Wednesday, 4 November 2020

Beijing Stays Silent as U.S. Awaits Election Results

As the United States waits for the substantive results of the 2020 presidential election, official Chinese channels are staying quiet. When asked for comment during a Wednesday, November 4 press conference, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin said only, “We notice that the U.S. presidential election is still ongoing, and the result hasn’t come out yet.” Online, however, many Chinese are closely following the election. At Whats On Weibo Manya Koetse this week traced Chinese netizens shifting perceptions of Trump and Biden:

Donald Trump is often nicknamed Chuān Jiànguó (川建国) on Chinese social media, which basically means “Build the Country Trump.” The name is just one among many existing memes and jokes about the U.S. president on the Chinese internet. A reason to call him Chuān Jiànguó is to make fun of Trump’s words and actions, suggesting that his leadership only brings America down and in doing so, also further accelerates the rise of China. In doing so, Trump is sarcastically called “America’s gift to China.”

[…]An online poll that was held by a popular Weibo blogger earlier this year asked people if they would like to see Trump be reelected. Of the 8736 people participating, 74% said they hoped Donald Trump gets elected again. Only 5% said they hoped he would not be reelected. Another 21% said they felt indifferent about the American elections, as it would not make much difference for China anyway.

Although many people do care about the American elections, mostly because of how the outcome would affect China, others just enjoy watching the spectacle of U.S. politics. “I love how confident and unruly Trump is,” one commenter writes: “He is legendary. If Biden comes to power, the coming four years are going to be much more boring.” [Source]

Despite the public’s interest in the election, Chinese media outlets have been noticeably quiet. It is characteristic for Beijing to instruct media outlets to be circumspect in their coverage of foreign elections. Despite state media’s normal “love to chronicle an America in chaos,” David Wertime notes that this year outlets are even “refraining from predictions and limiting coverage to major developments like the early voting turnout.”

Last month when President Trump was hospitalized with coronavirus, censors ordered media outlets to keep reports brief, factual, and off of the trending lists. Chinese coverage from RFA notes that the Chinese media narrative on the election seems focused on images of chaos “bordering on civil war” rather than coverage of the vote. At Foreign Policy, Tracy Wen Liu wrote on the circumstances behind Chinese media silence:

Politically sensitive topics—especially around foreign relationships—tend to produce limited and nervous coverage in China. That’s backed up by my conversations with reporters in Chinese state media. A reporter from one state-linked outfit told me that months ago they were told to be very careful about covering this election and to ensure the coverage was “calm,” “neutral,” and “appropriate.” They were advised to not publish an excessive number of articles on this matter and to avoid live election results that might draw a lot of public attention—and most importantly, to be very cautious about their wording so that their stance wasn’t read as that of the Chinese government.

“My pitch on battleground states was rejected by the chief editor, since if we imply that a particular candidate might win the swing states, readers might interpret it as China supporting them, and even worse, readers might interpret it as China trying to interfere with the election,” the reporter said. [Source]

Chinese STEM students are closely following the election, as a Trump victory is a bad sign for Chinese graduate students studying in the U.S. From April to September, the U.S. granted only 808 F-1 visas to Chinese students, down 99% from the 90,410 visas granted in 2019 during the same period. At Nikkei Asia, Nikki Sun, Marrian Zhou, and Alex Fang interviewed a Chinese student pursuing a PhD in the U.S.:

Jack Cai, who is studying for a doctorate in computer science in the U.S., is considering returning to China after graduation.

“If Trump is reelected and it gets more difficult to live here in terms of visas and safety, I might as well just return to China,” Cai said. While the scholar in his 20s prefers the U.S. work culture to China’s “996” — where tech industry employees work nine hours a day, six days a week, the thought of “not having to listen to Trump” has become a big draw for Cai.

If Trump is elected, Cai expects more STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students like him to return, boosting near-term technological development and university teaching standards in China. [Source]

Chinese “America-watchers” looking for the inside scoop on the election have turned their attention to the Yiwu wholesale market in Zhejiang province, whose merchants have become augurs in our globalized age. At The New York Times, Keith Bradsher wrote on the “Yiwu Index,” a highly unscientific prognostication of who will win the American presidential election:

President Trump’s campaign paraphernalia — hats, banners, mugs and practically anything else that can carry a logo — has been selling briskly at shops in the vast wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu. By contrast, shop owners said during recent visits, bulk orders for materials supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have been almost nonexistent.

