2004-5 年，当 H5 禽流感病毒株在亚洲蔓延时，中国实验室生产了几种未经授权的活禽流感疫苗，科罗拉多州立大学兽医学教授 Mo Salman 说，他曾在亚洲从事动物健康研究，提高 担心它们会产生危险的新变种。
The government has not said how widely used illicit vaccines are or who has produced them. But a “vast amount” of pigs in China have nonetheless been vaccinated, Johnson said, a sentiment echoed by many other experts.
In 2004-5, when the H5 bird flu strains were spreading across Asia, Chinese laboratories produced several unauthorized live bird flu vaccines, said Mo Salman, a professor of veterinary medicine at Colorado State University, who has worked on animal health in Asia, raising fears that they could produce dangerous new variants.
“The current ASF unlawful vaccine(s) in China is repeating history,” Salman said.
There are several reasons that Chinese demographic data are unreliable. For starters, China’s local governments have a strong incentive to inflate population figures. More residents mean larger fiscal transfers from the central government, including funds for priorities such as education, pensions and poverty alleviation. Likewise, households might claim to have more members to receive more benefits.
Politics provides another motive for exaggerating the birth figures. For example, to show that the shift from a one to a two-child policy worked — and benefitted the careers of officials — the Chinese National Health and Family Planning Commission announced 18.85 million births in 2016, a 27 percent increase from the previous year.
Beijing: ‘Worst sandstorm in a decade’ leaves Chinese capital covered in thick brown dust after heavy Gobi Desert winds
Monday 15 March 2021 07:11, UK
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https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.568.1_en.html#goog_1728580444Play Video – Beijing choked in dust stormBeijing faces regular sandstorms due to its proximity to the Gobi desert, and issues such as deforestation and soil erosion.
Annalena Baerbock said after a meeting in Beijing with China’s foreign minister Qin Gang on Friday that conflicts must be solved peacefully and that Berlin was monitoring the situation in Taiwan with concern. “A unilateral, violent change of the status quo would be unacceptable for us Europeans,” she said, according to Reuters.
Women’s tennis tour ends Peng Shuai-inspired China boycott Peng dropped out of public view after saying in a social media post in November 2021 that a high-ranking government official forced her to have sex.
The Information Office of the State Council, China’s ruling administrative body, has not responded to requests for comment on the allegations. Zhang is one of the most senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party in recent years, and as such his contact details are not publicly available, so he could not be contacted directly.
Last Saturday, just hours after Xi Jinping sipped tea with Emmanuel Macron while calling for peace in Ukraine, fighter jets flew across the Taiwan Strait in a display of Chinese military might.
Aimed at intimidating Taiwan, China’s drills began the day after a state visit by the French president that marked a high point in Chinese diplomacy.
The jarring juxtaposition was the latest example of the two faces China has presented to the world – a dovish international peacemaker, and an attack dog baring its teeth to defend what it sees as its territory.
Mr Xi and Mr Macron attended a tea ceremony in GuangzhouTaiwan president Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with US leader Kevin McCarthy infuriated China
Disappearing Billionaires: Jack Ma And Other Chinese Moguls Who Have Mysteriously Dropped Off The Radar
The disappearance last month of technology industry dealmaker Bao Fan has rekindled interest in a recent Chinese phenomenon – vanishing billionaires.
The founder of China Renaissance Holdings – with a client list that has included internet giants Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu – is seen as a titan in the country’s tech sector.
Mr Bao’s case has followed a well-trodden path: he went missing for days before his company announced that he was “co-operating in an investigation being carried out by certain authorities in the People’s Republic of China”.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, made headlines when he was recently spotted at Yungu School in Hangzhou, where the company is headquartered. He had rarely made a public presence since he irked the Chinese Communist Party for criticizing the country’s financial regulatory system in 2020. “He described them as having a ‘pawnshop mentality,’ and that really ruffled a lot of feathers,” said Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative and author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. “Also, just the brash character of Jack Ma rubbed a lot of regulators and very powerful people in China the wrong way.” Jack Ma wasn’t the first billionaire who mysteriously disappeared from public view. In 2015, Guo Guangchang, who is known as China’s Warren Buffet, went missing. The company later said he was assisting authorities with an investigation. In 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, was abducted by Chinese security agents from Hong Kong. In 2022, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for fraud and corruption. The mysterious disappearance of China’s billionaires hasn’t stopped yet. In February, Bao Fan, a renowned investor banker, became the latest name on the list of ‘vanishing billionaires.’ However, a few days later, his company said he was “cooperating in an investigation being carried out by certain authorities in the People’s Republic of China.” “When someone like Bao Fan disappears, someone that high profile who suddenly vanishes without explanation, that inevitably sends a chilling kind of feel through the rest of the market,” said Nick Marro, lead analyst for global trade at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “I mean, how can you feel like you can do business in a place where, you know, an important leader of the industry can suddenly disappear?”
