China’s central bank warns state-owned lenders, Alipay off bitcoin linked transactions in meeting.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Postal Savings Bank of China among financial firms that attended a discussion organised by People’s Bank of China
Virtual currency transactions and speculative activity have disrupted the normal order of the economy and financial system, central bank says
China’s central bank recently ordered banks, including four state-owned commercial banks, and leading mobile payments provider Alipay to cut off all transactions linked to bitcoin, stepping up its clamp down on cryptocurrencies in the country.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Postal Savings Bank of China were among financial companies that attended a regulatory discussion organised by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) recently. Other participants included the Fujian-based Industrial Bank, and Alipay (China), a subsidiary of Ant Group, which along with Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay controls more than 90 per cent of China’s mobile payments market.
ASML sells to China to survive long term, if they don’t when China develop her own within 5 years, ASML will be finished. Do you think US will come to rescue ASML? Hell no! ASML is like Taiwan, being used to fight US private war shall be used and discarded when done. ASML 賣給中國是為了長期生存，如果中國在 5 年內開發自己的產品，ASML 就玩完了。 你認為美國會來拯救ASML嗎？ 一定不會! ASML就像台灣，被用來打美國的私人戰爭，用完就扔掉.
Reuters : ASML extends sales deal with Chinese chipmaker SMIC to end of 2021 by Stephen Nellis March 3, 2021
A logo of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is seen at China International Semiconductor Expo (IC China 2020) following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Shanghai
(Reuters) – ASML Holding NV has extended a deal to sell chip manufacturing equipment to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, China’s largest chipmaker, until the end of this year, the Dutch company said in a statement on Wednesday.
ASML made the statement after SMIC on Wednesday disclosed a volume purchase agreement under which it has already spent $1.2 billion with the toolmaker. In a clarifying statement issued several hours later, ASML said the agreement began in 2018 and was slated to expire at the end of 2020, but the two companies agreed in February to extend the deal to the end of this year.
In December, SMIC was one of dozens of firms put on a U.S. blacklist that required American semiconductor manufacturing equipment firms such as Applied Materials Inc and Lam Research Corp to obtain a license before exporting products to the chipmaker.
The U.S. Commerce Department said the action against SMIC stemmed from China’s efforts to harness civilian technologies for military purposes and evidence of activities between SMIC and Chinese military industrial companies of concern. The rules would still allow the shipment of tools for making less advanced chips.
ASML, which is based in the Netherlands and is the world’s largest supplier of lithography equipment for making chips, produces a critical tool required to manufacture advanced chips: an extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, machine.
In 2019, the Trump administration pressed Dutch officials to cancel a sale of an EUV machine to SMIC. At that time, Dutch officials declined to renew a license needed to ship the tool. Dutch officials had not approved a license to ship an EUV tool to China as of late February, according to government records.
In its statement on Wednesday, ASML said the volume purchase deal with SMIC related to an older technology called deep ultraviolet lithography, or DUV.
In January, ASML Chief Executive Peter Wennik said the company could see “significant upside” selling older chipmaking technology to China if allowed by government officials to do so. China accounted for 17% of ASML’s 14 billion euros in 2020 sales.
On Monday, the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, or NSCAI, recommended that the United States coordinate with the Netherlands and Japan to deny export licenses to China for key chipmaking equipment.
“This (sale) is a slap in the face to the NSCAI recommendations and shows how big the gap with allies is on these issue,” a U.S. semiconductor executive said on condition of anonymity.
A source close to President Joe Biden’s administration, however, said the administration was more focused on the next wave of technological competition with China.
“This is akin to trying to prevent them from getting a flip-phone. We’re much more interested in the technologies of tomorrow,” the person said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and Michael Martina in Washington; Editing by Paul Simao, Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)
What do you think about China? by Ismail Bashmori June 20 2021
Alright, listen up. I’m going to give you a summary of my entire impression of China as an Egyptian observer. I’ve been studying the country intensely for the past year — its government, society, history, and transformation — and over the past 3 months I’ve spoken to hundreds of Chinese and China-haters on this site and heard everything they had to say. By now I’ve learned roughly as much about China as anyone can learn without knowing the language or living in the country, and I’ve reached my conclusion. You might think I’m crazy. That’s OK with me. I’ve seen the facts and my opinion of the truth has become rock-solid. And China attracts a lot of haters, know-nothings and armchair experts.
The truth is that China is the greatest country on the face of the earth. It makes all other countries look insignificant and contemptible. It is the most brilliant, most industrious, most ambitious, most educated, meritocratic and technocratic, most modern, sophisticated, and civilized, and best-governed country in the world of our time, by far. It is the first nonwhite, non-Western country to reach this status since the 1600s. The determination of this country is indescribable. Supernatural. There is no force that can stop it from accomplishing anything it wants to do. It can set a goal that seems completely outlandish, drug-induced, hallucinatory — and it can make it happen. That’s precisely what it’s been doing. Forty years ago a flush toilet in China was a luxury. Today it has its own indigenously built Chinese Space Station. Believe me when I tell you that that is a tiny example of China’s capabilities.
