在2020年初，当新冠肺炎仍然是一种神秘疾病时，中国疾病控制中心（CDC）从市场采集了样本。这些样本中包含的遗传信息直到最近才被简短地公开，这使一组研究人员能够解码它们，并将浣熊狗作为可能的“中间宿主”，疾病从中蔓延到人身上。根据3月20日在线发布的一项分析，这项分析的关键是，正在出售的野生哺乳动物浣熊狗的DNA生活在肉类市场上，与SARS CoV-2检测呈阳性的拭子在同一个位置被发现。—阅读www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65067264 During the early days of 2020, when Covid was still a mystery disease, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control (CDC) took samples from the market. The genetic information contained in those samples has only recently been made, briefly, public, and that enabled a team of researchers to decode them and point to racoon dogs as a possible “intermediate host” from which the disease spilled over into people. The crux of this analysis is that DNA from racoon dogs, wild mammals that were being sold live in the market for meat, was found in the same locations as swabs from the market that tested positive for SARS CoV-2, according to an analysis that was published online on 20 March. — Read on www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65067264
Does this answer the question of how the pandemic started?
This is not definitive proof. That is something we might never have.
The search for that proof has itself become heavily politicised and often toxic. While this lends weight to the theory that the virus emerged in wild animals and spread to humans at the market, another theory has focused on a possible “lab leak” of a virus from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The years-long delay in releasing this valuable data has led to frustration and anger with the China CDC.
“The data are three years old – it’s an absolute scandal that it’s taken this long for it to see the light of day,” said Prof Holmes.
The information had actually been posted onto the GISAID genetic database back in February 2022. But it was left there unnoticed. It’s assumed that this was done to provide supporting evidence for a research paper based on the data that was being prepared by Chinese researchers from the CDC. (Sharing such background data is considered a requirement for scientific publication.)
But shortly after the Chinese researchers learned that others had seen the information, it became hidden again.
In a press conference on 17 March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said that “every piece of data” was important in moving us closer to that answer. “And every piece of data relating to studying the origins of Covid-19 needs to be shared with the international community immediately.”
This is a golden opportunity to seize for India, Vietnam, and the many other countries that are now offering themselves as alternatives. Not that Vietnam is any less communist or more respectful of freedom than Beijing, but it keeps a good distance from China and enjoys good relations with Washington.
As in the days of the first Cold War, the one with the USSR, the West is less careful with our allies than with our adversaries. Vietnamese communism, or the worrying Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi in India, do not stand in the way of doing business with the blessing of Washington. It is cynical but hardly surprising.
Although Xi Jinping finally ended China’s disastrous zero-COVID policy late last year, he has continued to double down on his Leninist project of deepening autocracy at home and aggression abroad. More Sino-Western “decoupling” and the emergence of Cold War-style blocs is all but assured.
中国周四试图阻止一名著名的维吾尔族活动家在联合国人权理事会发表讲话，他要求该机构紧急处理关于北京严重违规行为的指控。 China attempted on Thursday to block a prominent Uighur activist from speaking at the United Nations Human Rights Council, where he demanded the body urgently address allegations of serious violations by Beijing.
China’s formidable Great Firewall, which blocks access to all sorts of Web services and perceived threats to the country’s people, was the victim of a glitch on Wednesday that saw hundreds of millions of Chinese Web users attempting to access allowed sites being redirected to the home page of Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a company that sells technology allowing Chinese citizens to get around the firewall.
Although state-run media outlets have said that the glitch was a successful hack, people apparently familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday that no hacking attempts were identified, making those sources wonder whether simple human error caused the issue when modifications were made to the firewall.
The hole gave many Chinese citizens their first glimpse into the outside digital world. For years, China has been blocking Web sites, including DIT’s, for a myriad reasons, including alleged threats to its government structure and a desire to limit comments on certain topics.
Chinese say it’s very natural government forced to have how many babies on every people. Chinese think the world is the same. By China’s Brainwahed education.
中国的爱国主义教育是长期的，不间断的。 中国共产党控制着社会的方方面面，包括经济、文化和媒体。 从幼儿园到大学的教育是中共的首要任务。中国共产党的洗脑教育造就了适应不了世界的中国人 China’s patriotic and war-wolf education is long-term with no interruptions. The Chinese Communist Party or CCP controls every aspect of society including the economy, culture, and media. Education from kindergarten to university is the CCP’s top priority.
This report explores how the Chinese party-state’s globally focused propaganda and disinformation capabilities are evolving and increasing in sophistication. Concerningly, this emerging approach by the Chinese party-state to influence international discourse on China, including obfuscating its record of human rights violations, is largely flying under the radar of US social media platforms and western policymakers.
In the broader context of attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to censor speech, promote disinformation and seed the internet with its preferred narratives, we focus on a small but increasingly popular set of YouTube accounts that feature mainly female China-based ethnic-minority influencers from the troubled frontier regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, hereafter referred to as ‘frontier influencers’ or ‘frontier accounts’.
