CHINA CLAIMS AMERICA STARTED THE CHINA VIRUS - AMERICA SAYS CHINA'S 3000 SPIES WORKING FOR SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN BROUGHT IT - "Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S. politician."

China Accuses U.S. of Botching Coronavirus Response, Claims Virus Came from America

AP Photo/Channi Anand

JOHN HAYWARD

6 Mar 202081

7:54

China’s state-run media attempted to flip the script on the coronavirus by claiming the United States botched its response to the epidemic and is concealing hundreds of infections.

An even more insidious line of Chinese Communist propaganda advanced from claiming the virus originated outside China to suggesting it came from America.

China’s Global Times jumped on the Democrat Party bandwagon and used the coronavirus to attack President Donald Trump:

The problem, as has been heatedly debated on cable news in recent days, is with respect to the testing kits provided by the federal government. Only a few hundred tests have been conducted so far and many proved inaccurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admitted as much that on February 12, attributing the problem to one of the substances used in the test that “wasn’t performing consistently.” Dr Matt McCarthy, an emergency respiratory disease doctor from a hospital in New York City went on CNBC’s Squawk Box to state, “That is a national scandal. They are testing 10,000 cases a day in some countries, and we can’t get this off the ground.”

In the meantime, the Democrats are smelling blood, amid hectic primary campaign of an election year. The Trump administration’s coronavirus handling issue is becoming a political weapon used by the Democrats in the hope of taking down this president, who has even called the coronavirus a Democrats’ “hoax.” Instead of mobilizing national resources to combat the vicious disease, Washington politicians have chosen to play political games.

American people need help. American people don’t deserve this. And I think China can donate a number of COVID-19 testing kits to Washington on an emergency basis.

Let us be honest here. Yes, China-US relations have been on a rocky road lately. The current US administration has waged a trade war against China, imposing horrendous tariffs on Chinese products. It has suppressed Huawei in all possible ways. And recently it imposed personnel cap on Chinese media outlets’ operation in the US. 

When they go low, we reciprocate by going higher. We need to save lives. Every human being on this planet, no matter their ethnicity, political belief or religious faith  is worth our effort. 

As an example of the convergence of Chinese Communist Party and U.S. Democrat Party rhetoric, “when they go low, we go high” was a slogan deployed by former First Lady Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democrat national convention. China’s editorialists may not realize that the slogan has since become the subject of widespread mockery since the Democrats most certainly did not “go high” after losing the 2016 presidential election.

The Chinese Communist Party was deeply humiliated by the coronavirus epidemic, terrified of losing its grip on an angry populace, and prone to rejecting American offers of assistance as everything from thinly-veiled racism to a nefarious plot to give U.S. Special Forces commandos a chance to raid Chinese medical laboratories. The arrival of the coronavirus in the United States appears to the Communists as an opportunity to reverse every criticism leveled at them and throw them back at the American government.

The Chinese might have waited a bit longer to implement this political strategy, since there is much anxiety about the coronavirus in the U.S. – and, as noted, the Democrats have aggressively politicized it – but the actual number of cases to date remains low. 

There are 90,000 known cases and 3,000 deaths worldwide, but only 162 cases and 11 fatalities in the United States. Emergency measures are going into effect early to prevent the disease from spreading, a far cry from the secretive and paranoid Chinese government unleashing a pandemic upon the world by attempting to pretend the epidemic did not exist during its crucial early weeks and punishing whistleblower doctors. To this day, the Chinese government is putting lives at risk by censoring discussions of the coronavirus and blocking useful but embarrassing information online.

Foreign diplomats wearing face masks attend at a briefing by South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha on the situation of the COVID-19 outbreak in Korea, at the foreign ministry in Seoul Friday, March 6, 2020. (Jung Yeon-je /Pool Photo via AP)

Having successfully bullied the world medical community out of referring to the disease with a name incorporating Wuhan, China is now putting some effort into clouding the origins of the virus by floating theories that it did not come from Wuhan or even China at all.

This week, those theories mutated into dark mutterings that the virus actually came from America, and since the first cases with no direct link to China are only just appearing in the U.S., the heavy implication is that America released the virus deliberately in China. 

This, again, is a reversal of speculation embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party that the virus either escaped from, or was deliberately developed at, an advanced microbiology laboratory near Wuhan. It would also appear to mark the end of China’s old talking point that the coronavirus is less dangerous than the common flu and America was overreacting by warning of a pandemic.

The Epoch Times on Thursday spotted the first cases of “America created the coronavirus” meme infection in the Chinese press:

It started when China’s top virology expert Zhong Nanshan said at a press conference on Feb. 27 that there was a possibility the novel coronavirus did not originate from China.

