Category: China

The Chinese had made their viewpoint known to Bangladesh on any dialogue with “The Quad”:

A U.S. State Department spokesman rebutted a Chinese diplomat’s warning for countries to stay away from the U.S.-led regional forum, Quad, on Tuesday, saying the Quad is an informal but essential mechanism to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Ned Price made the remark after the Chinese ambassador in Bangladesh, Li Jing, said in a statement that the South Asian country should not join the Quad or its relations with China will “substantially be damaged.”

“We have taken note of that statement from the PRC ambassador to Bangladesh. What we would say is that we respect Bangladesh’s sovereignty and we respect Bangladesh’s rights to make foreign policy decisions for itself,” the department spokesman said in a press briefing.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The anti-China sentiment has always been there in the Korean public; it is just incidents like this bring it out publicly:

The Chinatown issue comes on the back of Koreans’ protesting claims made by some Chinese influencers and media that kimchi is their traditional food. After Beijing received an international certification for its pickled vegetable dish, “paocai,” in November, China’s state-run Global Times reported that this certification amounted to “an international standard for the kimchi industry led by China.” Since then, the nationalist newspaper has been running articles containing the implication that Beijing is leading the kimchi industry and that the dish originated in China.

These articles led to an online spat between the internet users of both countries, with Koreans arguing that China was now attempting to steal Korea’s cultural legacy. 

Korea Times

You can read much more at the link about why the anti-China sentiment is rising in Korea right now.

Here is another example of the Chinese using their auxiliaries to push around a weaker neighbor in the South China Sea. The Philippines is in a tough spot because if they send in Coast Guard and Naval assets to remove the auxiliaries than that gives the Chinese military the excuse to move in and protect them. This is a fight the Philippines cannot win thus why they are turning to the international media:

The Philippine defense chief on Sunday demanded more than 200 Chinese vessels he said were manned by militias leave a South China Sea reef claimed by Manila, saying their presence was a “provocative action of militarizing the area.”

“We call on the Chinese to stop this incursion and immediately recall these boats violating our maritime rights and encroaching into our sovereign territory,” Lorenzana said in a statement, adding without elaborating that the Philippines would uphold its sovereign rights.

A government watchdog overseeing the disputed region said about 220 Chinese vessels were seen moored at Whitsun Reef, which Beijing also claims, on March 7. It released pictures of the vessels side by side in one of the most hotly contested areas of the strategic waterway.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Increasingly more foreigners are choosing to not travel to China for fear of being detained:

The dramatic detention of a handful of foreigners in recent years has instilled a deep fear in some people, especially those with politically adjacent occupations. As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target.

CNN

You can read more at the link, but depending on ones occupation or viewpoints people should legitimately be concerned about being detained.

Here is the latest strategy to counter China by the Biden administration:

The Biden administration is moving to put semiconductors, artificial intelligence and next-generation networks at the heart of U.S. strategy toward Asia, attempting to rally what officials are calling “techno-democracies” to stand up to China and other “techno-autocracies.”

The new framing for the U.S. rivalry with China has been given added urgency by the sudden global shortage of microchips needed in products such as cars, mobile phones and refrigerators. The strategy would seek to rally an alliance of nations fighting for an edge in semiconductor fabrication and quantum computing, upending traditional arenas of competition such as missile stockpiles and troop numbers.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the article says there is a global shortage of microchips because China has been stockpiling them. The theory is that if major microchip producers like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan restrict sales of technology to China it will quash large Chinese companies like Huawei.

Of these three nations I would expect there would be little pushback from Taiwan or Japan on such a strategy, but the Moon administration in South Korea may be a tougher sell. Samsung is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors so restricting sales to China would be a huge loss for them. Additionally the Moon administration has arguably a policy of not upsetting China or the U.S.; siding against China on this issue they know will lead to severe retaliation far worse than what they experienced on the THAAD issue. This is not an easy policy decision for the Moon administration and I would not be surprised if they just delayed any decision on this as long as possible to see if it goes away.

The Chinese government is once again pointing fingers at the U.S. to justify why the Chinese Communist Party should remain solely in charge of China:

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that seeing the plight of Americans suffering in a severe winter storm that hit the state of Texas this week reinforced a belief among Chinese citizens that their country is “on the right path”.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comments in response to a question from a state media journalist on calls by western countries for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in its western Xinjiang region.

During her lengthy response, made at a regular ministry news conference, Hua repeated China’s denials of abuse of Muslims in the region, and said that Australia, Canada and the United States had histories of genocide.

But she also contrasted the vulnerability of many Texans with the festive experience of Chinese during the recently-completed Lunar New Year holiday. State and social media in Communist Party-led China frequently draw attention to crises in the United States and other western countries.

“Not to be wanting of food or clothing, not to be hungry or cold, this is the fundamental human right that is the most real,” she said.

“In the meantime in Texas … millions of people found themselves caught in the terrible situation of not having electricity and heating at home, a few tens of people even lost their lives because of this,” she said.

“This gave the Chinese people a deeper appreciation for what is the real human right, and made us believe more strongly that China is on the right path. We are fully confident about our future,” she said.

Reuters

You can read more at the link.

Did anyone expect anything other than a sham investigation by this WHO team?:

The White House on Saturday called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about the way the findings of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 report were communicated.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy fired back with a strongly-worded statement, saying the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not be “pointing fingers” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic. (……)

The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert and member of the WHO team, told Reuters.

“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government,” Sullivan said.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but if this team was never going to get all the information it needed from the Chinese government it should have never went. Now the Chinese government can repeat the talking point that an independent WHO team found no evidence that the virus was released from the Wuhan lab even though that is not true considering they never received all the data they needed. At least one of the WHO scientists on the trip is not ruling out the lab theory.