Category Archives: China

State Dept Fact Sheet: Wuhan Institute of Virology

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Update: Video has emerged where scientists were bitten by bats and had disregard to proper safety protocols.Scientists at the the Wuhan Institute of Virology 'admitted to being attacked by bats' Go here for the summary and video. 

U.S. State Department

China lied about origin of coronavirus, leaked ...

For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.

Mystery virus found in Wuhan resembles bat viruses but not ...

Related reading: SHANGHAI—A new coronavirus identified by Chinese scientists is the putative cause of an outbreak of unusual pneumonia in the central city of Wuhan, according to Chinese news reports yesterday. In an interview today with Science, Xu Jianguo, head of an evaluation committee advising the Chinese government, confirmed that scientists have a complete sequence of the novel virus’s genome.
The World Health Organization on 9 January requested sequence data, a spokesperson in Geneva says, and many scientists urge the country to make the sequence public quickly, but the decision is up to the top leadership of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, says Xu, who is director of the Beijing-based State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, part of China CDC. (The center’s head, George Gao, did not respond to emails from Science seeking comment.)
Xu says the investigation is being led by China CDC but numerous groups in other government agencies are involved. “Plenty of people are working on the outbreak,” he says. The role of the evaluation committee Xu leads is to review all the findings and make recommendations to the National Health Commission. Xu also said the novel coronavirus resembles known bat viruses, but not the coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

The CCP’s deadly obsession with secrecy and control comes at the expense of public health in China and around the world. The previously undisclosed information in this fact sheet, combined with open-source reporting, highlights three elements about COVID-19’s origin that deserve greater scrutiny:

1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.
The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

2. Research at the WIV:

Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). The WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins.
The WIV has a published record of conducting “gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including “RaTG13,” which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.
WHO investigators must have access to the records of the WIV’s work on bat and other coronaviruses before the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of a thorough inquiry, they must have a full accounting of why the WIV altered and then removed online records of its work with RaTG13 and other viruses.

3. Secret military activity at the WIV:

Secrecy and non-disclosure are standard practice for Beijing. For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.
Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.
The United States and other donors who funded or collaborated on civilian research at the WIV have a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV.

Today’s revelations just scratch the surface of what is still hidden about COVID-19’s origin in China. Any credible investigation into the origin of COVID-19 demands complete, transparent access to the research labs in Wuhan, including their facilities, samples, personnel, and records.

As the world continues to battle this pandemic – and as WHO investigators begin their work, after more than a year of delays – the virus’s origin remains uncertain. The United States will continue to do everything it can to support a credible and thorough investigation, including by continuing to demand transparency on the part of Chinese authorities.

Chinese Communist Party is “inside the gates”

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In part from Breitbart:

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo warned lawmakers that the threat from the Chinese Communist Party is “inside the gates” during a meeting with House Republican lawmakers on Friday.

Pompeo told members of the conservative Republican Study Committee that as a former lawmaker, he is aware of the threat posed by China but that he did not appreciate “the scope and the scale and the nature” of how close the threat is until he became Central Intelligence Agency director.

This CCP infection inside the United States goes beyond Senator Feinstein, Congressman Eric Swalwell, former California Senator, Barbara Boxer or even closing the Chinese embassy in Houston. There is the Thousand Talents Program that has wormed it's way through academia and the Confucius Institutes.

How about a little known Florida congresswoman, Stephanie Murphy (D-FL)? She is quite dedicated to China due in part to her husband Sean and his manufacturing company, 3N2. His company produces sports equipment/apparel in China. Further, she advocates for all the democrat policy points including open-border policies and more studies into “gun-violence”. Crazy enough, Murphy actually joined a small group of Democrats in calling to remove tariffs on the Chinese government.

None of this is actually new when it comes to Stephanie Murphy, in fact it goes back as far as 2017. Did anyone notice?

When you are on social media, do you actually work hard to determine if you are being trolled by some foreign entity? We are quite aware of Russian disinformation but going back years, at least to 2016 (interesting year), China's own troll farm has been just as successful in the social media sphere and you are likely a victim. DC politicians are just as likely to be willing accomplices.

There is or was a Chinese operation called the 50-centers and you probably clicked on a lot of their social media posts.