I am a patriotic Egyptian and Middle Easterner. Yet I freely admit that compared to the Chinese, we are simply monkeys. A race of dumb animals. It doesn’t matter who we are. Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, even Americans. Next to the Chinese, we are pathetic. We can’t do what they do. We would have a mountain, an Everest of changes to make, and we would whine and bicker and fail at every one of them. China’s story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis. Next to China the entire Western world from Alaska to New Zealand has stagnated. Next to China the entire developing world from Brazil to Madagascar has progressed only at a crawl. China, my friends, is the mother of all gargantuan bullet trains. Every day it manages to create something new and astonishing. And unlike the United States, unlike the British Empire, unlike the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese or any other Western nation that had its turn at being a superpower in the past four centuries, China doesn’t need to run anybody over or take something from somebody else, to rise majestically.
China is also standing up to the Western world all by herself. The West hates and fears that China is shooting up to the top. They can’t believe their four-hundred-year-old global supremacy is being challenged. They hoped that the more China developed, the more it would submit to their influence, interests, and leadership. That didn’t happen. So now they will do anything possible, short of a nuclear war, to make China end. Their goal is to destroy this country. That’s why, although the United States has killed several million people and turned several regions of the earth into hellscapes since I was born in 1988, your TV, newspapers, Google newsfeed, and social media are all cursing, condemning and pandering panic and hatred of China 24 / 7. China is the worst fear of our planet’s Western masters. They want you to despise and dread a country that’s done nothing to you, that hasn’t invaded anyone, bombed or sanctioned anyone, that hasn’t overthrown any foreign government, or used its military on anything since 1979. You’ll hate China and pray for its collapse, so that the West can continue to do what it’s done since the age of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro — rape and pillage the earth from Latin America to Southeast Asia, and disguise its blood-spattered imperialism in the soft power and propaganda of “Western civilization” and world leadership.
China is the only major country in the nonwhite developing world, to stand up to the West. To look it in the eye when challenged or threatened, and say, No, I’m not afraid of you. Do your worst. I’m just as big as you are. All other countries in the Global South are simply Western puppets who submitted long ago. Even the most powerful ones. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India — their leaders are busy listening to the United States, pen and paper in hand, writing down all its demands and going, Yes sir, Mr. Yankee sir. Let me get on that right away for you.
The 1500s—1000s BC were Egypt’s time. Antiquity belonged to the Greeks and Romans. The 1700s belonged to France, and the 1800s to Britain. From 1945 to the present, the world has been under American overlordship. And they call it the Pax Americana but believe me, there isn’t much Pax in it. There’s plenty of Pax if you’re in Europe or Australia. But the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Yemen in the past 20 years. Latin America? They’ve destroyed that part of the world beyond any hope of recovery. Africa? It’s only been spared because of disinterest. The US sees Africa as nothing. The whole West does.
But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the rise of China. We are decades away from China becoming the greatest power on earth. This will be China’s time, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Attack China all you want, curse her and monger rumours and hysteria — but the truth is that none of your accusations are backed up by evidence, because you are a stooge of the Western press which is under the thumb of Western governments that want to stay on top of the world for all eternity. And the truth is that China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies. What’s going on now, this stupid new Cold War, is nothing. For her first thirty years, from 1949 to 1979, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West. It didn’t even have a seat in the UN General Assembly. And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy, a tiny fraction of Japan’s or Germany’s GDP — not even able to prevent famine. And it still didn’t submit to pressure or take any orders. Why on earth would it do that now?
China will be the next global power. There’s nothing that can be done about that. The first stage is that its economy only needs to grow at 4.7 percent per year to become the world’s largest by 2035. That means the usual, historical bare-minimum of 6 percent is already overkill. The US can build as many bases as it wants, slap as many sanctions as it wants, recognize whatever bogus genocides it wants. That’s what it’s been doing all along. Has any of it made a difference? China can adapt to any situation. It took China a mere ten years to go from being barred by the US Congress from participating in the “International” Space Station, to building its own Space Station from the zero. See, the US has an $800-billion war budget, 800 military bases, 13,000 aircraft, 500 warships, 6,000 nukes — but it doesn’t have what China has: invincible national resolve. It takes the US about 5 years to renovate a bridge, and it takes China 43 hours. There’s simply no competing with that. China doesn’t need to be a military superpower or empire. That was never part of the plan. US troops, God bless their souls, will continue sitting in their bases, scratching their balls, costing their government $800 billion a year to do nothing. Meanwhile, China will continue to actually develop. That’s the part of the equation that America totally missed, because it has barely developed since Reagan’s day. China is a better place to live today than at any time in its previous 5,000 years; Americans saw their highest standard of living in the 1960s and those days will never come back.
So yes, China will be the next global power, and the Chinese are vastly superior to us in every way. This is a fact that everyone can attack but that nobody can change, like the theory of evolution. The difference between me and other people is that I ask, Why is this a problem? Why is this something to be afraid of? Why doesn’t it mean — that the world will finally get better?
Look at you silly buggers, talking about China like it’s going to be the next Nazi Germany. Even many Middle Easterners I know fit in this foolish category. Did you notice when the US invaded or overthrew the governments of 20 countries in the past 32 years (my lifetime)? Did you even know? You think just because you’re ready to forget all that because of Beyoncé and Game of Thrones and Snapchat and other US cultural exports, it didn’t happen and isn’t still happening? But but, I’m scared! China’s big and bad! Because the US is feeding me terror-bytes about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Great Leap Forward! I don’t see any dead bodies, I can’t show you one invasion or one example of Chinese regime change, I can’t even find Hong Kong on a map or tell you one factual detail about Tiananmen Square, but the US State Department and all its media are telling me CHINA BAD! Wa, wa!