At the time of his disappearance Jack Ma was the richest person in China – he criticised financial regulatorsFosun International chairman Guo Guangchang. (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images). AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESRetired real estate executive Ren Zhiqiang. CHINA NEWS SERVICE (CNS)/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESBillionaire dealmaker Bao Fan
China’s hesitancy to join the UN project involving other Asian nations may compound frustration by global researchers who have been pressing Beijing to share information about the origins of COVID-19, as they seek to prevent future pandemics due to zoonotic, or animal-to-human, disease transmission.
Four Asian countries – China, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos – were initially selected for the survey by the scientific advisory committee of the project, called the Safety across Asia For the global Environment (SAFE), because they host multiple facilities presenting risks of animal-to-human disease transmission, the UN official said.
Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, is expected to meet Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in California later on Wednesday.
McCarthy has confirmed he will meet Tsai at a “bipartisan” event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, about 64km (40 miles) north of the centre of Los Angeles.
Taiwan now has only 13 formal allies with Beijing stepping up efforts to isolate the island on the international stage [Taiwan Presidential Office/Handout via Reuters]Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen travelled to Guatemala, one of Taiwan’s two remaining formal allies in Central America [Guatemala Presidency/Handout via Reuters]
Four of the companies – Luopu Haishi Dingxin Electronic Technology Co, Moyu Haishi Electronic Technology Co, Pishan Haishi Yong’an Electronic Technology Co and Urumqi Haishi Xin’an Electronic Technology Co – belong to the Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer Hikvision, according to Hangzhou-based firm’s 2021 half-year report.
This is not the first time Van Kerkhove has been vocal about China’s lack of transparency about Covid, nor is she the only world leader to call on China to be forthcoming about the beginnings of the pandemic.
In March, Van Kerkhove described to Science WHO’s late discovery of the Chinese data about the market as “beyond infuriating,” calling the lack of collaboration “scary as hell.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid task force during the presidential transition, said Van Kerkhove’s editorial puts WHO on the record on the issue.
“Will that be a compelling incentive for China to share more? No. They’re going to do what they’re going to do,” Osterholm said.
COVID-19 origins hearing witness blasts China’s ‘stonewalling’ China has vigorously denied COVID-19 lab-leak origins theory and refused to be transparent with international investigators
“Since the early days of the pandemic, China’s government has destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, gagged Chinese scientists, actively spread misinformation and done pretty much everything possible to prevent the kind of unfettered, evidence based investigation that is so urgently required,” he charged.
“Every person on earth must demand accountability from China, calling for a full investigation of pandemic origin,” Metzl continued, adding that scrutiny on China does not mean the U.S. and others should neglect to scrutinize their own response to the pandemic.
“I think the majority of Chinese people don’t notice it because they either don’t pay attention to the war or they only get their news about it from Chinese media,” she told Al Jazeera.
“But if you are able to look beyond the firewall [a term used to describe China’s draconian censoring of the internet], you see that the war is talked about very differently and reported on very differently in international and Western media,” she told Al Jazeera.
Early on in the invasion, China’s state broadcaster CCTV ran claims that the United States had funded the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian labs. It was also reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv in the wake of the first wave of Russian attacks.
Chinese media then dutifully relayed the Russian assertions that reports of torture and killings of Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv, were ”fake news”.
All the while, the invasion was, and still is, being referred to as a “special military operation”, just as in Russian media.
Despite the censorship and the information bubble, however, both Lin and Tang have noticed a change in the way the Russian invasion is being addressed on Chinese social media.