Despite being blocked in China, YouTube is seen by the CCP as a key battlefield in its ideological contestation with the outside world, and YouTube’s use in foreign-facing propaganda efforts has intensified in recent years. Originally deployed on domestic video-sharing platforms to meet an internal propaganda need, frontier-influencer content has since been redirected towards global audiences on YouTube as part of the CCP’s evolving efforts to counter criticisms of China’s human rights problems and burnish the country’s image.
Alongside party-state media and foreign vloggers, these carefully vetted domestic vloggers are increasingly seen as another key part of Beijing’s external propaganda arsenal. Their use of a more personal style of communication and softer presentation is expected to be more convincing than traditional party-state media content, which is often inclined towards the more rigid and didactic. For the CCP, frontier influencers represent, in the words of one Chinese propaganda expert, ‘guerrillas or militia’ fighting on the flanks in ‘the international arena of public opinion’, while party-state media or the ‘regular army’ ‘charge, kill and advance on the frontlines’.
Influencers are the new face of Chinese propaganda. Hidden amongst the vlogs about puppies and makeup, they clandestinely allow Beijing to whitewash its crimes against humanity. Despite being blocked in China, YouTube has become a key ideological battleground for the Chinese Communist Party. And they have created a whole new ecosystem of influencers who tow the party line. From looking at these videos, these Uygher influencers portray their homeland of Xinjiang as idyllic and prosperous. However, numerous and credible reports document China’s ongoing crimes against the Uygher population – from rape, forced sterilization to slave labor. Daria Impiombato, a Researcher at The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and her team, watched over 1,700 of these videos. Soon enough, they found a worrying grey area in which these influencers operate. Through working for ‘multi-channel networks’ or MCNs,. These “influencer agencies”, with state-approved VPN networks, allow them to circumnavigate the all-powerful “Great Firewall of China”. However, these agencies are linked to the Chinese Communist Party, and their content must strictly follow Chinese law. Beijing’s propaganda machine is attempting to control the narrative, not just within their borders, but directly within your algorithms too.
Table 1: Frontier accounts on YouTube with more than 2,000 followers
To interact with the hyperlinks, please download the full report.
Figure 18: A video on the Ayituna (阿依图娜) channel describing the beautiful hair of the women in the vlogger’s family
Figure 24: Screenshots of posts from the @Maryamugul Twitter account featuring frontier influencer vide
Source: ‘Xinjiang Mali’ [新疆玛丽], Twitter, 9 October 2021, online; ‘Xinjiang Mali’ [新疆玛丽], Twitter, 27 May 2021, online.
The now-suspended @LeonaBenjamin18 Twitter account shares the same name and profile picture as the currently active @Maryamugul Twitter account
Source: Twitter.
Xiaowu Brothers’ post outlining ‘detailed rules for the review of online short video content’
Source: ‘Xiaowu Brothers’ [杭州小五和她的兄弟们科技有限公司], Facebook, 30 December 2021, online.
Meta’s blog post on Xiaowu Brothers’ success story
Xiaowu Technology joint party branch held an organisational life meeting and carried out a criticism and self-criticism session of party members
Source: ‘Jincheng Xiaowu Technology’ [晋城小五科技], Weixin, 1 April 2022, online.
Pre-roll advertisements on videos about Xinjiang cotton, appearing on the ‘Annie Guli’ and ‘Chinar girl on horseback’ YouTube accounts, and a pop-up ad on the ‘GuLi XinJiang’ account
From Xi’s point of view, the image of China and its frontier regions is distorted by negative portrayals from ‘foreign forces’ used to contain the country’s rise. Creating a ‘credible, lovable, and respectable image’ of China’s frontier regions is meant to cultivate a favourable domestic and external environment for the PRC that will, in turn, facilitate the country’s stability, development and global power. The emergence of ethnic-frontier accounts on platforms blocked in China is another sign of Beijing’s willingness to experiment in building its global voice.
The party-state is concerned that opening up access to social media platforms and other interactive channels to regular Chinese people will expose them to the risk that they’ll be influenced by the West’s superior ‘discourse power’ and undermine the CCP’s political project. Far from encouraging widespread participation of Chinese internet users on foreign platforms, the CCP has continued to restrict them from engaging in dialogue across the firewall, indicating that the party-state doesn’t trust Chinese citizens to ‘tell China’s story well’ unless they’re led and guided through designated channels.
Frontier-influencer accounts are increasingly used as an emerging part of Beijing’s growing propaganda arsenal. They’re seen as a resource to be drawn on, but only if they’re harnessed properly. At present, their effectiveness appears to be mostly limited to the global Chinese diaspora. But, as Beijing continues to ramp up political control over social media content production and bring official discourse and self-expression further into line, more of these seemingly authentic accounts are likely to be unleashed onto the world.
