According to International Christian Concern (ICC), Father Francis Liu of the Chinese Christian Fellowship of Righteousness said in a tweet that several Christian WeChat pages, including “Gospel League” and “Life Quarterly,” were no longer accessible online.

Anyone attempting to reach such accounts are greeted with the following message: “(We) received report that (this account) violates the ‘Internet User Public Account Information Services Management Provisions’ and its account has been blocked and suspended.”

Bible apps have also been banned from China’s App Store, and hard copy Bibles are no longer eligible for purchase online, as per ICC. In China, Bible Apps can only be accessed with the aid of a VPN.

Another indication of the repression is the sale of books that support President Xi Jinping’s ideas and communist philosophy in bookstores operated by the state-sanctioned Three-self churches.

ICC noted that “even their WeChat accounts are turning into propaganda channels for CCP.”

New religious regulations issued by China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs went into force on Saturday, Christian Post (CP) reports. Catholic bishops must be certified and ordained by the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Bishops’ Conference, according to Article 16 of the regulations in Chapter III.

According to the Union of Catholic Asian News‘ reading, “the regulations indirectly assert that the election of Catholic bishops will be done by the state-approved system under the Chinese Communist Party’s direction and the Vatican and Pope Francis will have no role in it […] It runs contrary to the laborious China-Vatican deal on the appointment of Catholic bishops, signed in September 2018.”

The China-Vatican Agreement of 2018 which has been renewed last year allows the Chinese Government, through its state-approved Patriotic Catholic Chinese Association, to recommend new bishops to the Vatican with the pope’s powers of veto. Upon signing the agreement, the Vatican said that it hoped the unification of the approximately 10 million to 12 million Catholics would be promoted by China.

Additionally, Article 27 states that senior religious leaders will hold their positions for a period of three or five years, during which they may resubmit their personal information to the authorities, states the United Kingdom-based group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW). The group explained that the provision may be used to punish individuals for criticism or failure to comply with regulations by denying their application to re-register.

CSW also noted that the rules in Article 3 mandate clergy to “support the leadership of the Communist Party.”

Likewise, Article 12 states that clergy members should not “endanger national security” or be “dominated by foreign forces.”

Per the latest reports, religious oppression in China increased in 2020, with church closures and other human rights violations affecting thousands of Christians.

In 2018, the Chinese government prohibited the selling of Bibles at online bookstores around the world in order to conform with a “white paper” that mandated adherence to core socialist principles.

The communist regime’s assault on religious rights prompted the United States State Department to designate China as a “country of particular concern” for “continuing to participate in especially serious abuses of religious freedom.”

According to Open Doors USA’s Global Watch List, China is one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to Christian oppression.

The Christian Council of China and the Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches of China have also reportedly revised the titles and reviews of all their books on their official WeChat bookstore, “Tianfengshuyuan.”

Source: http://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/11710/20210503/chinese-communist-party-shuts-down-bible-apps-christian-wechat-accounts-under-new-crackdown-policies.htm

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South China Sea (Representational image) | Photo: www.pacom.mil

Singapore/Manila: The Trump administration’s move to brand most of Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea a violation of international law doesn’t mean much on its own: China has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the 2016 tribunal ruling that the U.S. finally just endorsed.

But analysts fear it could lead to a miscalculation at sea if it prompts the Communist Party to become more aggressive in asserting its claims, both to rebuff the U.S. and to deter other claimants in Southeast Asia to avoid taking action. China’s campaign to build artificial structures intensified after the Obama administration announced a “pivot” to Asia in 2011.

“This may not necessarily change the texture of what the U.S. military is already doing in the South China Sea,” said Collin Koh Swee Lean, research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. “The concern we have is the Chinese may decide to step up their challenge against these U.S. activities in the SCS, thus increasing the risk of incidents.”

While the U.S. and China are sparring on everything from trade to Covid-19 to Hong Kong, the South China Sea remains the most likely spot for the two powers to have their warships and fighter jets actually collide. Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said he wants to deploy more U.S. forces to confront China, and the U.S. Navy appears to be stepping up freedom of navigation operations challenging Beijing’s territorial claims. Earlier this month two U.S. aircraft carriers conducted exercises in the South China Sea.

“The Trump administration is trying to find all the nails they can to hammer into the coffin,” said Zhu Feng, executive dean of the Collaborative Innovation Center of South China Sea Studies at Nanjing University. “On the one hand it’s exploiting the China factor for the elections, but in general the U.S. has fundamentally changed its attitude towards China.”

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Attempts to dissuade China’s ruling Communist Party from asserting more authority over Hong Kong didn’t work. Now that China is imposing a new national security law on the territory, world powers are looking to punish Beijing.

The law hands the central government almost unchecked legal power in the former British colony, which was promised a “high degree of autonomy” for 50 years when it was returned to China in 1997. Drafted secretly and enacted swiftly on Tuesday, it is considered by many analysts to be even harsher than expected.

Policymakers, activists, and analysts outside China say it’s critical now for governments from Washington to Tokyo to back their words with action by cranking up pressure on China’s leadership while trying to help the people of Hong Kong.

In the short run, few expect China’s emboldened leadership to blink. Over the long run, though, the hope is that pressure will lead to change.

“Obviously, more now has to be done that they have pulled the trigger,” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said at a hearing on Hong Kong’s future in the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

“We need to meet this as never before. We didn’t do it after Tiananmen Square,” he said, referring to the June 4, 1989, crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. “We acquiesced and they took note of that and said, ‘You know, give it a little time and people will just let it go.’ ”

Economic pressure and sanctions

In late May, the Trump administration decertified Hong Kong for not being sufficiently autonomous from China. The U.S. has begun steps to remove elements of the special treatment that the territory has enjoyed for decades because it was different from other Chinese cities.