Even my father, brother, brother’s in-laws have no real knowledge of any kind about the Western terror-bytes that have given them such an apprehensive feeling about China. And they’re Egyptian and Syrian, so imagine how blank the typical Westerner is. Blankness doesn’t stop prejudice and gullibility. That’s what most China-haters are. As gullible as children getting told about the boogeyman to procure their obedience.
Aren’t you at least curious to see what a world with a nonwhite, non-Western leader might look like, after 400 years? Because God knows that leader won’t be us. It won’t be Brazil or Africa, or the Middle East or India or Indonesia or Nigeria or Pakistan. We’re a mess. China was a mess too. But we remain a mess many decades after we achieved independence, and the Chinese went their own way, disentangled their mess and created their destiny. We’re not made of what the Chinese are made of. We might be one day, if we stop taking orders and cozying up to Western puppet-masters. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.
Where’s your concept of innocent until proven guilty? You turn a blind eye to the country that gave you dozens of destroyed nations and millions of corpses to see as proof of its brutality, because it also gave you some amazing sitcoms! While a country you don’t have the slightest objective knowledge of, is already Nazi Germany to you because its adversaries, who are also your historical and present-day oppressors, tell you so?
Come on. Let’s wait to see one dead body, one invasion, one regime-change operation from the Chinese, before we fly into rage and hysterics about them! Is that so crazy? We’ve seen centuries of horror from the US and we’re still giving ‘Murica the benefit of the doubt, even when the brutal truth is crystal-clear.
For myself, I see China as hope. Hope that a colonized, brutalized, primitive and humiliated country, can rise above its past — refuse to be weak any longer — rebuild itself from nothing, with iron resolve, and become too strong to be overrun by the West again! Hope that a nonwhite, non-Western country can look deep within itself and find its own solutions to its problems — proving that (foolishly) trusting the West to guide us isn’t necessary! Proof that if we can do what the Chinese did, there will be no limits for us. Imagine a world where the US, France, Britain, Australia, are no more important than Uzbekistan or Paraguay. A world where the World Court might be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the World Bank in New Delhi, the United Nations in Jakarta, the IMF in Cairo. A world liberated from the US banking system and the dollar as its reserve currency, so that Washington can no longer tell 200 other countries who they can and can’t trade with. A world where an American can be tried for war crimes at the Hague, not just an Iraqi or Liberian or Serb. A world where we don’t hear about a non-Western-made vaccine and grunt to ourselves, Oh, it must be poison. A world where we don’t have to immigrate to the same countries that turned ours into hellholes, to work as sales clerks or taxi drivers, or even if we’re brilliantly employed — to drain our brains from our homelands in the best of cases, and use them to reinforce Western riches and supremacy in exchange for a fat paycheck, instead of using them to make our own countries semi-habitable. When I hear that China has built its own Space Station, landed a rover on Mars, ended extreme poverty, built the Earth’s biggest city, dam, telescope, 5G network, highway, air purifier, or whatever the heck it is that will come tomorrow — I feel the same pride as if I were Chinese. It’s not happening for all of us, but it’s happening for one of us and that’s a start. There’s got to be such a thing as developing-country nationalism — a common nationalism for all the countries that were colonized and plundered, and remain economically and politically captured by their ex-rulers. A nationalism for the Global South. We are too divided, too brainwashed, too fooled and weak — most of us still worship the countries that destroyed us, are non-Western on the outside and Western on the inside, are hating and fearing and buying all the lies about the only one of us that’s made it, and are leaving our countries in droves to let them burn while we “make a better life for ourselves” in the West. Do you want to live on a Western-dominated Earth for another 400 years? If you do, keep doing what you’re doing. But I don’t!
You know what’ll happen for all of us if America’s sick wishes come true and its global thuggery does make China collapse? Nothing. Eternal repetition of the status quo. More enslavement, hijacking of our resources and weak corrupt governments, neo-colonialism, invasion, regime change, sanctions, MISERY. Haven’t we already seen this? Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Belarus, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Soviet Union. Rest in peace. Even FRANCE and JAPAN for God’s sake. What does the United States do when any other country says NO, or simply becomes too powerful, too good at honest competition? IT CRUSHES IT LIKE A BUG. Japan was a Western-style democracy crawling with US troops, with a US-authored pacifist constitution and almost no military and an extremely pro-US government and populace, and it STILL got crushed when it looked like it would become the #1 economy in the 80s. Do Indians really believe that if China goes down, India will be allowed to become a great power? Do they not see that a strong or wealthy India would immediately fall victim to the same despicable US tactics? Don’t make me laugh. I remember 10–15 years ago when China was still relatively poor and impotent, and Bush and Obama would talk about China as sweetly as swans. Obama happily had dinner with Xi Jinping in late 2015, called China a crucial partner of the United States, and said the US welcomed China’s rise; it was all horseshit. Today Biden, who was there with Obama in late 2015 as Vice-President, angrily rebukes a reporter who merely said that Biden and Xi were old friends. America has taken off its mask. China made it, it wasn’t supposed to make it, so now it must die. What a difference 5 years can make. China went from “crucial partner” to “number one threat.”