The Left-leaning policy organization Foreign Policy published the following in 2016.

A May 17 paper written by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego provides the most detailed and ambitious description of China’s 50-centers available to date. It confirms the existence of a “massive secret operation” in China pumping out an estimated 488 million fabricated social media posts per year, part of an effort to “regularly distract the public and change the subject” from any policy-related issues that threaten to anger citizens enough to turn them out onto the streets. But the research finds no evidence these 50-centers are, in fact, paid 50 cents, nor does it find they engage in direct and angry argument with their opponents. Instead, they are mostly bureaucrats already on the public payroll, responding to government directives at a time of heightened tension to flood social media with pro-government cheerleading.

Opinion: How Chinese paid cyber-troll farms are upending ... photo

Understanding the behavior of pro-government netizens is important, given the stakes. In the past two and a half years, the Chinese government has used a combination of muscle and guile to cow online opinion leaders into submission, muzzling social media as a political force, and leaching public dialogue of much of its independence. But beneath the peppy, pablum-filled surface that has resulted, Chinese social media remains a contested space. In countless online chat rooms, bulletin boards, and Weibo threads, Chinese social media roils with the same ideological debates that also increasingly consume Chinese academics and elites.

Broadly speaking, the clash pits so-called leftists — that is, conservatives and neo-Confucianists who marry stout Chinese nationalism, a yearning for reconstructed socialism, and the quest for a reversion to hierarchy and filial piety — against rightists, or reformists, who continue to espouse what a Westerner would recognize as universal values, such as civil and human rights, government transparency, and democracy and constitutionalism. It’s more common for the two camps to exchange barbs than ideas. The leftists label the rightists sellouts, turncoats, and “public intellectuals,” the latter delivered with an implicit sneer. The rightists often call the leftists “50-centers,” regardless of who really pays their bills.

What is worse is a separate issue known as the Chinese cyber-attacks. A for instance however:

More than two dozen universities in the United States and around the world were targeted as part of an effort by the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, to build up its naval and submarine forces.

iDefense, one security firm, tracked the Chinese cyberattacks to a hacking group known variously as Temp.Periscope, Leviathan or Mudcarp. A second firm, FireEye, calls the hacking group APT40 or Temp.Periscope.

FireEye said the operations appear linked to Chinese activities in the South China Sea, where Beijing has built disputed islands and deployed advanced missiles on them beginning a year ago. The Chinese military hacker unit in charge of that region is the Chengdu-based Unit 78020.

The 27 universities included the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Take caution, judge slowly. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is right.

 

 

 

Apple Bans 39,000 Apps After Demands by the CCP

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And counting…including the newly launched conservative open free speech social media site Parler.

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Apple removed 39,000 game apps on its China store Thursday, the biggest removal ever in a single day, as it set year-end as deadline for all game publishers to obtain a license.

The takedowns come amid a crackdown on unlicensed games by Chinese authorities.

Including the 39,000 games, Apple removed more than 46,000 apps in total from its store on Thursday. Games affected by the sweep included Ubisoft title Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20, according to research firm Qimai.

Qimai also said only 74 of the top 1,500 paid games on Apple store survived the purge.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple initially gave game publishers an end-of-June deadline to submit a government-issued licence number enabling users to make in-app purchases in the world’s biggest games market.

Apple later extended the deadline to Dec. 31. Cases still pending.

China’s Android app stores have long complied with regulations on licenses. It is not clear why Apple is enforcing them more strictly this year.

Analysts said the move was no surprise as Apple continues to close loopholes to fall in line with China’s content regulators, and would not directly affect Apple’s bottom line as much as previous removals.

“However, this major pivot to only accepting paid games that have a game license, coupled with China’s extremely low number of foreign game licenses approved this year, will probably lead more game developers to switch to an ad-supported model for their Chinese versions,” said Todd Kuhns, marketing manager for AppInChina, a firm that helps overseas companies distribute their apps.

In December, shares of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) were down a bit after the company removed thousands of paid game apps from its China App Store. Meanwhile, Disney (NYSE:DIS) stock rose after the company reportedly plans a price increase for its ESPN+ streaming service.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that tech giant Apple planned to remove thousands of game apps from its App Store in China due to government pressure. Apple reportedly warned Chinese developers earlier this month that paid gaming apps were at risk of removal.