“We’ve had four or five shoppers for Trump materials each month,” said Ge Lu, a salesman at one of about 100 shops specializing just in flags, referring to big purchasers who buy banners by the thousands. “We’ve had one Biden shopper this year.”

It is also home to what Chinese watchers of American politics — a nervous group these days, given souring relations between the two countries and Beijing’s tighter limits on conversation — call the Yiwu Index. Big demand for a presidential candidate’s merchandise, goes the theory, translates into big voter turnout in November. [Source]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/beijing-stays-silent-as-u-s-awaits-election-results/
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Tuesday, 3 November 2020

Chinese Authorities Stop Ant Group IPO, Stunning Observers

Ant Group’s initial public offering was unexpectedly halted by Chinese regulators on Tuesday, just 48 hours before it was to begin. The suspension of the IPO, expected to give the Alibaba-affiliated company a market cap valued at over $300 billion, came after three days of political intrigue. At The New York Times, Raymond Zhong and Cao Li reported on the showdown between Jack Ma’s powerful fintech company and Chinese regulators:

In a late-evening announcement that stunned China, the Shanghai Stock Exchange slammed the brakes on Ant’s initial public offering, which was set to be the biggest stock debut in history with investors on multiple continents and at least $34 billion in proceeds.

The stock exchange’s notice to Ant said that the company’s proposed offering might no longer meet the requirements for listing after Chinese regulators had summoned company executives, including Jack Ma, the co-founder of the e-commerce titan Alibaba and Ant’s controlling shareholder, for a meeting on Monday.

Neither the regulators nor Ant have said in detail what was discussed at the meeting. But the timing of the conversation, mere days before Ant’s shares were expected to begin trading concurrently in Shanghai and Hong Kong, suggested discord with the company or with Mr. Ma, who spun Ant out of Alibaba in 2011. [Source]

On Saturday October 31 at the Bund Summit, a finance conference in Shanghai, Jack Ma gave an unfiltered speech directly criticizing Chinese financial regulators, mere hours after Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan said, “There should be a fine balance between encouraging financial innovation [and] building regulatory capacity [….] Among safety, liquidity, and profitability – the three principles of finance – safety always comes first.” At NPR, Emily Feng reported on Ma’s disdain for China’s financial regulators:

The halt of Ant’s IPO and after he made disparaging comments about China’s regulatory environment and state banks.

“China does not have a systemic financial risk problem. Chinese finance basically does not carry risk; rather, the risk comes from lacking a system,” he told those gathered for a finance conference in Shanghai. “China today needs policy experts, not paper pushers.” In his comments, Ma also dismissed Chinese banks as “pawnshops” giving loans out to companies “that do not need money. As a result, many good companies have turned into bad companies.” [Source]

On Monday November 2, Chinese regulators detailed new regulations on micro-lending, a core portion of Ali Group’s business. Two Ant Group products, Huabei and Jiebei, “Just Spend” and “Just Lend,” offer consumers loans valued between $7 and $10,000. Last year, Ant Technology (formerly Ant Financial) worked with 100 banks to deliver over $300 billion worth of loans to both consumers and businesses. While dramatically expanding Chinese consumers’ access to credit, Chinese leaders were worried about credit’s impact on social stability. Guo Wuping, a Chinese bank regulator, said, “fintech companies often lured young people into overspending so that ‘some people in low income groups and young people fall deep into debt traps’.”

Later that same day, four Chinese regulators summoned Jack Ma and two other Ant Group executives for an “interview — yuetan — [which] generally indicates a dressing down by authorities.” Participants did not disclose details about the meeting, but Bloomberg reported that “Ant’s leadership team was told the company will face increased scrutiny and be subject to restrictions on capital and leverage similar to banks.”

The following day, November 3, the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges both announced that they had postponed Ant Group’s listing. At CNN, Hanna Ziady and Sherisse Pham reported on the unprecedented cancellation of the multi-billion dollar IPO:

This is the first time that Chinese regulators have taken such drastic actions on the eve of a large IPO, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group Xiaomeng Lu told CNN Business.

“Jack Ma’s aggressive comments last weekend exacerbate the brewing conflict between large Chinese tech companies and powerful regulators,” Lu said in emailed comments. “Ant is likely to adjust its IPO valuation as a result of this intervention and delay its launch date.”