Lin saw some anti-war remarks on Chinese social media when the war first broke out but the vast majority of posts she read were pro-Russia and anti-Western.
“Now, I think that there is a lot more posts and comments that are critical of Russia compared to before, and they also stay up longer before they are removed by censors,” Lin said.
Thousands of Chinese migrants and asylum seekers have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, and many more are heading north after passing through the treacherous Darién Gap jungle between Colombia and Panama.
The announcement, for which the distributor gave no reason, added to censorship concerns amid a government crackdown in the Chinese territory. 发行方没有说明理由的这一宣布，加剧了中国政府在中国领土上镇压的审查担忧。
HONG KONG — Public screenings of the British horror film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” have been abruptly called off in Hong Kong, adding to worries about growing censorship in the Chinese territory….
Winnie the Pooh has been a sensitive topic in China since 2013, when a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama strolling together in California inspired Chinese internet users to compare them to the bumbling bear and his irrepressible friend Tigger. The Pooh character has become a lighthearted, parodic way to refer to Xi, who recently secured an unprecedented third term in office, as well as a way to express dissent…….
The city of more than 7 million, which lifted its last major “zero-Covid” restrictions only this month, is trying to revive its economy and its reputation as an international financial hub with the full-scale return of cultural and sporting events such as the Asia edition of Art Basel, which starts Thursday….
captured from twitter, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hong-kong-winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-rcna76046
A worker in a protective suit sprays disinfectant as residents stand in line for their routine Covid-19 tests at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing on Thursday, November 24, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/02/economy/china-zero-covid-sustainability-debt-woes-intl-hnk/index.html
Most of the debts incurred by Chinese local governments aimed to fund the strict lockdowns, mass testing and quarantine centers, which were the hallmarks of the controversial zero-COVID policy. As the debt and its interests continue to pile up and mature, Chinese local governments are forced to cut their spending or delay investments, impeding economic growth and public services. In Zhengzhou, where the world’s biggest iPhone factory stands, the city’s fiscal revenue dropped by an average of 14% per year while its total debt grew by 14%. Its debt-to-fiscal income ratio surged 178% in 2022, compared with 75% in 2019. The Chinese city’s public services spending is feeling the brunt of the growing debt. Zhengzhou’s bus drivers said their salaries were cut in 2021, while street sweepers continue to work despite not being paid for their services in months.
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/230130182527-hegang-city-2020-exlarge-169.jpg The northern coal city of Hegang covered in snow on January 2, 2020.
Local governments have exhausted their budgets after spending enormous amounts of money on enforcing frequent Covid lockdowns, mass testing and setting up quarantine centers before December’s policy U-turn, which signaled the abrupt end of Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy.
“Beijing is facing an economic minefield of its own making,” said Craig Singleton, senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “All told, China’s current debt crisis represents a perfect storm.”
The “hidden debt” issued by local government financial vehicles, entities created to circumvent borrowing restrictions and used to channel funding for infrastructure spending, might have totaled 65 trillion yuan ($9.6 trillion) by the middle of 2022, according to a recent estimate by analysts at Mars Macro, an economic research firm based in Hunan. That’s more than 20% higher than the estimate of 53 trillion yuan made by Goldman Sachs in 2021. That would be equivalent to more than half of China’s GDP. Overall, Chinese government debt is now equivalent to 102% of its GDP, the analysts estimated.
The Wujiang Bridge in the city of Zunyi in the southwest province of Guizhou on Nov. 24, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/31/economy/china-local-governments-basic-services-debt-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html
中国男子被指拒绝进入隔离设施后被拖出家门 Chinese Man dragged out of home after allegedly refusing to go to quarantine facility
尽管各国领导人对私营部门表示”坚定不移的支持”，但该国最著名的企业家之一还是选择在海外呆上几个月 Even as leaders voiced “unwavering support” for the private sector, one of the country’s best-known entrepreneurs chose to spend months overseas.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Ant Group Co. Ltd. co-founder Jack Ma may be one of Beijing’s best chances at repairing its reputation with the private sector in China and beyond. But so far, the billionaire isn’t jumping on invitations from authorities. Lulu Chen reports on Bloomberg Television.
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