China requires paid video games to be licensed before being released, a policy that has been in effect for the past four years. However, app developers have been able to get around that rule on Apple’s platform. Apple began closing the loophole this year, the Journal reports.

On Thursday, Apple followed through by removing 39,000 game apps from its China App Store, according to Reuters. These include popular titles like Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20. Just 74 of the top 1,500 paid game apps on the China App Store are still available, according to research firm Qimai.

The license requirement applies to paid games and games with in-app purchases, so the move by Apple could push more developers to opt for an ad-supported model. Apple takes a cut from sales of apps and in-app content, so such a shift would hurt Apples sales in China. source

*** Expect more stock price decline given the recent anti-trust cases in the legal pipeline against Apple and other big tech corporations. Apple and Google both take a cut of the revenue of the apps on their respective stores.

***

The factory in China where Apple products, specifically iPhones, undergo final assembly has approximately 230,000 workers. In the US, there are only 83 cities that have the same population as this factory’s number of employees. Meaning the number of possible workers in the US is not enough to cover Apple’s needs.

In China, an estimated quarter of their workforce lives in company-owned dormitories. These barracks are located on factory property. Many people are living and working at the factory. Such jobs are in high demand in China, and they can hire many people overnight. These examples prove that the measure, speed, and efficiency of Chinese manufacturing surpass anything the US is presently capable of. (read slave labor)

'Made in China 2025': is Beijing's plan for hi-tech ...

Apple is a willing partner in the China 2025 plan. You will then understand the China policy of President Trump and Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

Continue reading…you need to understand the past implications and those when Biden takes office.

When the US and ultimately the rest of the Western world began to engage China, resulting in China finally being allowed into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, no one really expected the outcomes we see today.

There is no simple disengagement path, given the scope of economic and legal entanglements. This isn’t a “trade” we can simply walk away from.

But it is also one that, if allowed to continue in its current form, could lead to a loss of personal freedom for Western civilization. It really is that much of an existential question.

Doing nothing isn’t an especially good option because, like it or not, the world is becoming something quite different than we expected just a few years ago—not just technologically, but geopolitically and socially.

China and the West

Let’s begin with how we got here.

My generation came of age during the Cold War. China was a huge, impoverished odd duck in those years. In the late 1970s, China began slowly opening to the West. Change unfolded gradually but by the 1990s, serious people wanted to bring China into the modern world, and China wanted to join it.

Understand that China’s total GDP in 1980 was under $90 billion in current dollars. Today, it is over $12 trillion. The world has never seen such enormous economic growth in such a short time.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union collapsed and the internet was born. The US, as sole superpower, saw opportunities everywhere. American businesses shifted production to lower-cost countries. Thus came the incredible extension of globalization.

We in the Western world thought (somewhat arrogantly, in hindsight) everyone else wanted to be like us. It made sense. Our ideas, freedom, and technology had won both World War II and the Cold War that followed it. Obviously, our ways were best.

But that wasn’t obvious to people elsewhere, most notably China. Leaders in Beijing may have admired our accomplishments, but not enough to abandon Communism.

They merely adapted and rebranded it. We perceived a bigger change than there actually was. Today’s Chinese communists are nowhere near Mao’s kind of communism. Xi calls it “Socialism with a Chinese character.” It appears to be a dynamic capitalistic market, but is also a totalitarian, top-down structure with rigid rules and social restrictions.

So here we are, our economy now hardwired with an autocratic regime that has no interest in becoming like us.

China’s Hundred-Year Marathon

In The Hundred-Year Marathon, Michael Pillsbury marshals a lot of evidence showing the Chinese government has a detailed strategy to overtake the US as the world’s dominant power.

They want to do this by 2049, the centennial of China’s Communist revolution.

The strategy has been well documented in Chinese literature, published and sanctioned by organizations of the People’s Liberation Army, for well over 50 years.

And just as we have hawks and moderates on China within the US, there are hawks and moderates within China about how to engage the West. Unfortunately, the hawks are ascendant, embodied most clearly in Xi Jinping.

