作者：Asawin Suebsaeng and Erin Banco  来源：Daily Beast

In a private conversation with President Donald Trump during the rapid acceleration of the coronavirus pandemic, China’s leader Xi Jinping went out of his way to deploy one of the most effective diplomatic maneuvers of the current American era: aggressive flattery.

In a phone call to discuss the international health crisis last week, Xi stressed to Trump how decisive, strong, and successful he feels his U.S. counterpart’s public-health and economic responses have been, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter said. The flattery came at a time when Trump was continuing to experience a deluge of criticism for his administration’s response to the pandemic. It also came as some of the American president’s most prominent officials were still engaged in a multipronged campaign to castigate the Chinese government for an alleged coronavirus cover-up and to rebrand the illness as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus.”

Trump had begun incorporating that language into his public utterances, framing the pandemic as a war whose origins were in China. But lately, he has softened his tone and adopted a more deferential stance toward Xi—whom he routinely calls his good “friend” and an “incredible guy”— going out of his way to compliment and excuse Beijing for its response to the virus, and to even publicly shrug off new reporting on China’s disinformation apparatus in the midst of the pandemic.

In the past few days, Trump has also told multiple officials that Xi has assured him that the Chinese government wouldn’t lie about the numbers of reported cases of coronavirus currently coming out of the epicenter of the outbreak, Wuhan, two sources familiar with the comments said.

“For a long time, the president has enjoyed an epic bromance with Xi,” a senior administration official said. “If I were them, I would be doing the same thing. Why wouldn’t you try to leverage that relationship with a [U.S.] president who goes on TV so many times to say how great he thinks your guy [Xi] is.”

The president’s messaging on Xi and China appears to have trickled down to other parts of the federal government as well. According to two senior Trump administration officials, the State Department has also toned down the tough talk on Beijing for not revealing its coronavirus case numbers sooner.  

In recent cables, it appears the department is also no longer calling the virus the “Wuhan virus” and is instead referring to it as “COVID19” or simply “COVID.” As one senior Trump official told The Daily Beast: “There’s an understanding that the department—and the administration as a whole—is going to back away from that terminology.”

It is a fairly jarring turn. Just earlier this month, the State Department had transmitted a cable that included a section detailing National Security Council “Top Lines” and official talking points on the “[People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”

The State Department did not return a request for comment. But the shift comes as White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, along with the State Department and FEMA, set up the deliveries of essential medical supplies and protective gear from U.S. health-care distributors based in China. 

The new tone is particularly notable since, for weeks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had accused China’s leaders of contributing to the global spread of the virus because they took too long to warn the rest of the world of its spread and silenced health-care workers who tried to speak out about it. In his remarks to the press, Pompeo has continuously referred to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus” and brushed off suggestions that such a term was racist. Beijing’s leaders pushed back on the designation, claiming that the terms are xenophobic and inaccurate now that the virus has spread to dozens of countries across the world. 

“We condemn the despicable practice of individual U.S. politicians eagerly stigmatizing China and Wuhan by association with the novel coronavirus, disrespecting science and WHO,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a recent briefing. “The international society has a fair judgment, and Pompeo’s attempts of slandering China’s efforts in combating the epidemic is doomed to fail.”

According to cables reviewed by The Daily Beast, China launched a campaign to discredit the Trump administration’s use of the term “Wuhan virus.”

“Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory disease expert widely respected by the Chinese public for his work on both SARS and the coronavirus, has been quoted widely by state-media outlets questioning the origin of COVID-19,” the cable said. “At a March 18 press conference at Guangzhou’s First Affiliated Hospital, Zhong again said there was ‘no evidence’ indicating the virus originated in Wuhan, adding that it would be ‘irresponsible’ to make conclusions about the origin of COVID-19 without further information.”

It all amounts to a concession to Beijing from Trumpworld, which for a year has made alleged submissiveness to China—particularly on trade policy—a major political talking point against the president’s likely 2020 Democratic presidential rival. 