[…] While it’s not yet clear exactly why the Ant Group IPO was suspended, it could be an attempt by Beijing to remind Ma “who calls the shots,” Clark told CNN Business on Tuesday. Still, such a dramatic move so close to the listing date is surprising because it could damage Beijing’s drive to develop its capital markets, he added. [Source]

Was the suspension a political move aimed at Jack Ma? A result of legitimate regulatory concern? A mixture of both? In an opinion piece at Bloomberg, Shuli Ren weighed in:

What Ma said was a bit sensational, perhaps. But he was right. China’s bankers are so averse to extending credit to smaller borrowers that Beijing redefined “inclusive financing” to make its banks’ loan books look prettier. In fact, it’s been so difficult for small businesses to obtain bank credit in the last decade that they have become hard wired not to invest for the future. Here’s the latest tidbit of evidence: In the third quarter, even as China’s economy recovered and 86% of 300 smaller manufacturers CLSA spoke to became profitable, most remained wary. A record-breaking 59% of their capital expenses went into mere “regular maintenance,” the brokerage found.

Ma’s words were blunt, but these phrases, such as “pawn shops,” are not his concoctions. Bureaucrats at the People’s Bank of China, for instance, had used the same words themselves. So why is Ma being singled out?

Could it be that Ant is too profitable and is now being targeted? Ant is raising at least $34.5 billion in an IPO that attracted more than $3 trillion of retail orders. Meanwhile, regional banks are still in the doghouse, struggling and sometimes being restructured because they lack capital buffers. [Source]

Prominent Chinese blogger Wen Yunchao wrote in a tweet that the suspension was intended as a reminder that Ma Yun was not a member of the Zhao family, internet-speak for someone who wields real, Party-backed, power. Many echoed similar sentiments on Twitter:

Weibo users, who only a day before had invented a new tongue-in-cheek chengyu about Jack Ma, quickly took to mocking him by sharing clips of Gong Shou Dao, a 2017 kung fu movie in which he starred:



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/chinese-authorities-stop-ant-group-ipo-stunning-observers/
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Hong Kong Police Arrest Journalist Who Investigated 7.21 Incident

A decorated Hong Kong reporter who produced an investigative documentary on the July 21, 2019 subway mob attack was arrested by police on Tuesday. The journalist, Choy Yuk-ling, who also goes by Bao Choy, was arrested for allegedly making “false statements” while accessing public records to conduct a vehicle license plate search. Choy was working with Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), which has come under intense government scrutiny this year for its news and entertainment coverage.

The July 21 incident, widely known in Hong Kong as the 7.21 incident, was a bombshell moment and a galvanizing event in the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests. That evening, a mob of white-shirted men stormed a subway station in Yuen Long and attacked pro-democracy protestors and commuters, including an elected lawmaker, on a stopped train. The attack was broadcast and streamed online live, and even after police received 24,000 calls to its emergency hotline, officers were seen walking away from the scene, taking 39 minutes to finally respond.

Choy was heavily involved in producing an award-winning RTHK documentary episode that aired in July, on the one-year anniversary of the attack. Titled “Who Owns the Truth?” the episode won international awards for investigative reporting. For the New York Times, Austin Ramzy and Elaine Yu reported on the particulars of the documentary that landed Choy in hot water on Tuesday:

Ms. Choy worked on some of the most notable inquiries into police conduct, including a prizewinning episode of the program “Hong Kong Connection” that examined the slow response by officers to a mob attack on a group of protesters and commuters in a train station on July 21, 2019.

Ms. Choy, who is employed by RTHK on a freelance contract, was arrested on Tuesday afternoon.

The police said they arrested Ms. Choy for making a false statement about why she was obtaining license information from a publicly accessible database. Such offenses could be punishable with fines of $645 and six months’ imprisonment.

In an investigative documentary that aired in July, one year after the mob attack, RTHK journalists looked up the license plates of vehicles caught on video transporting the suspected assailants and traced them to community leaders in the territory’s outlying villages. [Source]

In the documentary, which was posted on YouTube where it received 1.3 million views, RTHK reporters can be seen reviewing CCTV footage from the scene and using the vehicle license plate database at the 10 minute mark. Reporters tracked vehicles identified from the footage, one of which can be seen delivering weapons to the white-shirted mob.