We should be helping and supporting China to keep climbing to the top, and giving her some serious solidarity as she withstands the new Cold War of Western imperialism. It’s been a long 400 years. China is the first non-Western country to even come close to reaching a status of ultimate global importance. She is akin to the the first member of an impoverished family to go to university. That is our family of nations. And when China gets to the top, believe me, it won’t be a repeat of the French, British, or American Empire. Not a single developing country will be worse-off because of China becoming #1. There will be something good in this for all of us, so let’s wake up and let’s go! https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-China-4/answer/Ismail-Bashmori
Cartel of killers: UK, US and Canada jointly whip up global Xinjiang hysteria, but what about their joint history of systemic genocide, violence and enthnic cleansing? 殺手卡特爾：英國、美國和加拿大共同掀起全球新疆的歇斯底里，但他們的系統性種族滅絕、暴力和種族清洗的共同歷史如何？by GT staff reporters Jun 20 2021
The United Nations Human Rights Council assembly room.
As the 47th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council is scheduled to be held in Geneva on Monday, the Global Times learned that Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other Western countries have worked to misuse the UN platform to bring topics on China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and hyped untenable “genocide” allegations against China.
However, Chinese experts said that whatever inflammatory allegations these countries have been making, their political farce has got no legal basis from the international laws nor will they get support from the international community.
Canada will take the lead in making a Xinjiang-related joint statement at the interactive dialogue on the annual report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the Human Rights Council on June 21, according to the website of China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva and other International Organizations in Switzerland.
The attempt of Canada to lead an anti-China joint statement at the 47th session of the Human Rights Council is doomed to fail, Chinese Mission spokesperson Liu Yuyin said in response to a media question on this issue.
“It seems they are bent on going down the wrong path and about to stage another political farce,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Friday, adding that China’s achievements in the human rights cause, including that in Xinjiang, are universally recognized, and no one can gainsay this fact. “Standing in stark contrast are these mud-slinging countries’ own deplorable human rights records,” he noted.
Observers and experts reached by the Global Time said that some Western countries think they have the moral high ground to accuse China of committing “genocide,” but the fact is they don’t. Unlike them, China has never had a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, nor will it take in the future.
The US, Canada, and the UK, and some of the Western countries wishing to accuse China of committing “genocide,” a “projection” of facts based on their own heinous past and continued systemic violence and oppression, assumed China would do the same, Zhu Ying, deputy director of the National Human Rights Education and Training Base of the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times on Sunday.
As Chinese netizens commented, the very reason why they use these excuses to smear China is because they themselves have actually committed such atrocities. For every label of human rights violation they put on China, they can find a prototype in themselves. Here, the Global Times investigates and reveals the true face of Canada, the UK, and the US, the three countries that have abysmal human rights records.
US: American dream of genocide
Protesters are arrested by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US on May 31, 2020
US’ Stained Human Rights Record Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
While proclaiming itself a “beacon of democracy,” the US in fact tramples on the human rights of peoples of color in the country, committing genocide against American Indians, systematically discriminating against Asian and African Americans, and doing nothing for social inequality.
In America’s bloody history, the rights of American Indians have been seriously violated. The US government has carried out systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide against American Indian populations, among other acts of unspeakable genocidal crimes against other minorities in the country. Today, American Indians still live like second-class citizens with their rights trampled upon.
On August 5, 2020, a report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the implications to human rights of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes, submitted pursuant to the Human Rights Council resolution 36/15, decried the situation of the indigenous peoples in the US. They are regularly exposed to toxic pollutants, including nuclear waste, released or produced by extractive industries, agriculture, and manufacturing. Soil and lead dust pollution from mining waste poses a more significant health threat for indigenous populations in the US far more than other groups.
In addition to the serious abuse of the rights of American Indians, the instances of Asian Americans being discriminated against and abused in public spaces have increased sharply since the outbreak of the epidemic. Several media outlets in the US including the New York Times reported on the dire situation that Asian Americans face in the US.
According to an NBC News report, one in four Asian American youths experience racially motivated bullying. Due to irresponsible remarks by some US politicians, hatred toward Asian Americans and specifically toward Chinese Americans was stoked to astronomical levels in the US. UN human rights independent expert Tendayi Achiume said media and political leaders who have inflamed the rise of xenophobia and racial hatred amid the COVID-19 pandemic are “entrepreneurs of intolerance,” According to a UN tweet.
An FBI report released in 2020 showed that 57.6 percent of the 8,302 single-bias hate crime offenses reported by law enforcement agencies in 2019 were motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Of these offenses, 48.4 percent were motivated by anti-black or anti-African American bias; 15.8 percent stemmed from anti-white bias; 14.1 percent were classified as anti-Hispanic or anti-Latino bias, and 4.3 percent resulted from anti-Asian bias. Among the 4,930 victims of racial hate crimes, as many as 2,391 were of African descent.
This is not only peculiar to Asian Americans, but African American human rights are also seriously disregarded in the US.
On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old George Floyd was brutally killed by white police officer Derek Chauvin on the street as Chouvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes, disregarding Floyd’s distressed pleas at not being able to breathe. Shortly after Floyd’s death, which ignited nationwide anger in the US, 29-year-old black man Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer in the presence of Blake’s three children, and he was left paralyzed after the incident.