Xi’s vision of the Chinese Communist Party controlling the state and eventually influencing and even controlling the rest of the world is clear. These are not merely words for the consumption of the masses. They are instructions to party members.

Grand dreams of world domination are part and parcel of communist ideologies, going all the way back to Karl Marx. For the Chinese, this blends with the country’s own long history.

It isn’t always clear to Western minds whether they actually believe the rhetoric or simply use it to keep the peasantry in line. Pillsbury says Xi Jinping really sees this as China’s destiny, and himself as the leader who will deliver it.

To that end, according to Pillsbury, the Chinese manipulated Western politicians and business leaders into thinking China was evolving toward democracy and capitalism. In fact, the intent was to acquire our capital, technology, and other resources for use in China’s own modernization.

It worked, too.

Over the last 20–30 years, we have equipped the Chinese with almost everything they need to match us, technologically and otherwise. Hundreds of billions of Western dollars have been spent developing China and its state-owned businesses.

Sometimes this happened voluntarily, as companies gave away trade secrets in the (often futile) hope it would let them access China’s huge market. Other times it was outright theft. In either case, this was no accident but part of a long-term plan.

Pillsbury (who, by the way, advises the White House including the president himself) thinks the clash is intensifying because President Trump’s China skepticism is disrupting the Chinese plan. They see his talk of restoring America’s greatness as an affront to their own dreams.

In any case, we have reached a crossroads. What do we do about China now?

Targeted Response

In crafting a response, the first step is to define the problem correctly and specifically. We hear a lot about China cheating on trade deals and taking jobs from Americans. That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s also not the main challenge.

I believe in free trade. I think David Ricardo was right about comparative advantage: Every nation is better off if all specialize in whatever they do best.

However, free trade doesn’t mean nations need to arm their potential adversaries. Nowadays, military superiority is less about factories and shipyards than high-tech weapons and cyberwarfare. Much of our “peaceful” technology is easily weaponized.

This means our response has to be narrowly targeted at specific companies and products. Broad-based tariffs are the opposite of what we should be doing. Ditto for capital controls.

They are blunt instruments that may feel good to swing, but they hurt the wrong people and may not accomplish what we want.

We should not be using the blunt tool of tariffs to fight a trade deficit that is actually necessary. The Chinese are not paying our tariffs; US consumers are.

Importing t-shirts and sneakers from China doesn’t threaten our national security. Let that kind of trade continue unmolested and work instead on protecting our advantages in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, and so on.

The Trump administration appears to (finally) be getting this. They are clearly seeking ways to pull back the various tariffs and ramping up other efforts.

China’s Military Takes Charge of War Powers

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Primer:HONG KONG — Jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong was arrested on a new charge under the national security law on Thursday while an American rights lawyer who was detained in a sweeping crackdown was granted bail. Friends and family of Wong, who is serving a 13 1/2-month prison sentence for organizing and participating in an unauthorized protest in 2019, were informed that he had been arrested on suspicion of violating the national security law and was taken away to give a statement on the new charge, according to a post on his Facebook page.

The post also stated that Wong’s lawyer was unable to meet with him, and that Wong had been transferred back to prison after giving the statement, which was not disclosed.

Separately, John Clancey, an American human rights lawyer who works at law firm Ho Tse Wai & Partners, was granted bail, his associate said. He was one of 53 activists arrested Wednesday under the national security law. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

At least some of the others were released on bail late Thursday from various police stations where they had been held. One, veteran activist and former lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, unfurled a banner that blasted the national security law as he left.

China has expanded the power of its Central Military Commission
Has China gone into stealth mode with its military-civil fusion plans? | South China Morning Post
(There is hardly an expectation that the Biden administration will take any aggressive action against China or would maintain existing current China policy under the Trump/Pompeo architecture. At risk especially is Taiwan and Hong Kong.)
Read on as President Xi is asserting more power during the power transition underway in the United States.
(CMC) – headed by President Xi Jinping – to mobilise military and civilian resources in defence of the national interest, both at home and abroad.

Revisions to the National Defence Law, effective from January 1, weaken the role of the State Council – China’s cabinet – in formulating military policy, handing decision-making powers to the CMC.