“Joe Biden, incredibly, dismisses China as an economic competitor, so it’s little wonder that while Biden was in office he welcomed China’s rise and sat back and watched as the Chinese ate America’s lunch,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said last year. 

The president himself has routinely claimed that he’s so tough on China that Beijing desperately wants Biden to win in November, insisting that “China wants Sleepy Joe BADLY!”

Senior Trump officials and Capitol Hill lawmakers, alarmed by the recent change of tone in the administration’s public-facing relationship with China, are still pushing for Pompeo and the president to continue to counter China’s disinformation campaign, according to one official working on China policy.

And on that front, Foggy Bottom still appears to be complying. Two officials with knowledge of the cables told The Daily Beast that the State Department was asking foreign countries to track Chinese disinformation efforts. One State Department cable said the People’s Republic of China was pushing out stories that focused on “preventing a second wave of outbreaks from ‘imported cases.’”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-toned-it-down-on-chinaafter-xi-sucked-up-to-him?ref=scroll

来源时间：2020/4/2   发布时间：2020/3/31

旧文章ID：21161

作者：ohn Dotson  来源：Jamestown

Image: A photo released by Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense on February 10, showing a Taiwan Air Force F-16 (foreground) escorting a PLA Air Force H-6 bomber (background). (Source: ROC Defense Ministry / AFP)

Introduction

On March 16, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force aircraft conducted a set of unusual nighttime sorties over the sea to the southwest of Taiwan. At least one KJ-500 airborne early warning and control (AEWC) aircraft and an undisclosed number of J-11 FLANKER-L jet fighters participated in the mission, and at one point crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which prompted a scramble by Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) F-16 fighters in response (Focus Taiwan, March 17; Taipei Times, March 18). Although the nature of the mission was unusual—this marked the first time that PLA aircraft flew in the vicinity of Taiwan at night—the incident was otherwise consistent with a pattern of increasingly provocative naval and military aviation operations conducted in the vicinity of Taiwan by PLA units in the first quarter of 2020.

This uptick in tactical military activity has been accompanied by more assertive rhetoric from People’s Republic of China (PRC) media outlets and spokespersons since the landslide reelection of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-Wen (蔡英文) on January 11 (China Brief, January 17). These military operations (see further discussion below) have also taken place as PRC officials and citizens have scrambled to cope with the social, economic, and political impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic that first manifested in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December (Jamestown, ongoing). This suggests that senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials wish to project the message that the crisis has not inhibited the PLA’s capabilities to defeat Taiwan “separatism”—and may further wish to use such operations to assert an image of strength in the face of the internal crisis produced by the pandemic.

Background: PLA Aviation Operations Near Taiwan Prior to 2020

PLA Air Force (PLAAF) flights around Taiwan are not a new phenomenon, and PLAAF sorties to circumnavigate the island—frequently involving H-6K bomber aircraft flying through the Bashi Channel (巴士海峽, Bashi Haixia) south of Taiwan, with other aircraft acting in support or escort roles—have been conducted since November 2016. In certain periods, such as the summer of 2017, these sorties peaked significantly. [1] These flights serve a two-fold purpose: they provide training for aircrews in conducting longer-distance sorties in likely operating areas for a potential future conflict over Taiwan; and they also serve a propaganda role, with both real and notional “island encirclement” sorties promoted in state media as part of a psychological warfare campaign intended to intimidate residents of Taiwan. [2]

On March 31, 2019 two PLAAF J-11 fighters crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait (an unofficial boundary, but one traditionally observed by military aircraft from each side), the first such reported incident since 2011. This prompted a scramble by ROCAF fighters and a sharp response from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-Wen (蔡英文), who vowed the “forceful expulsion” of PLA aircraft repeating this action in the future (SCMP, April 1, 2019).