Journalists in Hong Kong regularly use vehicle license plate records as well as other publicly available information in their reporting. Hong Kong Free Press’ Selina Cheng explained why and how Hong Kong reporters use the license plate database: 

Hong Kong vehicle licence records contain the personal data of vehicle owners, including their name, residential address and Hong Kong ID card number – all of which can be purchased from a government website. To access a “Certificate of Particulars of Motor Vehicle,” a fee must be paid and the purchaser must declare one of three purposes for obtaining the record: transport related proceedings; the sale and purchase of a vehicle; or traffic and transport related matters. [Source]

The Hong Kong government has been making it harder to access public records. Alex Lam, a reporter for Apple Daily, wrote on Twitter that the Transport Department revised the usage permissions for their license plate search service, effectively barring journalists from legally using it:

Limitations on usage of the license plate database are not the only way that the Hong Kong government has made it harder for journalists to access public information. Citing the risk of doxxing to its officers, a Hong Kong police union recently tried to limit public access to voter registry information, although its efforts were blocked by a court in April. Police have also revised rules around media access at demonstrations, refusing to recognize certain credentials and banning online-only media outlets from reporting at protest sites. Local reporters have decried the chilling effect that the latest arrest will have on reporting in the city.

Choy’s arrest is the latest move by the police to confront those who have sought to investigate and seek accountability for the events of 7.21. Despite the abundance of video evidence identifying many of the attackers, police charged almost nobody in the Yuen Long attack for months, before arresting just four men. A report by the Independent Police Complaints Council, which has limited investigatory powers and no authority to subpoena evidence or summon witnesses, described the attack as a “gang fight… involving both sides” and absolved the police of any wrongdoing.

This September, police shocked many Hong Kongers when they arrested several people who were beaten by the mob, including a pro-democracy lawmaker who was attacked on the train. For The Atlantic in September, Timothy McLaughlin reported on how the police have used the arrests as a way to recast the narrative of what happened that night:

Many Hong Kongers were outraged recently when the police began making arrests over the Yuen Long violence, picking up and charging not the attackers, but those who had been beaten, including a prodemocracy lawmaker left bloodied in the mayhem. Then, more than a year after the incident, officials presented an entirely new narrative of what occurred that night—recasting it as a pitched battle between two evenly matched sides, one of quick action by police in which the victims were actually the instigators.

This new version of events marked the most blatant and audacious attempt yet at sweeping historical revisionism of last year’s protests. Hong Kong authorities appear eager to not just quash the demonstrations and move on, but create an alternate history of events in which prodemocracy protesters are the villains, bringing suffering on everyone else. It is not an uncommon tactic among autocratic regimes, wiping problematic episodes from the historical narrative, presenting the status quo as a moment that was never in doubt. The authorities in Hong Kong are going a step further, rewriting a movement that, although slowed, is very much ongoing, with hundreds arrested at protests on Sunday, when legislative elections were supposed to take place. [Source]

At the end of the RTHK documentary, a Yuen Long shopkeeper whose shop cameras captured the attackers explained why he came forward to share his footage. “The victors are continuously rewriting history,” he said. “And the truth is gradually being forgotten by regular people, or is gradually being eliminated in a thousand and one ways.”



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/hong-kong-police-arrest-journalist-who-investigated-7-21-incident/
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Monday, 2 November 2020

Photo: Untitled, by Hsiuan Boyen

Untitled, by Hsiuan Boyen (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/photo-untitled-by-hsiuan-boyen-4/
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Minitrue Diary, February 14, 2020: Authentic Feelings, Poems and Songs

CDT has recently acquired and verified a collection of  directives issued by central Party authorities to  at the beginning of this year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020, and we will be posting them over the coming weeks. The following directive was released on February 14, 2020.

Reminders concerning reports on the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic situation:

1. Positive reports must seek truth from facts, tell of ordinary people’s authentic feelings and real lives, be mindful in reporting, and avoid exaggerating or deviating from the real situation.

2. When publishing poems or songs about the fight against the epidemic, ensure to avoid appearing out of sync with the social atmosphere. (February 14, 2020) [Chinese]

As the COVID-19 outbreak continued to spread through China and across the world in February, propaganda authorities issued near daily directives to contain and shape the narrative surrounding the worsening pubic health crisis. CDT translated several censored poems that were posted to WeChat by a Wuhan nurse in mid-February, and another censored poem mourning Dr. Li Wenliang, the frontline doctor who died on February 7 after being punished for sharing “illegal” information about the outbreak.

真Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/minitrue-diary-february-14-2020-authentic-feelings-poems-and-songs/
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As Beijing Charts a Course to “Self-Reliance,” Challenges Abound

As the CCP lays out the vision for its latest five-year plan, reports suggest that developing national “self-reliance” is a critical piece of Beijing’s long-term goals. This emphasis is not new: related themes such as “dual circulation” and “technological modernization” have been frequently stressed by officials across numerous industries, with efforts being spearheaded in areas from semiconductor development to China’s emerging central bank digital currency. However, numerous analysts have noted that the road to self-sufficiency for China may be bumpier than it looks.

The semiconductor industry is one key sector aiming to increase capacity. Despite the huge sums Beijing has invested into developing a homegrown semiconductor champion, challenges have been considerable. The urgency to develop a viable domestic champion is not just for economic reasons, but for strategic ones as well. Chinese semiconductor manufacturers have recently been hobbled by their reliance on foreign technology, especially after the U.S. imposed sanctions on the country’s biggest chipmaker in late September. As The New York Times’ Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers report, analysts expect an important component of the new five-year plan will involve redoubling efforts at developing the semiconductor sector:

[…] Mastering the design and production of silicon chips and other parts can be expensive and risk-filled, and industry experts have questioned how far and how quickly China could successfully decouple itself from global suppliers.

“I think a lot of what China is trying to do is to throw a lot of resources — financial resources, human resources — at clearly identified problems,” said Andrew Batson, the China research director for Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent research firm. “A lot of the priorities involve scaling up of existing technologies domestically.” [Source]

With establishing a viable chipmaker something of a national priority, money has flowed into the pockets of new entrants and has led to several high-profile collapses. For SupChina, Luz Ding wrote last week about the “debt-ridden disappointment” of one semiconductor startup, HSMC, which attracted billions in investment but is now reportedly struggling financially:

Founded in 2017, HSMC received high expectations mainly thanks to its big-name CEO, Chiang Shang-yi (蔣尚義 Jiǎng Shàngyì), who formerly oversaw research and development as the joint COO of the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). HSMC earned additional prominence in the field when it purchased an advanced lithography machine from the Netherlands’ ASML and announced it aims to produce 7nm chips, a goal that even SMIC has yet to achieve. HSMC attracted 128 billion yuan ($19 billion) of investment and subsidies. However, recent government and news reports suggest that the company is facing financial fallout and risks bankruptcy.

Construction of HSMC’s headquarters and factory in Wuhan has come to a full stop as the company failed to pay off its contractors, according to multiple Chinese media reports (in Chinese). HSMC appears to be still operating, with hundreds of employees continuing to work in the temporary office buildings, but there is no indication of any ongoing production activities in the factory, an HSMC equipment supplier told SupChina.

HSMC is currently facing a significant cash shortage and is at risk of being shut down anytime, according to the mid-year economic report issued (in Chinese) this July by the local government of Wuhan’s East-West Lake District, where the semiconductor startup is located. [Source]

Last month at the South China Morning Post, Amanda Lee reported that the National Development and Reform Commission would step in to curb “chaos” in the semiconductor industry:

Meng Wei, a spokeswoman with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said that some companies “with insufficient knowledge of integrated circuit development” have “blindly entered into projects”.

“The risks of low-level construction have appeared repeatedly, and there has even been stalled construction of individual projects and vacant factories, resulting in a waste of resources,” Meng said on Tuesday at a regular press briefing of the economic planning agency.

She added that the NDRC “also noticed that the enthusiasm for domestic investment in the integrated circuit industry is constantly rising”.

In response, she said the commission will work with other state departments to more closely supervise semiconductor projects. [Source]

Another crucial step towards China’s goal of self-reliance is stimulating domestic demand to reduce demand for exports from abroad. A related principle recently promoted by Xi Jinping during his Shenzhen tour is the idea of “dual circulation,” which envisions a “new balance away from global integration (the first circulation) and toward increased domestic reliance (the second circulation).” At the Paulson Institute’s MarcoPolo think tank, Houze Song noted that the challenge for Beijing now is encouraging greater demand for domestic consumption:

Moreover, dual circulation is simply an acknowledgement of reality. For years, many have called for rebalancing the Chinese economy. At a macro level, that rebalancing has actually happened since the global financial crisis. China’s trade surplus has already dropped from more than 8% of GDP to around 1% of GDP, while the share of domestic demand has risen accordingly by 7% of GDP over the same period.