The US police shot and killed a total of 1,127 people in 2020, with no killing reported in just 18 days, according to Mapping Police Violence, a collection of interactive tools, maps, and figures that illustrate police violence in the United States. African Americans make up 13 percent of the US population but account for 28 percent of people killed by police. African Americans are approximately three times more likely than white people to be killed by police. From 2013 to 2020, about 98 percent of police officers involved in shooting cases were not charged with a crime, and the number of convicted was even lower, US media VOX reported.
Meanwhile, it’s reported that people of color died from the COVID-19 epidemic in far greater numbers than their white counterparts. Of the 10 counties in the US with the highest COVID-19 mortality rates, seven had a majority of people of color.
Due to the loss of confidence in the US government amid its poor handling of the epidemic, the number of people procuring guns has raised sharply, which threatens public security.
People of color were also more harmed by the COVID-19 epidemic. Infection and death rates attributed to COVID-19 in the US showed significant racial differences, with the infection, hospitalization, and death rate among African Americans being three times, five times, and twice that of their white counterparts respectively, according to a report delivered on August 21, 2020 by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent to the UN Human Rights Council.
Racial disparities in the epidemic equally extend to children, according to a report released on August 7, 2020 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Latino and black children were hospitalized with COVID-19 at a rate nine and six times that of white children, respectively.
Barbara Ferrer, director of public health for Los Angeles County, said the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus disease on black and Latino residents is rooted in the impact of racism and discrimination on access to the resources and opportunities that are needed for good health, according to the Los Angeles Times website on July 10, 2020.
A tally by Johns Hopkins University showed that as of June 20, 2021, the US had registered more than 33.53 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, with related deaths exceeding 601,000.
UK’s Stained Human Rights Record Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
UK: Murderous colonial cradle
While the UK prides itself as the world “leader” in human rights protection, the opposite is true, especially since the outbreak of COVID-19. Poverty in the country has increased, along with the blatant disregard for people’s right to life and access to healthcare with ethnic minorities among the worst affected, analysts pointed out.
From 2018 to 2019, 14.4 million people in the UK were living below the poverty line, 4.5 million among them being children, an increase of 100,000 from the previous year; 7 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty and 11 percent of the population lives in persistent poverty, the Guardian reported.
The country’s poor handling of the epidemic is deplorable, with the country once having proposed “herd immunity” as a strategy to contain the virus, leaving vulnerable groups exposed to infection.
According to a report by the Public Health Agency of England (PHE), the COVID-19 death rate among British-Bengalis is twice that of whites, and the death rate among those of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Caribbean descent is 10 percent to 50 percent higher than that of whites.
A report done by UK-based, black people-led researching organization Clear View Research showed that the majority of black people in the UK don’t think their rights are equally protected as those of the white people.
According to Sky News, hate crimes against Chinese people in the UK soared during the epidemic outbreak. At least 267 offenses were reported in the first three months of 2020 including harassment, robberies, assaults, and criminal damage.
Islamophobia is also on the rise in the UK. In a detailed study released in 2019 by the Center for Media Monitoring of the Muslim Council of Britain, among over 10,000 articles and clips referring to Muslims and Islam in the period of fourth quarter of 2018, 59 percent of all articles associated Muslims with negative behavior. About 37 percent of articles in right-leaning and religious publications were categorized with the most negative rating of “very biased,” and over one-third of all articles misrepresented or made generalizations about Muslims.
At the same time, according to Modern slavery in the UK: March 2020 released on March 2020 by Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, “there were 5,144 modern slavery offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2019, an increase of 51 percent from the previous year.” The number of potential victims increased by 36 percent to 10,627 in the year ending December 2018 compared with the previous year.
The ONS analyzed that the actual number of victims of modern slavery in Britain may be as high as 136,000. The top three nationalities of victims were British, Albanian and Vietnamese.
A large amount of evidence shows that in 2003, the British army captured and tortured thousands of Iraqi civilians in Iraq’s southern city of Basrah, and many innocent civilians died. During its stay in Afghanistan, the UK Special Air Service (SAS) repeatedly attacked villages and massacred villagers under the cover of darkness in the name of anti-terrorism and made it a “anti-terrorism success.”
There were more than 3,400 charges of war crimes, 90 percent of which were not investigated. In three months in 2011 alone, 33 civilians were suspected of being killed in 11 separate night attacks, the Times reported.
Michelle Bachelet Jeria, the High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights, expressed concerns on April 12, 2021, over the UK putting forward a new Overseas Operations Bill.
According to the new UK bill, if torture or other serious human rights violations committed by British soldiers overseas exceed a limit of five years, they will not be prosecuted in principle. If a prosecution must be put forward, the prosecutor must get the consent of the British Attorney General or the Attorney General of Northern Ireland.
Canada’s Stained Human Rights Record. Graphic: Jin Jianyu
Canada: Aboriginal slaughter grounds
For a long time, Canada has claimed to be a “model student of human rights” and has been obsessed with lecturing and remarking on other countries’ human rights conditions. Ironically, Canada itself is far from a model example of upholding human rights.
Canada has grossly violated the human rights of its indigenous peoples, the latest such case to be discovered being in May.
The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered in a former residential school, the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, which is believed to have housed 500 indigenous Canadian children. The youngest of the deceased was only 3 years old, and no information on the deaths of these children was recorded, according to Reuters.