That same day, a Taiwanese politician named Pan Hwai-tzong said during a television program that aired on the pro-Beijing cable channel EBC News: “The coronavirus is from the United States.” Pan is a councillor from Taipei city, and a professor at the Taiwan National Yang-Ming University.

Chinese media republished this claim by Pan. Some professors in mainland China have since clarified in media interviews that Pan’s comments have no scientific basis.

Taiwanese netizens and media also criticized Pan for pandering to Beijing.

The Epoch Times quoted speculation that China is floating these theories as a way to refocus Chinese public anger on the U.S. instead of their own rulers.

The New York Times thought the stress of the coronavirus epidemic might have “weakened China’s powerful propaganda machine,” but last week conceded that the spin cycle on that machine still seems to work all too well:

The state-run news media has hailed China’s response to the outbreak as a model for the world, accusing countries like the United States and South Korea of acting sluggishly to contain the spread.

“Some countries slow to respond to virus,” read a recent headline from Global Times, a stridently nationalistic tabloid controlled by the Chinese government.

Online influencers have trumpeted China’s use of Mao-style social controls to achieve containment, using the hash tag, “The Chinese method is the only method that has proved successful.”

Party officials have tried to spin the crisis as a testament to the strength of China’s authoritarian system and its hard-line leader, Xi Jinping, even announcing plans to publish a book in six languages about the outbreak that portrays him as a “major power leader” with “care for the people.”

The NYT suggested spinning the outbreak is vital to China’s global ambitions, which require a great deal of commerce and travel with Third World nations as Beijing sets its debt traps and expands its sphere of influence. 

Now that the scale of the epidemic can no longer be denied and many countries around the world are dealing with their own outbreaks, the Chinese Communist Party desperately needs to present itself as a model of leadership and responsibility. China’s state-run Xinhua news service did its part last week with an “online poll” that asked participants which aspect of China’s amazing response to the epidemic “impresses you most.” There were no bad answers, only a choice of which one of Beijing’s successes was most astounding.

China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat

Pat Buchanan

Ten weeks of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the Hong Kong airport.

Ominously, Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as "deranged" acts that are "the first signs of terrorism," and vowed a merciless crackdown on the perpetrators.

China is being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force, as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would reveal the character of President Xi Jinping's Communist dictatorship, as well as Beijing's long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5 million.

Yet this is not the only internal or border concern of Xi's regime.

Millions of Muslim Uighurs in China's west are in concentration camps undergoing "re-education" to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession and the creation of a new East Turkestan.

In June, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22 crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.

President Rodrigo Duterte's reluctance to resist China's fortification in the South China Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.

China's claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.

Any Taiwanese declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.

While Taiwan's request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai's unofficial visit.

The vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a decade ago, not enough to create the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in the countryside seeking work.

And talks have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which, says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing's "seven deadly sins" in dealing with the United States:

China steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S. companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.

Such practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Moreover, China has used the accumulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.

With President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two economies?

Only Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.

If the American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the course, will not be the USA.

For three years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia's theft of emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

Yet the greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing's theft in 2014 of the personnel files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of them holding top-secret clearances.

Compromised by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a "treasure trove of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works for the United States government."

"A very big deal from a national security ... and counterintelligence perspective," said Comey. And Xi's China, not Putin's Russia, committed the crime. Yet America's elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of cyberaggresion.

Undeniably, Russia is a rival. But Putin's economy is the size of Italy's while China's economy challenges our own. And China's population is 10 times that of Russia, and four times that of the USA.

Manifestly, China is the greater menace.

Are Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by the rules of reciprocal trade?

Or will Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in 2001?

This issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia, if not the world.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend Beyond Chinese Spy

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

 

By Trevor Loudon

August 6, 2018 Last Updated: August 7, 2018

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein speaks during a Committee hearing on Cambridge Analytica and data privacy in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

News Analysis

Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no one.

The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended functions at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.

At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances behind his exit, and no charges were filed.

Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be targeted by Chinese intelligence.

The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to “funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.

“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.

Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence for the classified information she might possess through her position on the intelligence committee.

She might also be the target of “influence operations”—a subtler approach, by which Chinese operatives would try to steer Feinstein into promoting policies that might benefit the Chinese regime.

According to the article, “For many years, Ms. Feinstein has tried to promote friendship and trade with China, and she has countered critics of the Chinese human-rights record by emphasizing what she described in a Senate speech last year as ‘major improvements in human rights’ there.”

Conciliatory to Communists

Feinstein’s conciliatory approach to communist governments began in the mid-1950s, when she served in the Stanford University student government.