The end of 2019 saw another significant development for naval aviation in the region, when the PLA Navy (PLAN)’s first indigenously-designed carrier SHANDONG (山东舰) (CV-17) was commissioned in mid-December 2019 at Sanya Naval Base on the southern Chinese island province of Hainan (Xinhua, December 17, 2019; Japan Times, December 18, 2019). On December 26, SHANDONG sailed through the Taiwan Strait in the course of conducting local-area training and sea trials (USNI, December 26, 2019). The transit was of limited importance in terms of demonstrating operational proficiency, but it was a symbolically powerful statement of the PRC’s growing naval strength and assertiveness towards Taiwan.

Image: Xi Jinping, in his role as Chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission, reviews an honor guard as part of commissioning ceremonies for the PLA Navy aircraft carrier SHANDONG held at the Sanya Naval Base on Hainan Island, Dec. 17, 2019. (Source: Xinhua)

Significant U.S.-PRC Military Events Near Taiwan in Early 2020

The pace of military incidents involving both U.S. Navy / Air Force and PLAN / PLAAF platforms has picked up in the first three months of 2020 (see chart below). These events have also been accompanied by at least three significant political events:

• Taiwan President Tsai’s reelection victory on January 11.
• A visit in early February to the United States by Taiwan Vice President-elect Lai Ching-te (賴清德), who met with senior U.S. political figures and attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. (Taiwan News, February 4). Although Lai had not yet assumed office at the time, and therefore visited in an unofficial capacity, his visit still drew strident condemnations in PRC state press (Xinhua, February 6).
• Passage of the “Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative” (“TAIPEI Act”), which was signed into U.S. law on March 26. The measure provides a symbolic statement of support for Taiwan, and “requires the Department of State to annually report to Congress on steps the State Department has taken to help strengthen Taiwan’s diplomatic relationships and partnerships around the world” (Congress.gov, March 26).

Noteworthy U.S. and PRC military actions in the vicinity of Taiwan in the first quarter of 2020 are provided in the chart below:
Click here to see the chart.

Conclusion

PLA naval and aviation operations in the vicinity of Taiwan are an ongoing phenomenon, and may be expected to further increase commensurate to the PRC’s growing military power. These activities ebb and flow on a regular basis, and too much could be made of looking for broader significance at particular times. That said, such tactical activity does appear to have been on the rise in the first quarter of this year. Furthermore, it has been accompanied by increasingly strident rhetoric from the PRC, which is insisting on its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan in an ever-more assertive fashion—even as democratic political processes in Taiwan are leading the island away from the PRC’s orbit, and making the prospects for peaceful unification on Beijing’s terms more remote than ever.

These actions have also been paralleled by an increase in maritime presence and freedom of navigation operations conducted by the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force in the vicinity of Taiwan and the South China Sea. In a proverbial case of the lady protesting too much, PRC state press has accused the U.S. government of conducting military provocations in order to distract from failings surrounding the ongoing viral pandemic: as stated by the nationalistic Global Times on March 22, “The current U.S. administration wants to shift attention from its failure in containing COVID-19 and the plummeting stock market, so it is increasing efforts to escalate tension… China hawks believe that such actions during the crucial period of the COVID-19 outbreak can shift Americans’ attention by inciting nationalist sentiment” (Global Times, March 22).

The combination of its own rising military capabilities, and the need to project an image of strength amid the domestic social and political crisis sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, have led Beijing to ramp up provocative military measures aimed at sending a political message to both Taiwan and the United States. If domestic woes continue this year—as, for example, in a serious economic downturn—Beijing’s saber-rattling across the Taiwan Strait may be expected to continue further into 2020.

John Dotson is the editor of China Brief. For any comments, queries, or submissions, feel free to reach out to him at: cbeditor@jamestown.org.

Notes

[1] Grossman, Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Ma, and Chase, China’s Long-Range Bomber Flights: Drivers and Implications (RAND Corp., 2018), pp. 20-25. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2500/RR2567/RAND_RR2567.pdf.