Observers noted that this incident is another reminder of Canada’s historical crimes of the brutalization of indigenous people and the extermination of indigenous culture. Statistics revealed that an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and put in the care of “residential schools” in what a historic 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as a “cultural genocide” targeting Canada’s indigenous people, where at least 4,000 children died unnatural deaths, NPR reported.
Canada has also used a reservation system to violate the rights of aboriginal people. The Canadian government set up the reservation policy in the 1880s to force Aboriginal groups to move from resources-rich areas to remote and economically disparate areas through fraud and coercion.
According to data issued by Statistics Canada, currently more than 600 Aboriginal groups living on more than 3,000 small, scattered reserves, where the live conditions are harsh and nearly isolated, and where drug addiction, alcoholism, murder, and violence are rife.
With no future or hope in sight, the suicide rate among Aboriginal people living on reserves is eight times higher than the national average for Canada.
It is alarming that crimes against the rights of Aboriginal groups continue to this day in Canada. In 2018, the UN Committee against Torture adopted its concluding observations on Canada’s seventh periodic report, expressing concern about the widespread forced or coerced sterilization of Canadian Aboriginal women and girls. A 2019 report released by Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls also found that between 1980 and 2015, thousands of indigenous women and girls went missing or were murdered, 12 times more than any other group in Canada and 16 times more than white women.
At the same time, people of Asian and African descent are also subject to severe racial discrimination and unwarranted violations of immigrant rights in Canada. According to a 2020 survey conducted by Statistics Canada, 55 percent of minorities in Vancouver, 36 percent in Montreal, and 31 percent in Toronto believed that incidents of discrimination and harassment on the basis of race are on the rise.
Observers pointed out that although racism is considered a “red line” by all levels of the Canadian government, it is largely a case of “more talk, less action” and a lack of substantive initiatives to protect the legal rights of minorities.
Video: US CANNOT Lecture China on ‘Rules-Based International Order’ – Vijay Prashad. 美國🇺🇸不能就“基於規則的國際秩序”向中國🇨🇳指指點點 Vijay Prashad We speak to Director of the Tricontinental Institue Vijay Prashad. He discusses the conspiracy peddled by Western intelligence agencies of COVID-19 being created in a lab by China despite the fact scientific research has shown the virus jumping from animals to humans as the most likely way COVID-19 came to spread around the world, China’s changing foreign policy and defiance of arguably hypocritical positions by the West, China’s growing ability to defend its borders and territorial waters, the US’ and UK’s own chemical and biological weapons programs, the prospect of another ‘pink tide’ in Latin America and much more! https://vimeo.com/565344305 https://youtu.be/usWN0nZEx6I https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/514525959770734/?d=n
China surpasses milestone of administering 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses; next step to help ensure an ideal immunity effect by GT staff reporters Jun 20 2021
People wearing face masks line up to receive the COVID-19 vaccines at a vaccination site in Jiangxia District in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, June 9, 2021.
China on Sunday became the first country in the world to have administered one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Such achievement is believed to be a “milestone” but not “surprising” given China’s thorough vaccination plan and effective implementation system.
China has administered more than 1.1 billion doses as of Saturday, according to data released by the National Health Commission on Sunday. The number is about three times that delivered in the US, and almost 40 percent of the 2.5 billion shots given globally, according to data website Our World in Data.
China kicked off its national vaccination drive in December, 2020. Despite a slow start due to the low willingness among the public to receive the vaccine, given how well the epidemic had been brought under control, the country has witnessed a surge in daily delivered doses since May – more than 10 million per day and sometimes even double that number – following unexpected continuous outbreaks in Northeast China’s Liaoning, East China’s Anhui and South China’s Guangdong provinces.
The continuous boost in vaccine production and speedy vaccination roll-out in China reflects the government’s quick response in both vaccine research and its mass inoculation plan against the outbreak, and is also a result of China’s highly efficient governance system, said the experts.
“The milestone represents China not only comes closer to full domestic immune protection, but also makes a great contribution to the global fight against the epidemic,” Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Industry Association, told the Global Times. “China’s actual supply of vaccines significantly exceeds domestic use, and China continues to offer doses overseas.”
China has provided more than 350 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the world, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Registration for vaccination will actively continue, given the public’s confidence in the government and Chinese vaccines, Feng noted. “Ensuring a vaccination rate of more than 80 percent is no longer a problem. What needs to be solved now is how to ensure an ideal immunity effect after full public vaccination.”
In the next step, China should also enhance investment in vaccine research and development to improve the products as well as explore the best vaccination procedure to maximize efficacy, a Beijing-based immunologist told the Global Times on Sunday on condition of anonymity.
To improve the vaccines so that they can handle virus mutations as well as make them safe for the elderly will be the focus in the next step, the expert said.
Media reports revealed that since June 10, some places in China have issued notices saying they will give priority to people who are due to accept their second or third shots over those registering for their first shots.
The expert said that the arrangement is aimed at ensuring those who have had first shots can complete their vaccination procedures in a timely manner and build immunity effectively, which will also help to protect those who have not yet had any shots.
COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in Chinese mainland exceed one billion.