For the first time, “disruption” and protection of “development interests” have been added to the legislation as grounds for the mobilisation and deployment of troops and reserve forces.The legislation also specifically stresses the need to build a nationwide coordination mechanism for the mobilisation of state-owned and private enterprises to take part in research into new defence technologies covering conventional weapons, as well as the non-traditional domains of cybersecurity, space and electromagnetics.

Military and political analysts said the amendments aimed to strengthen the country’s military leadership under Xi, providing it with the legal grounds to respond to the challenges of accelerating confrontations between China and the US.

Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of the Communist Party publication Study Times,said the amendments aimed to legalise and formally apply the “special” nature of China’s political and defence system when dealing with situations that could harm the regime at home and abroad.“China’s political nature is very different from many countries … it’s not surprising for Beijing to enhance the leadership of the CMC when the PLA is going out to defend China’s national interests across the world,” said Deng, who is now an independent political commentator in the US.

China’s success at controlling the Covid-19 pandemic has been seen by Beijing as an endorsement of the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule, particularly as many Western countries are still struggling with rising numbers of infections.

Chen Daoyin, an independent political commentator and former professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said the changes showed the regime had gained the confidence to legitimise its long-standing principle that “the party commands the gun” and stamp its “absolute leadership over armed and reserved forces”.

“The move to include ‘development interests’ as a reason for armed mobilisation and war in the law would provide legal grounds for the country to launch war in the legitimate name of defending national development interests,” Chen said.

Zeng Zhiping, a military law expert at Soochow University, said one of the big changes of the law was the downgrading of the State Council’s role in formulating the principles of China’s national defence, and the right to direct and administer the mobilisation of its armed forces.

“The CMC is now formally in charge of making national defence policy and principles, while the State Council becomes a mere implementing agency to provide support to the military,” said Zeng, who is also a retired PLA lieutenant colonel.

“It’s a big contrast when compared with developed countries like Israel, Germany and France, which prefer to put their armed forces under civilian leadership. Even in the US, the civilian-led defence ministry plays a more important role than their military top brass, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Taipei-based military expert Chi Le-yi said the amendments highlighting the use of armed forces to suppress national disruption would be used to target independence-leaning forces in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as part of its territory.

Chi said the ultimate goal of the amended defence law could be seen as Beijing’s latest response to the US policy of comprehensive strategic containment of a rising China.

“The Chinese Communist Party now has strong crisis awareness as it faces various new security challenges, pushing the PLA to come up with a new defence policy soon after completing the establishment of top-down commanding and coordinating systems under Xi’s leadership,” Chi said.

“The law revision is also a symbolic battle call by the party to warn all Chinese people to be combat-ready for a nationwide defence mobilisation, which the party has never done since [it came to power] in 1949.”

The amendments were passed by the National People’s Congress on December 26, after two years of deliberation. Three articles were removed, more than 50 were amended, while there were six additions. In a media conference earlier in December, a spokesperson for the CMC’s legislative affairs bureau said the changes gave the PLA a clear direction in its modernisation and development goals.

 

Chinese Slaves Manufacture Covid Masks Your Wearing

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So, while we are continuing to learn only some of the actions inside the United States by the Chinese Communist Party that include:

Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband

The entire Biden Family

Congressman Eric Swalwell

… we are now finding that Georgia Senate candidate, Jon Ossoff in a contentious run-off race lied about his Chinese Communist Party business deal and finally came clean after he was about to be sued over his false financial disclosures.

Ossoff attracting surprising levels of GOP support in Georgia special - POLITICO

There is much more to bubble to the surface as noted by the shuttering of the Chinese Consulate in Houston a few months ago and the soon to be revealing of more details. Meanwhile, U.S. corporations are also very tied to the Chinese Communist Party least of which is Apple, Google and Facebook. But what about slaves?

Few people understand that China has re-education camps and slaves known as Uighurs and the treatment of this Turkic ethnic group which is native to China.

A very large and detailed investigation completed has noted below:

Medical masks and protective equipment made by Uighur laborers in China are being sold across Europe by at least two major distributors, and have been bought by governments and health bodies in at least five countries, an investigation by OCCRP and partners has found.

