Tag: china

Vanishing Foreign Minister Becomes Growing Embarrassment for China

The strange disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has become a major embarrassment for the regime in Beijing, as speculation grows that he has been silenced and purged for political reasons or personal misbehavior.

Daniel R. Russel, a former senior U.S. diplomat who now works for the Asia Society Policy Institute, told the far-left New York Times (NYT) on Monday that Qin’s disappearance is “embarrassing and unsettling to Chinese diplomats because of the uncertainty it injects in a system that is tightly controlled.”

“For foreign diplomats it raises even more questions about the bureaucratic weight of China’s foreign ministry,” Russel added.

“Secrecy is the chosen mode of operation because for the Chinese Communist Party, information is a weapon, but in this case, the mystery surrounding such an important official — foreign minister — is mind-boggling,” marveled Jamestown Foundation senior fellow Willy Wo-Lap Lam.

Qin’s abrupt disappearance follows a swift rise through the Chinese bureaucracy. He began as a diplomatic staffer in 1988, became an embassy official and Foreign Ministry spokesman by 2010, took over as director of the protocol department in 2014, and was appointed vice minister of Foreign Affairs in 2018.

Qin worked personally with dictator Xi Jinping while running the protocol department, a close relationship that paved the way for his last two leaps up the career ladder: ambassador to the United States in July 2021 and promotion to foreign minister in December 2022. 

Keep reading

US Finally Cancels Funding To Wuhan Lab

The US government has finally pulled funding from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the Obama administration offshored banned gain-of-function research, including projects to make bat covid more transmissible to humans, before a highly evolved, human-infecting bat coronavirus broke out in the same town and killed millions of people worldwide.

Then the US put the same guy involved in said research, Peter Daszak, in charge of a highly conflicted lab-leak denial.

The stated reason for the funding halt? The lab failed to provide documents concerning safety and security measures, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg.

Keep reading

Robotic Flea Leaps 87 Times Its Own Length

Although fleas are annoying pests, credit must be given where it’s due. These tiny creatures, just 3 millimeters long, can leap as far as 330 millimeters in a single hop—a distance close to 100 times their own body length. Now a similar feat has been achieved by a miniature robot. The results were published 24 March in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

“We were inspired by fleas in nature, which despite their small size can unleash tremendous potential and jump close to 100 times their body length. No one in the field of robotics has been able to achieve this feat yet,” says Ruide Yun, a third-year Ph.D. student at Beihang University, in Beijing, who was involved in the study.

To acquire flealike jumping abilities, the robot had to be able to unleash a lot of energy at once, so Yun and his colleagues created one that works somewhat like a miniature piston engine.

Keep reading

US Tech Giant Hired Apparent Chinese Spy and Gave Him Vast Access to Databases – Now He’s Disappeared

Spying is not always James Bond or cloak-and-dagger kinds of stuff.

Sometimes secrets can fall into the wrong hands through industrial espionage.

For instance, U.S. federal authorities say former Apple employee Weibao Wang took with him confidential Apple material regarding self-driving cars when he resigned from Apple and joined a startup owned by Baidu, a major Chinese technology company.

Wang, 35, indicted by a federal grand jury in May, joined Apple as a software engineer in March 2016, and worked with an Apple team “that designed and developed hardware and software for autonomous systems, which can have a variety of applications, such as self-driving cars,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California.

Wang left Apple after about a month and in November 2017, took a full-time job as a staff engineer “with the U.S. subsidiary of a company headquartered in the People’s Republic of China…and was allegedly working to develop self-driving cars,” the news release said.

Although his current LinkedIn site still has Wang employed by Apple, the U.S. attorney’s office did not name the Chinese company for whom Wang allegedly stole secrets.

Reuters last year identified Wang as an executive of Jidu, the electric vehicle subsidiary of Baidu. Wang’s mention by Reuters was in a June 2022, story of Jidu developing a self-driving concept car.

When he left Apple on April 16, 2018, “Apple identified Wang as having accessed large amounts of sensitive proprietary and confidential information in the days leading up to his departure from Apple,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office news release.

Keep reading

Software Engineer Imprisoned for Developing Application to Break China’s Internet Censorship

Two people, who were detained by Shanghai State Security Police in October 2021 for developing software that circumvents the Great Firewall, received six- and five-year prison sentences on June 12, 2023.

He Binggang and his fiancée Zhang Yibo, together with several others, were arrested on Oct. 9, 2021, for developing and maintaining software that helps people living in China to access overseas internet platforms, according to the Falun Dafa Infocenter.

The Chinese regime set up Great Firewall (GFW), or Golden Shield Project, in 1998, which is managed by the regime’s Ministry of Public Security to monitor and censor what can and cannot be seen in China through an online network.

He and Zhang are Falun Gong adherents, a spiritual practice that has been persecuted inside China since 1999 and has been the subject of intense political propaganda.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual improvement practice based on principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, with five slow-moving, gentle exercises that have significant physical benefits. The practice has been very popular in China, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the country before the Chinese communist regime began to persecute the belief and its followers in July 1999.

He and Zhang had developed software called oGate that allows Chinese people to freely access websites and information available outside of China but which are blocked by the GFW and otherwise unavailable inside China.

A group of Chinese non-IT activists, including lawyers and journalists, launched BanGFW on March 8, 2023.

Keep reading

Lab Leak Theory: 1, Misinformation Cops: 0

The lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins gained tremendous legitimacy this week as The Wall Street Journal confirmed independent reports that the earliest outbreak occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019.