Important milestone
China surpassed threshold of administering 100 million doses of the vaccine on March 27, and the pace of vaccination has been accelerating since then, setting records again later. On May 28, the number of vaccinations in China exceeded 600 million doses, just five days after it achieved 500 million. The high speed has been maintained ever since, moving from 900 million doses on June 14 to reaching 1 billion on June 19, a space of just five days.
If each person received two doses, the rough vaccination rate in China would be around 36 percent currently. If the current rate continues, there is little doubt that vaccination rate will reach 40 percent by the end of June, a target set up at the beginning of the year.
Chen Xi, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University, told the Global Times that China’s administration of 1 billion vaccine doses is an important milestone, but he is not surprised that the number has been achieved so quickly, as it fits in well with China’s initial goals.
For a country of 1.4 billion people, getting 1 billion doses of vaccine is just the first step in building herd immunity, according to Feng. China is expected to have 70 percent of the target population fully vaccinated by the end of this year and form herd immunity, Feng said.
China’s top epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan previously said that to achieve herd immunity, China needs a vaccination rate of 83.3 percent, assuming the vaccine has a protection rate of 70 percent, or at least at an inoculation rate of 72.9 percent if the vaccine is 80 percent effective.
Chinese vaccines have been gradually rolled out to people aged 3-17 years, and a wider demographic and rising inoculation rate in the national immunological spectrum is expected.
Globally, Chinese vaccines are also being approved and used by increasingly more governments. For example, Singapore started to offer Chinese produced Sinovac Biotech COVID-19 vaccines to the public for the first time since Friday. Several private clinics have reported overwhelming demand for the Chinese-made shot, despite already available rival vaccines having far higher efficacy rates, Reuters reported.
Challenges in the next step
Despite taking the absolute leading position in total number of doses administered, China lags behind some other countries in the number of vaccine doses administered per 100 people.
According to Our World in Data, as of Friday, the number was 68.8 doses per 100 people in China, ranking the seventh highest globally. It is about half of the world’s highest 144.57 doses per 100 people in the United Arab Emirates.
As of the same day, the vaccination rate is 94.5 doses per 100 people in the US.
But experts said that China would soon catch up given the country’s current vaccination speed. According to Our World in Data, China has the second highest number of daily doses administered per 100 people – 1.26 doses – following South Korea’s 1.37 doses on June 17.
Chen expected that the inoculation speed in China may experience a slowdown as it works toward the 80 percent vaccination rate target from the current 40 percent, as is the case in many other countries. But the slowing speed in China will be lower than in other countries, as the risk from neighboring countries and imported infections reinforces people’s urgency to get vaccinated. Also, the autumn and winter seasons may again see an upswing in sporadic infections..
Feng said there is no great concern of the vaccine failing as a result of the increasing prevalence of mutated strains worldwide. “In the nearly one-year post-vaccination observation by experts, we did not find an obvious inflection point in its efficacy, which demonstrates a longer duration of vaccine protection.”
The current monitoring results did not show that the virus mutations will cause the existing vaccine to fail. Even for the worst case scenario, China has started to prepare vaccines with mutant strains, so that the new vaccine can be used quickly if needed, according to Feng. “It will never be useless to get early shots as they are providing sustained protection for us,” he noted.
A booster pin has not been a “must” so far, and its necessity and schedule continue to be studied. But China has already carried out relevant research on booster shots, which means that new immunization strategies can be initiated at any time if needed.
Chen believes that the next step regarding inoculation should focus on bridging the gaps between regions and populations, ensuring the coverage rate of the elderly, patients with underlying diseases and other vulnerable groups, and prepare for a gradual reopening of the border to the world in the future.
DPP beholden to US vaccine shipment, with political trade behind by Wang Qi and Fan Anqi Jun 20 2021
Medical workers wearing masks outside a quarantine hotel as Taiwan extends its level 3 Covid-19 alert to June 28, following a local outbreak in Taipei, the island of Taiwan, on June 7, 2021.
Following verbal support to the island of Taiwan on recent G7 summit, the US shipped a batch of 2.5 million Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to the pandemic-hit island, as Taiwan residents are mired in a panic brought by Japan-shipped AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccines, as the island has witnessed 67 deaths after receiving AZ jabs.
The batch of 2.5 million Moderna vaccines arrived on the island on Sunday. The US initially pledged to deliver 750,000 doses to Taiwan, which was announced during a visit by three senators to Taiwan by a C-17 US military aircraft on June 6 and was described as “timely rain” by the island’s regional leader Tsai Ing-wen who is facing a huge wave of pressure from people and opposition camp due to the continued snub to Chinese mainland vaccines.
Tsai expressed her gratitude for the US’ latest shipment during a livestream speech on Facebook, describing the US as “a friend in need is a friend indeed.” The head of Taiwan’s health authority, Chen Shih-chung, held up a thank-you board, as shown in a photo as he received the batch of vaccines at the airport.
Tsai said that with the 2.5 million doses, there is a total of 4.85 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines in Taiwan.
So far, only 6 percent of Taiwan’s total population of 23.5 million has received at least one jab, with over 40 million more doses needed for the island to achieve herd immunity, media reported.
Experts believe it is unrealistic that this batch of Moderna vaccines will alleviate the vaccine shortage, nor the public’s fear of AZ vaccination. A doctor from a Taipei-based hospital warned that even if people switch from AZ to Moderna, similar cases may continue to happen, Taiwan media reported.
