening procedures would be reviewed to “get to the bottom of what happened.”

According to CBC News, there was a rather large red flag in Zhang’s background: the Public Service Commission of Canada in 2023 found that she “committed fraud in an application for a position at the Canada Border Services Agency by applying under two different names and emails and failing to later clarify whether she had submitted multiple applications.”

Canada’s Globe and Mail explained that Zhang “submitted applications from two e-mail addresses, one from York University and the other from the University of Montreal and twice wrote the same standardized exams in an effort, the commission found, ‘to increase her chances of being appointed.’”

Zhang requested a judicial review of this finding in February 2024, but it was dismissed by a federal court judge.

“I think the concern level would be very high in government. Everybody wants to know what happened. There are a lot of questions to be asked,” former Canadian national security adviser Jody Thomas told the Globe and Mail.

Keep reading

US Intel Chiefs Back Trump’s Claim China Interfered In American Elections

A fact sheet released July 30 by the White House Government Transparency Task Force says China and its proxies bought, stole, or hacked voter data belonging to as many as 220 million Americans, including some information that was not publicly available.

The fact sheet pairs that finding with the intelligence community’s official definition of election interference, which includes a foreign power’s targeting of voter data.

It notes that, for a foreign country’s actions to amount to “election interference,” they do not have to change the actual results.

“That definition includes a foreign power’s targeting of voter registration infrastructure or data,” the task force states, citing declassified documents produced by the U.S. intelligence community.

The fact sheet was approved by the heads of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Homeland Security, according to the White House.

Representatives from those agencies—as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation—also coordinated with the White House before Trump’s July 16 address and “approved the factual statements” drawn from intelligence documents used in the speech, the task force states.

Election Interference Defined

In his speech, Trump said China has long been meddling in U.S. elections, including that it was “working to influence” the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which President Joe Biden was ultimately declared the winner.

Trump did not explicitly claim that China managed to change the 2020 result, and neither did the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies.

The spy chiefs did say in the fact sheet that voter-registration data is itself part of election infrastructure and could be manipulated in ways that affect election results, for instance by preventing groups of voters from casting their ballots.

“Adversaries could alter data to potentially prevent individual voters or groups of voters from voting, causing delays on election day or forcing voters to use provisional ballots,” the task force states, citing intelligence community documents.

Keep reading

China Brings Back Masking for Vulnerable People as Summer Coronavirus Spike Sweeps South

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began encouraging vulnerable residents – such as the elderly, pregnant women, and those with chronic diseases – to seek out Wuhan coronavirus vaccine products and use sanitary masks as the rate of coronavirus infections skyrocketed in July.

The Chinese state newspaper Global Times first announced in English the CDC warning of a spike in Wuhan coronavirus cases on July 26, insisting that the virus appears to be spreading much faster in southern China than in the north and that it does not appear to be causing severe infections in most people. Experts suggested that hot temperatures driving people indoors to air conditioning has created similar conditions to winter, when many do not go outside because of the cold and the limited air circulation facilitates infections.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post identified the culprit of the latest outbreak as the “Omicron NB.1.8.1 variant,” which is reportedly spreading at a “moderate” level but mostly a threat to the elderly or those with other health complications.

The Chinese CDC warned last week that it was documenting more cases of coronavirus than influenza this month, suggesting accelerating rates of infection. The vast majority of those diagnosed with the disease were reportedly between the ages of 15 to 59, suggesting that children and the elderly did not represent the majority of cases.

“The [Wuhan coronavirus] test positivity rate stood at 16.3 percent, up 4.3 percentage points from the previous week, while the influenza positivity rate was 12.6 percent, down 0.9 percentage points week on week,” the Global Times detailed.

The Global Times added that the Chinese government was now encouraging the elderly and those with health complications to “preventive measures, such as wearing masks in crowded places or on public transportation.” All were encouraged to update their vaccine product dosages, particularly pregnant women.

The state outlet China Daily reported an update on Wednesday from Beijing’s CDC discouraging residents from concern, stating that the rate of transmission in the capital city was “within normal cyclical fluctuations” and not straining medical facilities. Overcrowding in Chinese hospitals is a recurring problem during waves of respiratory infections, particularly those targeting children, as many parents choose to take their children to be hospitalized for intravenous treatment rather than attempting to treat respiratory symptoms at home. During past waves of respiratory infections citizens have documented chaotic scenes in city hospitals as emergency rooms failed to offer proper services to the large crowds of people flooding their waiting rooms and ran out of seats of IV fluid treatment.

“The [Beijing health] center said visits to fever clinics remain low across the city, hospitals have sufficient medicine supplies, and the latest increase in cases has not placed noticeable pressure on the healthcare system,” according to China Daily.

The current transmission data available from China indicates that the situation in southern China is more precarious. The U.S.-based Epoch Times, which conducted much of the early reporting exposing the calamity in Wuhan, China, as the coronavirus first began spreading in 2020, noted in its reporting on Wednesday that the gap between cases in the north and south had “widened significantly” and that one potentially complicating factor could be widespread floods in the region that have killed and displaced large numbers of people. The newspaper, citing biomedical science professor Xiaoxu Sean Lin, cited that flooding could potentially cause situations such as “population displacement, centralized sheltering, poor ventilation, overcrowded medical facilities, and compromised nutrition and rest,” all of which help spread respiratory illness.

Lin described the current reports out of the Chinese communist regime as “only the tip of the iceberg,” as many Chinese do not report symptoms consistent with a coronavirus infection, particularly when caused by a variant that only prompts mild symptoms to occur. The outbreak causing a rise in cases has been identified as “Omicron NB.1.8.1.” The South China Morning Post listed common symptoms as “fever and a sore throat.”

Citing Peng Jie, deputy director of the infectious diseases department at Southern Medical University’s Nanfang Hospital, the Morning Post noted that some experts are concerned about an “increasingly unpredictable” trend of coronavirus infections in the summer. While the Chinese CDC typically documents an increase in cases of all major respiratory diseases in the winter, state reports have explicitly noted that they have not documented a similar increase this summer of cases of influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which also tend to spread more severely among children and the elderly.

Speaking to the Epoch Times, Taiwanese infectious disease specialist Cheng Yuan-yu posited the air conditioner theory for why coronavirus appears to be spreading at a faster rate.

“High outdoor temperatures drive people flocking to air-conditioned environments, which leads to spending extended periods in enclosed indoor spaces and has increased risk of indoor airborne transmission,” Cheng reportedly said. If this factor is driving infections, Cheng continued, that would mean situations such as “people going to work while sick, the confined environments of commuting, waning immunity, biases in testing and health care-seeking behavior” would result in more cases of people aged 15 to 59 being diagnosed with coronavirus, rather than children or the elderly.

The Wuhan coronavirus was originally identified in the eponymous central Chinese city of Wuhan as a novel pathogen in early 2020, though reports indicated that the first diagnosed case could have surfaced as early as November 2019. As a result of the Chinese Communist Party violently silencing those identifying a new virus, allowing “super-spreader” events to take place to obscure the spread of the disease, then engaging in human rights atrocities to imprison people in the city, the virus went on to infect millions of people around the world, killing over 7 million people.

Keep reading