What’s more, TikTok is reportedly paying an army of influencers to descend on Washington DC over three days this week, courting lawmakers in the hopes of staving off a ban.
“Lawmakers in Washington debating TikTok should hear firsthand from people whose lives would be directly affected by their decisions,” said TikTok spokesperson Jamal Brown (h/t Politico). “We look forward to welcoming our creators to our nation’s capital, helping them make their voices heard, and continuing to drive meaningful impact in their lives and for their communities.”
Governments around the world, including in the US at both the federal and state levels, have grown increasingly wary of TikTok in recent months, primarily over national security-related concerns stemming from the Chinese company ByteDance that launched the app.
A Forbes investigation, meanwhile, was the first to report on the surveillance of journalists by employees within TiKTok’s parent company who were searching for the source of leaks.
For some questions in life, there is only one correct answer. Questions like: Does this shirt make me look fat? Do you still love me? Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but? It’s when you start quibbling over the definition of this or that word in response to those questions that you start to look like … well, like TikTok CEO Shou Chew during his testimony at a congressional hearing on Thursday. At one point, he dodged a congressman’s question about whether TikTok spies on US users by nitpicking over the choice of the word “spying.”
we need to link stopping fentanyl to stopping cartels and stopping China. Mexico is the front line in ending the influx of fentanyl from China.
Tracking fentanyl’s deadly path from China to Mexico to ODs in America Like the opium trade of the past, fentanyl is manufactured in China and then trafficked through Mexico. It’s enriched China, empowered the cartels and destabilized Mexico. It’s also killed thousands of Mexicans and Americans for far too long.
Addressing it means disrupting the supply chain and the support network. The US-Colombia agreements offer a template that incentivizes Mexico as a full and equal partner in reversing fentanyl transmission while also justifying the use of American assets to reverse the fentanyl influx. We need to stop accepting failure and those who profit from it.
Both nations have the talent and interests to fix a set of problems that are solvable, self-evident and self-inflicted by both sides.
Even three days’ notice would have been good,” said a former China CDC official. “The way this happened was just unbelievable.”
Soon, the sick overran emergency wards and patients sprawled on floors. COVID-19 antivirals sold for thousands of dollars a box on the black market.
In just six weeks, about 80% of the country was infected — more than a billion people, the China CDC later estimated. But even as deaths mounted, authorities ordered state media to deflect criticism over China’s sudden reopening, according to a leaked directive obtained by a former state media journalist and posted online.
The similarities are very, very striking between the Chinese Communist way of persecution and the American leftist way of restriction and even discrimination,” Fu told Fox News Digital.
Fu said he has observed with concern how the left in the U.S. is increasingly exhibiting “dictatorial” attitudes both culturally and politically by censoring speech, enforcing “woke” culture and not tolerating dissent. He pinpointed the alleged political weaponizing of federal law enforcement agencies as a worrisome escalation of such trends.
— Read on www.foxnews.com/world/christian-escaped-china-persecution-warns-us-descending-communist-style-governance
have imposed sanctions on Russia and sent military aid to Ukraine: the UK, US, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Korea, Japan and the EU — in other words, those countries that are directly under the US sphere of influence, which in many cases involves a significant US military presence.
Since the invasion, China has hugely increased its purchases of Russian oil, gas and coal, while exporting far more machinery, manufactured products and high-end electronics in the other direction; they have boosted their bilateral trade by more than 30%. The two countries have also committed to significant investment and infrastructure projects through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the world’s largest regional grouping in terms of geographic scope and population, which also includes India, Pakistan, Iran and all the major Central Asian republics.
Today, as Xi and Putin sit down to discuss the future of Ukraine, the implication of this is clear. China and Russia are not decoupling from the West; rather, the West is decoupling from the rest of the world.
The interruptions occurred at the Council’s interactive dialogue with Alexandra Xanthaki, the U.N.’s special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, on her report on migration and cultural rights. The report identified gaps that exist in the protection of the cultural rights of no less than 280 million around the world.
Qantas told pilots aircraft had experienced GPS jamming suspected to originate from warships (pictured) operating off the north west shelf of Australia https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11870693/Qantas-warns-crews-Chinese-military-interfering-planes.html
Qantas has warned its pilots of radio interference from people claiming to be Chinese military, and GPS jamming from Chinese warships.
The airline updated its flight standing orders manual on Thursday to include policies on what to do if crews encounter this.
The policy update informed pilots that flights had encountered both hostile actions, sometimes very close to Australia, but safety was not compromised.
As companies all over the world race to develop their own versions of generative artificial intelligence chatbots, developers in China have a particular hurdle to overcome, Beijing’s censorship rules. WSJ reporter Shen Lu joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how Chinese developers are working to ensure their chatbots avoid subjects like politics.