[2] For discussion of how PRC state media has promoted these flights for propaganda purposes, see: ibid., pp. 22-23. For an example of how notional PLAAF flights have also been used in propaganda directed at Taiwan, see: John Dotson, “Beijing Sends a Menacing Message in Its Lunar New Year Greeting to Taiwan,” China Brief, February 15, 2019. https://jamestown.org/program/beijing-sends-a-menacing-message-in-its-lunar-new-year-greeting-to-taiwan/.

来源时间：2020/4/2   发布时间：2020/4/1

旧文章ID：21160

作者：Andrew Yang  来源：Washington Post

Andrew Yang was a Democratic candidate for president and is founder of Humanity Forward.
     Last week I was shopping for groceries and preparing to hole up at home with my wife, Evelyn, and our two boys. There was an eerie, peculiar aura in the parking lot in upstate New York as night fell and shoppers wheeled out essentials and snacks.

Three middle-aged men in hoodies and sweatshirts stood outside the entrance of the grocery store. They huddled together talking. One looked up at me and frowned. There was something accusatory in his eyes. And then, for the first time in years, I felt it.

     I felt self-conscious — even a bit ashamed — of being Asian.

It had been years since I felt that way. I grew up with semi-regular visitations of that sense of racially tinged self-consciousness. It didn’t help that I was an awkward kid. But after adulthood, marriage, a career, parenthood, positions of leadership and even a presidential run, that feeling had disappeared — I thought.

My place in this country felt assured. I have it better than the vast majority of Americans of any background. When comedian Shane Gillis slurred me by name, I did not think he deserved to lose his job. It barely registered when a teenager yelled “Chink” at me from the window of his car in New Hampshire a number of months ago. My only reaction was to think, “Well, I’m glad that neither of my sons was around because then I might have to explain to them what that word means.”

But things have changed.

In the past few weeks, the number of reported physical and verbal attacks on Asian Americans has increased dramatically. The percentage of Asians who use the not-for-profit Crisis Text Line to speak with a counselor has shot up from 5 percent of callers — about in line with our share of the population — to 13 percent, an increase of 160 percent. Some level of background disdain or alienation has grown into outright hostility and even aggression.

And we all know why. The coronavirus is devastating communities and lives. People’s livelihoods and families are being destroyed. And people are looking for someone to blame.

Before covid-19, too many Americans were already living paycheck to paycheck, working long hours just to get by. Now, we all are even more fearful for the future, worried about our parents, grandparents and children. We are anxious about our jobs, bills and next month’s rent or mortgage payment.
     In early February, when I was still running for president, someone asked me, “How do we keep the coronavirus from inciting hostility toward Asians in this country?”

I responded, “The truth is that people are wired to make attributions based on appearance, including race. The best thing that could happen for Asians would be to get this virus under control so it isn’t a problem anymore. Then any racism would likely fade.” This was weeks before “Chinese Virus” became a thing.

Now it is, and we have to figure out how to combat that, too. I’m an entrepreneur. In general, negative responses don’t work. I obviously think that being racist is not a good thing. But saying “Don’t be racist toward Asians” won’t work.

I have been thinking about ways to improve that encounter at the grocery store. People are hurting. They look up and see someone who is different from them, whom they wrongly associate with the upheaval of their way of life.

Natalie Chou, a UCLA basketball player, said that she felt better when she wore her UCLA gear, in part because the association reminded people that she was an American.

During World War II, Japanese Americans volunteered for military duty at the highest possible levels to demonstrate that they were Americans. Now many in the Asian American community are stepping up, trying to demonstrate that we can be part of the solution. Some 17 percent of U.S. doctors are Asian and rushing to the front lines.

We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before. We need to step up, help our neighbors, donate gear, vote, wear red white and blue, volunteer, fund aid organizations, and do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis. We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.

Demonstrate that we are part of the solution. We are not the virus, but we can be part of the cure.

来源时间：2020/4/2   发布时间：2020/4/1

旧文章ID：21159

作者：Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs  来源：Bloomberg

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.

The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

Communications staff at the White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.

While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism toward China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.

Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have been particularly harsh about China’s role in the outbreak. Enhancing Beijing’s role in the pandemic could be politically helpful to President Donald Trump, who has sought to shift blame for the U.S. outbreak away from his administration’s delays in achieving widespread testing for the virus and mobilizing greater production of supplies such as face masks and hospital ventilators.

“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”

^{Airport employees wear full body protective suits at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai on March 28.} 

Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.

 “The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.

“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.

“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”

— With assistance by Justin Sink

来源时间：2020/4/2   发布时间：2020/4/1

旧文章ID：21158

作者：Marisa Taylor  来源：Reuters

WASHINGTON(Reuters) – The Trump administration cut staff by more than two-thirds at a key U.S. public health agency operating inside China, as part of a larger rollback of U.S.-funded health and science experts on the ground there leading up to the coronavirus outbreak, Reuters has learned.

Most of the reductions were made at the Beijing office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and occurred over the past two years, according to public CDC documents viewed by Reuters and interviews with four people familiar with the drawdown.

The Atlanta-based CDC, America’s preeminent disease fighting agency, provides public health assistance to nations around the world and works with them to help stop outbreaks of contagious diseases from spreading globally. It has worked in China for 30 years.

The CDC’s China headcount has shrunk to around 14 staffers, down from approximately 47 people since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the documents show. The four people, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the losses included epidemiologists and other health professionals.

The material reviewed by Reuters shows a breakdown of how many American and local Chinese employees were assigned there. The documents are the CDC’s own descriptions of its headcount, which it posts online. Reuters was able to search past copies of the material to confirm the decline described by the four people.

“The CDC office in Beijing is a shell of its former self,” said one of the people, a U.S. official who worked in China at the time of the drawdown.

Separately, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the global relief program which had a role in helping China monitor and respond to outbreaks, also shut their Beijing offices on Trump’s watch. Before the closures, each office was staffed by a U.S. official. In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture(USDA) transferred out of China in 2018 the manager of an animal disease monitoring program.

Reductions at the U.S. agencies sidelined health experts, scientists and other professionals who might have been able to help China mount an earlier response to the novel coronavirus, as well as provide the U.S. government with more information about what was coming, according to the people who spoke with Reuters. The Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and for keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to assist.

“We had a large operation of experts in China who were brought back during this administration, some of them months before the outbreak,” said one of the people who witnessed the withdrawal of U.S. personnel. “You have to consider the possibility that our drawdown made this catastrophe more likely or more difficult to respond to.”

The White House declined to comment or respond to questions from Reuters regarding the U.S withdrawal of staff in China.

The CDC did not respond to detailed questions submitted by Reuters about the cuts. It has insisted its staffing levels did not hinder the U.S. response to the coronavirus.

“There are many factors that go into decisions around staffing,” the CDC said in a statement.

Some health experts were skeptical that more CDC employees operating inside China would have made a difference in stemming the outbreak. Beijing has been widely criticized for silencing its own public health officials who warned of a deadly new respiratory disease emanating from the Chinese city of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province.

“The problem was China, not that we didn’t have CDC people in China,” said Scott McNabb, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a research professor with Emory University. He pointed to China’s censorship as the main culprit in the spread of the pandemic, which has infected at least 435,470 people worldwide, killed 19,598 and upended the global economy.

China’s embassy in Washington, D.C. declined to comment.

SHUTTERED OFFICES

The NSF closed all foreign offices in 2018, according to spokesman Robert Margetta. He said the agency planned on “sending teams on short-term expeditions around the world to find ways to increase international collaborations.”

A USAID spokesman said the decision to shutter its Beijing office was “due to significantly decreased access to Chinese government officials as well as the Agency’s position that the Chinese model of development is not aligned with U.S. values and interests.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-slashed-cdc-staff-inside-china-prior-to-coronavirus-outbreak-idUSKBN21C3N5

来源时间：2020/4/2   发布时间：2020/4/25

旧文章ID：21155