“Patients zero” are now presumed to be three Chinese scientists, including Ben Hu, who worked extensively on gain-of-function research (the manipulation of viruses to make them more dangerous), which was funded by grants from the U.S. government. Those cases occurred in November 2019—well before the Huanan wet market outbreak favored by some in the scientific community as the more likely origin story—and they occurred among the very people one would predict if the virus originated in a lab. This is quite damning, to say the least. Anyone still clinging to an animal origin theory—remember the pangolins and raccoon dogs?—is running up against Occam’s razor.

Assuming the intelligence reports are accurate and that Hu and his colleagues did contract the earliest cases of COVID-19, the implications are huge. This would mean that substandard safety protocols at the Wuhan lab probably unleashed a killer pathogen on the rest of the planet, and the Chinese government attempted to cover it up.

China is hardly the only government on the hook; the lab leak also means that research paid for by U.S. tax dollars—and vouched for by coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost gain-of-function advocate—is partly to blame for a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide. Fauci, the very person tasked with leading the U.S. response to COVID-19, was in charge of the government agency that gave Hu, the gain-of-function researcher initially sickened with the disease, millions of dollars to experiment with bat coronaviruses.

Information on the central role played by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was made public by the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group that uses public records requests to scrutinize federal funding of science. The Journal cited the organization’s work, writing that it confirmed Hu’s receipt of U.S. funding.

Keep reading

NATO Chief Says Russia Must Lose in Ukraine to Send Message to China

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg met with President Biden in Washington on Tuesday and said Russia must lose in Ukraine to send a message to China as the Western alliance increasingly has its eyes on the Asia Pacific.

“President Putin must not win this war, because that will not only be a tragedy for Ukrainians, but also make the world more dangerous,” Stoltenberg said at the White House before a meeting with Biden.

“It will send a message to authoritarian leaders all over the world, also in China, that when they use military force, they get what they want, and we will then become more vulnerable. So it’s our security interest to support Ukraine,” he added.

Stoltenberg’s comments come as NATO is planning to boost ties with countries in the Asia Pacific. According to a report from Nikkei Asia, the alliance is preparing documents to increase relations with its four main partners in the region, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

Keep reading

Scientists working at Wuhan Institute of Virology alongside Chinese military ‘were combining world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create mutant strain capable of sparking a pandemic just before the Covid outbreak began’

Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were running risky experiments to create deadly mutant coronaviruses by fusing newly discovered strains – just before the outbreak of Covid-19.

US investigators believe Covid-19 was created by scientists at the Wuhan lab through experiments on a similar coronavirus discovered in a mineshaft in southern China.

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were fusing deadly coronaviruses to create highly-infectious mutant strains, that were then used to infect albino mice, the US investigators claim.

The research programme was kept secret and covered up due to it being funded by the Chinese military with the aim of developing bioweapons, the investigators believe.  

The secret initiative in turn led to the creation of Covid-19, which was then leaked into the city of Wuhan through a lab accident, before it spread across the globe, the US investigators claim. 

Keep reading

China’s failed attempt to erase the Tiananmen square massacre

On Jun 4, 1989, Chinese troops stormed through Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, killing and arresting thousands of pro-democracy protesters in what would become known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Tiananmen massacre was precipitated by the peaceful gatherings of students, workers, and others in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and other cities in April 1989 calling for freedom of expression, accountability, and an end to corruption. The government responded to the intensifying protests in late May 1989 by declaring martial law. This was but a prelude the the planned crackdown the Chinese Communist party unleased on the unsuspecting pro democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Between June 3 and 4, 1989, the tanks rolled into the square and the military opened fire and killed untold numbers of peaceful protesters and bystanders. China’s statement at the end of June 1989 said that 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel had died in Beijing following the suppression of “counter-revolutionary riots” on 4 June 1989. Outside sources has put the number of at least several thousands, and up to 10,000 people who were massacred by the Chinese security forces, according to recently declassified documents. Following the killings, the government implemented a national crackdown and arrested thousands of people for “counter-revolution” and other criminal charges, including disrupting social order and arson.

Keep reading

China Launches Massive Online Censorship Sweep Ahead of Tiananmen Square Anniversary

The Chinese Communist government is ramping up online censorship ahead of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, massacre of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square – an event that is illegal to commemorate or discuss in China.

Beijing scrubs China’s heavily sealed, policed, and censored backwater of the Internet of Tiananmen content every year, but this time they, scrubbed a bridge right off the digital map. Users of China’s Baidu search engine – which, like Google and other search providers, has a mapping feature – suddenly found themselves unable to locate Sitong Bridge in Beijing. Early this week, Baidu began claiming “no related places found” when the bridge is searched for, although some intrepid users were able to get around the clumsy censorship by using different versions of the Chinese alphabet.

Sitong Bridge became a political topic last October when a man began hanging banners from the bridge criticizing dictator Xi Jinping and his heavy-handed coronavirus lockdown policies.

“No PCR tests, but food; no lockdowns, but freedom; no lies, but respect; no Cultural Revolution, but reform; no dictator, but vote; no [to being] slaves, but we the people,” one of the banners read.

The Sitong Bridge banners helped to inspire the massive nationwide protests that ultimately prompted Xi to abandon his lockdown policies, even though the Chinese government had long insisted the lockdowns were perfectly conceived, deftly executed, and highly effective at restraining the Wuhan coronavirus.

The protesters adopted white sheets of paper as a symbol of defiance, borrowing a (literal) page from the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement of 2019, which taunted the island’s Beijing-controlled government by daring the police to arrest them for waving papers that bore no message at all. Protesters waving blank paper assembled on other bridges as a tribute to the Sitong Bridge dissident, and they chanted a slogan from one of his banners: “Freedom, Not Lockdown.”

Keep reading