Before her senior year, Dianne Goldman, as she was then known, traveled to Europe on a student trip led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The agenda included a possible meeting with Yugoslav communist revolutionary Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

In January 1955, a vigorous debate erupted on the Stanford student executive, over whether to support a proposed visit of seven Soviet journalists to the United States.

According to Stanford Daily reports of the time, executive member Sam Palmer asserted that “nothing can be lost in allowing them to come over.”

He was supported by both Goldman and Don Peck, who claimed that it was important to show “Russia that the United States is not an Iron Curtain country—that we are willing to let Communists enter.”

The ayes won, and Goldman went on to personally host the delegation from the Soviet Writers Union when they toured Stanford’s campus later that year.

Thirty years later, while serving as mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein issued an official city proclamation in support of that year’s World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow.

This international propaganda event was organized by the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth and was supported in the United States by the Communist Party USA and similar groups.

Feinstein traveled to Moscow in December of that year as part of a trade delegation of 450 U.S. businessmen and public officials.

A little over a year later, on Jan. 27, 1987, Soviet Consul General Valentin Kamenev presented Feinstein with a Soviet streetcar: “A streetcar named desire.” Also present at the ceremony was Viktor Zhelezny, deputy chief of public transport for the Russian Republic.

Bridges to Communist China

Building bridges to the People’s Republic of China, however, seems to have been an even higher priority for Feinstein.

One of Feinstein’s first acts on becoming mayor of San Francisco in January 1979, was to visit Shanghai to establish sister-city relations.

The next apparent priority was re-establishing passenger airline service between China and the United States. Service was restored on Jan. 8, 1981, after a “32-year hiatus when a Boeing 747 with 139 Chinese passengers arrived exactly on time at San Francisco International Airport,” according to The New York Times.

Feinstein and Chinese Consul General Hu Ding-yi held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, “which included a cake, decorated with ‘CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] Welcome to San Francisco,’ and two bottles of champagne.” Feinstein described the landing as “an historic and exciting occasion.”

Feinstein went on to visit Shanghai several times in her official capacity and built a close personal relationship with then-Mayor Jiang Zemin.

According to the San Jose Mercury: “He [Jiang] once invited her and her husband to see Mao Tse-tung’s bedroom in his old residence, the first foreigners to do so. Feinstein had entertained Jiang in San Francisco, dancing with him as he sang ‘When We Were Young.'”

This relationship proved fruitful in 1999, when President Bill Clinton was pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization.

A visit to Washington that year by Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, which many had hoped would seal the deal, produced nothing. Relations got even worse after U.S. bombers accidentally destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that May.

Feinstein, stepped in to offer assistance to the administration. She volunteered to use her personal relationship with now-Chinese regime leader Jiang, to get negotiations back on track.

In August 1999, the White House dispatched Feinstein to China, with a hand-written note to Jiang from President Clinton, urging a resumption of talks.

“Senator Feinstein played a critical role in paving the way for this critical trade agreement,” White House press officer Elizabeth Newman said.

Feinstein and Jiang met Aug. 16 in the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, where the senator handed over President Clinton’s letter.

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury in November 1999, Feinstein said, that she felt the only way China would enter into WTO negotiations again was with the backing of Jiang.

Feinstein said, in offering her services as an intermediary to Clinton and national security adviser Sandy Berger, “I said I’d be prepared to do it if they felt it would be helpful, and they said they did think it would be helpful and please do it.”

Jiang was “receptive and particularly pleased that Clinton had taken the time to personally write a note to him,’’ Feinstein said.

“I think he listened, and we had substantial discussions on the subject. … I was successful in getting the Chinese interested in beginning to resume negotiations on the subject,” Feinstein said in the November 1999 interview.

Human Rights

Significantly, Feinstein said she expected approval of the new trade status, which would remove the “annual congressional review that many believe continues to put pressure on China to reform its economy and human-rights record.”

In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would get the trade status it coveted, without having to do anything of significance to improve its abysmal human-rights record.

China was admitted to the World Trade Organization and has used that trade access to build the world’s second-strongest economy, and a world-class military.

If anything, the CCP’s human-rights record is worse today. Certainly, their repressive technologies are far more powerful.

At the time, Feinstein’s colleague, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressed grave concerns about the deal.

“Once they get permanent (normal trade relations status), all leverage from the US on behalf of business is over because they have what they want permanently,” Pelosi said, in the San Jose Mercury article. “They have violated their agreements in terms of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, they have violated their agreements in terms of trade, they have violated their agreements on international covenants on human rights. Why is that we think they are then going to honor their commitments they make for WTO?”

All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government.

Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S. politician.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated who led Dianne Feinstein’s student trip to Europe. The trip was led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The Epoch Times regrets the error.