The workers are ethnic Uighurs from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang who have been sent to factories in other parts of the country under a controversial “labor transfer” program that experts say is coercive and prone to abuses.

China’s government has embarked on a campaign to stamp out unrest among Uighurs in Xinjiang via a campaign of mass surveillance and detention.

The labor transfer program ostensibly provides Uighurs in Xinjiang with new opportunities to leave home for factory jobs in other provinces. But rights workers say they are often coerced into complying, amid a crackdown that has seen over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities sent to re-education camps. Campaigners have been pushing for Western companies and governments to stop buying products made with Uighur labor.

Earlier this year, the New York Times revealed that medical masks made by Uighurs at a factory in Hubei province were being sold in the U.S. Now, OCCRP and its partners have found that some of Europe’s biggest medical distributors are also selling masks and protective equipment from this manufacturer, Hubei Haixin Protective Products. Publicly available documents show that Hubei Haixin until recently employed at least 130 Uighur workers transferred from Xinjiang.

The distributors include local branches of McKesson, a multinational giant that owns some of Europe’s largest pharmacy chains and medical wholesalers, and Swedish medical supply firm OneMed, which sold masks to health authorities and national stockpiles across the Nordic and Baltic regions.

Both McKesson and OneMed continued selling Hubei Haixin products throughout 2020, even after the Chinese company was named earlier this year by the New York Times and a think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), as using potentially forced labor by Uighurs.

Reporters also found McKesson and OneMed sold products made by Zhende Medical, a publicly traded Chinese company that has been flagged as risky by rights experts because it has supply chains and subsidiaries in Xinjiang.

In a brief response sent to reporters, McKesson Europe’s public affairs director, Ronan Brett, said: “McKesson Europe is committed to good corporate citizenship and ethical sourcing. Suppliers must agree to McKesson Sustainable Supply Chain Principles (MSSP) which covers compliance with appropriate laws along with adherence to our strict policies on protecting workers, preparing for emergencies, identifying and managing environmental risk, and protecting the environment.” He did not respond to a request for further comment.

coronavirus/Norway-Erna-Solberg.jpg  Credit: Henrik Myhr Nielsen / NRK Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg welcomes a shipment of protective equipment by OneMed on March 23, 2020. The shipment included goods from Hubei Haixin. 

OneMed’s head of operations, Robert Schmidt, said the company found out in late 2019 that the Hubei Haixin factory employed workers from Xinjiang, but continued its relationship with the producer after finding no evidence they were being coerced or mistreated.

“OneMed’s overall assessment is that there is no forced labor or discrimination against the Uighur minority population in our supply chain,” he said. “But we will of course continue to follow the issue and act if we should receive any new information.”

According to documents obtained by reporters, OneMed contacted Hubei Haixin with concerns about Uighur workers in January, and the Chinese factory promised to return them to their homes in Xinjiang at the end of their contract in March. But in reality, the factory continued to employ them until this September, claiming that pandemic movement restrictions prevented the workers from going home. OneMed continued buying the products.

Neither Hubei Haixin nor Zhende Medical responded to requests for comment, but in a statement sent to one of its European distributors, and obtained by reporters, Zhende said, “It is not acceptable in Zhende to engage in or support the use of forced or compulsory labor.”

“The so-called ‘human rights abuses’ in Xinjiang or ‘persecution of ethnic minorities’ are lies of the century made up by extremist anti-China forces,” a representative of the Chinese Embassy in Oslo, Yang Yiding, wrote in a statement to reporters.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

  Credit: Matteo Civillini Hubei Haixin masks ordered from LloydsPharmacy Italy bear the name of McKesson Global Sourcing Ltd, a U.K. subsidiary of McKesson. 

“Violation of Virtually Any Kind of Ethical Policy”

Over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been detained in newly built detention camps in recent years. China describes the camps as re-education facilities intended to combat Islamic radicalism, following a series of deadly inter-ethnic riots in Xinjiang and attacks by Uighur militants on ethnic-majority Han throughout China.

Uighurs have been documented working both in factories within Xinjiang’s detention camps, as well as being sent to regular factories throughout China via labor transfer programs, which are billed as a way of alleviating poverty and countering religious extremism.

It is important to keep reading the full summary found here.