But the form that rebalancing has taken is not optimal nor sustainable because it has been driven by domestic investment. Liu He, China’s top economic policy advisor and Vice Premier, has long argued for a more sustainable rebalancing based on domestic consumption and income growth. In fact, many elements of the “dual circulation” strategy are identical to Liu’s rebalancing proposal he published after the financial crisis but were never implemented. With Liu now in charge of reforms, there is a higher likelihood that more concrete actions will be taken. [Source]

Encouraging China’s consumers to spend more in today’s climate is no small task. While Beijing has done its best to exude confidence as China rebounds from the impact of COVID-19, recently released economic figures show that the general public is less willing to spend compared to last year. For The Wire China, Victor Shih wrote that those figures along, with a lack of concrete details from Beijing on how the new five-year plan will stimulate domestic consumption, show that achieving domestic reliance will be harder than it sounds:

Ning Jizhe, one of the co-authors of the [14th Five-Year] plan and the vice chairman of China’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission, likewise emphasized that a major objective of the plan was to “elevate people’s income and use multiple channels to increase the income of urban and rural residents.”

[…] Despite the stated objective, there’s been no sign of this reorientation during the current downturn. Total government spending on social security and healthcare rose from 5.2 percent of nominal GDP in 2019 to 5.5 percent this year. Meanwhile, all of the other major economies have increased health and welfare spending by trillions of dollars, pushing up deficits by more than 5 percent of GDP. As of September, the deficit in China had only nudged up from 4 percent of nominal GDP during the third quarter of 2019 to 4.8 percent this September, a 0.8 percent increase. Retail sales, a reflection of the income security of ordinary Chinese, still fell by more than 7 percent this September compared to a year ago, and declined by close to 9 percent, if inflation is taken into account.

Despite aspirations to boost consumer demand in China, which also would benefit the world, China has done very little to facilitate that goal even at a time when it made great sense to do so. It is doubtful that the 14th Five-Year Plan will elevate the trajectory of Chinese demand to a level higher than its existing path. This means China will continue to run large trade surpluses and the world will not reap much more marginal benefits from its growing economy. [Source]

Finally, there are the unknown unknowns. CNN Business’ Laura He reported that China will also likely have to contend with unforeseen challenges to its domestic supply chains:

“There is no guarantee that efforts to boost self-sufficiency in specific sectors will succeed,” wrote Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist for Capital Economics, in a research note late last week.

Evans-Pritchard pointed out that unforeseen events can derail China’s plans, such as when an outbreak of African Swine Fever decimated the country’s pork industry last year. The disease wiped out a third of China’s pig population, causing a shortage that forced China to import massive amounts of meat. [Source]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/11/as-beijing-charts-a-course-to-self-reliance-challenges-abound/
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Friday, 30 October 2020

Minitrue Diary, February 13, 2020: Purged Officials, Donations, Proper Capitalization

CDT has recently acquired and verified a collection of directives issued by central Party authorities to at the beginning of this year. These directives were issued on an almost daily basis in early 2020, and we will be posting them over the coming weeks. The following three directives were released on February 13, 2020.

Reports involving leadership changes in provincial Party committees (including municipalities directly under the Central Government) should without exception take the text of authorized releases from Xinhua as standard. It is forbidden to release information without authorization until these are published, or to hype related topics. (February 13, 2020) [Chinese]

Do not report on disadvantaged members of the public donating money and goods, funeral parlor workers supporting Wuhan, etc. (February 13, 2020) [Chinese]

Pay attention to the use of upper and lower case in the English terms “Novel coronavirus pneumonia” and its abbreviation “NCP.” (February 13, 2020) [Chinese]

On February 13, it was reported that Beijing had purged officials in Hubei Province—the site of the initial coronavirus outbreak in late December—including the Party secretaries of both the province and Wuhan city as well as local health officials. The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan and the region led to public anger at local officials’ handling of the crisis, including their slow response to early cases and stifling of information. From a South China Morning Post article by William Zheng:

China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Hubei party secretary Jiang Chaoliang had been replaced by Shanghai mayor Ying Yong, 61, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The Communist Party leader of the city of Wuhan, Ma Guoqiang, 56, also lost his job, Xinhua said. He will be replaced by Wang Zhonglin, 57, the party secretary of the city of Jinan, in the eastern province of Shandong.

Another Beijing heavyweight, Chen Yixin, was flown into Hubei last week. He is chief of the party’s top law enforcement body – the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission – and is now in charge of handling the outbreak. The virus is believed to have originated from a live animal and seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei’s capital city. [Source]

Several directives in January and February focused on donations from both China and abroad during the emerging coronavirus crisis.

真Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/10/minitrue-diary-february-13-2020-purged-officials-donations-proper-capitalization/
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