Experts reached by the Global Times on Sunday said that US delivery is a drop in the bucket for the island. By offering vaccines to the island in a “toothpaste-squeezing manner,” it will relieve the political pressure on the secessionist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and make it beholden to the US and fully cooperate with Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy to act as the vanguard to confront the Chinese mainland.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a Twitter post that the vaccine shipment to Taiwan is not based on “political or economic conditions” but with “the singular objective of saving lives.” The words are regarded as in sharp contrast to comments from William Brent Christensen, director of the Taipei office of the American Institute in Taiwan, who said on May 26 that the number of confirmed cases in Taiwan is still relatively low compared with the world average, implying that the US would not be generous in helping the island with vaccine aid.
Observers said that the US did not extend a helping hand to Taiwan in the first place out of kinship and humanitarianism as the mainland did, instead, semiconductor chip supply and the arms sales are the reasons why the US has later showed care to Taiwan.
Washington’s calculation
On June 10, US President Joe Biden announced that the US plans to donate 500 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the world under the banner of the “US is back.”
The vaccine donation to Taiwan is part of Washington’s “vaccine diplomacy” to counter Russia and China’s vaccine influence after the US has carried out enough inoculations and stockpiled a large number of vaccines, Zhu Songling, a professor at the Institute of Taiwan Studies at Beijing Union University, told the Global Times on Sunday.
The US was estimated to have 300 million or more excess doses of vaccines authorized in the US and/or EU by the end of July, based on existing authorizations and purchase agreements.
The island’s defense authority on Thursday announced two arms procurement deals with the US, including one “long-range precision fire system” and “a batch of missiles,” Taiwan media reported. Analysts said the arms sale is not a coincidence, and that more murky political deals are going on.
The vaccine shipment comes at a time when the US is negotiating with the island on securing supply chains for strategic items such as computer chips. Taiwan is a major supplier of chips that are vital to the US automobile and other industries.
Xu Zhengwen, head of the Taiwan Chamber of Commerce, told the Global Times on Sunday that Washington’s sudden “kindness” came at a “delicate timing,” as a bipartisan group of US senators had just proposed a 25 percent tax credit for investments in semiconductor manufacturing in a bid to increase the country’s chip production.
“The donation of these doses could be aimed in exchange for Taiwan’s largest semiconductor manufacturer TSMC to invest in the US,” he said.
In terms of political sectors, Wang Jianmin, a senior cross-Straits expert at Minnan Normal University, Fujian Province, told the Global Times on Sunday that after the saga of the US’ anti-China roadshow in Europe, the US needs the island of Taiwan to do more to counter the mainland.
Despite the fact that the US did not come to Taiwan’s aid swiftly during the worst of the epidemic on the island, the 2.5 million doses will ease the DPP’s pressure to some extent facing the discontent and criticism over the repeated rejection of the mainland vaccine, Wang said.
The DPP will be grateful to the US, but the political deals behind the donation are not good for cross-Straits relations and China-US ties, Wang said.
Vaccine policy for self interest
Taiwan experts and residents also questioned the DPP authority why it is not suspending the vaccination of AZ vaccine for elderly people given the dozens of deaths after the AZ vaccine jab in a week. Australia recommended that the AZ COVID-19 jab should not be given to people under 60 on Thursday.
Even when cross-Straits relations were tense, people from Taiwan came to the mainland to get vaccinations. According to public health data, over 62,000 residents from the island have been vaccinated on the mainland as of May 31.
Cheng Po-yu, executive director of the cross-Straits Youth Exchange Association who were vaccinated in Beijing in May, told the Global Times that even with the 2.5 million doses, the vast majority of Taiwan people still have no chance to get one, as the DPP authorities have prioritized those related to key industries such as semiconductors, which the US also prefers to ensure their own supply chains won’t be affected,” Cheng told the Global Times on Sunday.
He added that in his effort to bring more Taiwan compatriots to the Chinese mainland to get free vaccination, the DPP authorities had banned travel groups specifically intended for COVID-19 jabs to leave for the mainland, forcing such groups to travel individually.
Although the DPP authority on Friday announced that it will authorize Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Taiwan’s Foxconn, and semiconductor giant TSMC, to negotiate on its behalf for COVID-19 vaccines, the idea is unpopular, as there is no reason to believe they can do “better” than authorities.
According to Taiwan media, the island authority has purchased 10 million AZ vaccines and 5.05 million Moderna vaccines but only 50,000 doses or order have arrived.
Zhang Wensheng, a deputy dean of the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Sunday that Taiwan’s overall vaccination layout is controlled by the DPP. The vaccines shipped from the US and Japan are designed to alleviate public pressure on DPP and Taiwan’s locally developed vaccine will dominate the main market.
Experts said that in fact, the DPP authority does not want the non-governmental organizations to play a role in case to squeeze the space of Taiwan-made vaccine, but given how hard it is for the DPP to get vaccines, they do not hold out much hope for Gou and TSMC who are not allowed by DPP authority to get vaccines through mainland channels.
The Taiwan-made vaccine will only be in Phase-II clinical trials in July and will not be certified internationally, but when the time comes, people on the island will have no choice but to be inoculated with it, observers said, noting that manufacturers will make a fortune, and the DPP has huge interests and connections with manufacturers.
Johnson Choi Biz 