On Monday, the State Department announced an end to the sale of military equipment and other technologies to Hong Kong. The Commerce Department suspended preferential treatment and export license exceptions for Hong Kong the same day.

The steps may complicate China’s plans to turn the sprawling Pearl River Delta in southern China into a coordinated economic powerhouse with Hong Kong as the technology hub, says Ho-Fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University who follows Hong Kong affairs.

Hung says China had been expecting access to certain technologies via Hong Kong that are unavailable on the mainland, but that has changed.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/02/886587827/as-china-imposes-new-hong-kong-law-u-s-and-allies-take-steps-to-retaliate

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left), the director-general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 28. NAOHIKO HATTA – POOL/GETTY IMAGES

While the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying a global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread globally weeks before.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how it’s affecting countries around the world.]

WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against the international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.

It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective, said Richard Neher, a virologist at the University of Basel. “The big lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine “as scientifically justified.”

While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.

One reason is that official data from China is often highly dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other countries, since studies based on information from China are the first used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.

“I thought the greatest success of the Chinese party-state was in getting the WHO to focus on the positive sides of China’s responses and ignore the negative sides of the responses,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the SOAS University of London. “With the WHO presenting China’s responses in a positive light, the Chinese government can make its propaganda campaign to ignore its earlier mistakes appear credible and to ignore the human, societal, and economic costs of its responses.”

Indeed, WHO closes its eyes to such problems. “China reported and isolated ALL individuals with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19,” Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said in mid-March. However, Chinese authorities only in the beginning of April started to make current numbers of asymptomatic cases with lab-confirmed infections public—which also are included in the WHO case definition for COVID-19. “Every country has its self-reporting processes”, Lindmeier said. WHO epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who headed the visit, said in an interview that China was not hiding anything. When asked how many people have been put in quarantine, isolation, or residential restriction, Lindmeier referred to numbers from China’s National Health Commission—which are much smaller than the numbers calculated by the New York Times. “WHO works with these data,” he said.

Yet it is unclear whether the WHO experts who traveled to China sufficiently understood the situation on the ground. For example, based on numbers from the South China province of Guangdong, WHO argued that undetected cases are rare. However, a screening program for COVID-19 only included patients seen at fever clinics; most of them probably showed at least a fever. In Germany, most of the people who tested positive did not show a fever. It is easily possible that there has been a substantial number of undetected cases, Neher said, which is the “big unknown” in calculations of the death rate.

WHO also left many questions open about how exactly public engagement was managed in its report. Chinese people have reacted “with courage and conviction,” it says; they have “accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures.” While this is probably true for many, others were likely motivated by a statement of the Supreme People’s Court: People carrying the virus who don’t follow quarantine restrictions “face jail terms ranging from three to 10 years if the consequence is not serious,” it says. Otherwise, they could face a life sentence or death.

“The community has largely accepted the prevention and control measures and is fully participating in the management of self-isolation and enhancement of public compliance,” the WHO report says. In China, no measures have been implemented that could not also be used elsewhere, Aylward claimed in an interview. Apparently, the WHO mission didn’t have the chance to speak with people with opposing views. Many Chinese people told him that they all have been attacked together and need to react in a united fashion, Aylward said.

The very uniformity of this narrative should have been a wake-up call, said Mareike Ohlberg from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. Indeed, the whole trip of both foreign and national experts seems to have been organized along Potemkin-esque lines for a team where most of its international members lacked linguistic skills and familiarity with China. “We didn’t have much interaction until after all the site visits,” said Clifford Lane, a deputy director at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the delegation. It was his first trip to China, he told Science. “I was really surprised by how modern the cities were.”

Ohlberg said the statements of the WHO have clearly been heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. She says she was surprised that, from the start, many experts uncritically repeated information from Beijing and “preached confidence in the WHO and the Chinese government.” The WHO report rightly emphasized the heroic commitment of the population of Wuhan. “But it’s important that the WHO does not degrade itself to an instrument of the Chinese government—which does not want to make transparent how the population suffered,” she said.

Osman Dar, a global health expert at Public Health England and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that China is no different from other countries that seek to exert influence. WHO had evolved out of colonial-era international sanitary conferences convened by the European powers and expansionist U.S. policy, he said. Since WHO was controlled and largely influenced by the national interests of Western powers before, in the past 20 years, countries like China “have started to have more influence in the global health space.”

Beijing’s say is growing not only at WHO but also in the health policies of more and more countries. This also is an important area in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its activities in African countries. It may be doubted whether Beijing always acts in the best interests of its partners. “Chinese health aid allocation is poorly related to direct health needs of African countries,” French researchers last year concluded.

The same is true for the current outbreak, which is politically important, said Tankred Stöbe, former president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) Germany and a former member of the International Board of MSF International. In February, he traveled to Southeast Asia (SEA) as a COVID-19 emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. Countries like Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand “cannot escape the influence of China,” he said. “I know about meetings where representatives of China have said: Dear friends in Southeast Asia, we’re interested in continuing good cooperation. It is clear for us that you must let your borders open—otherwise, we would have to rethink our friendship.” The countries “cannot refuse,” Stöbe said. Countries like Cambodia and Pakistan kept accepting flights from China during the outbreak.

For political reasons, “Vietnam can’t close its border with China,” physician Rafi Kot told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He founded several medical centers in the country. “The Chinese have put immense pressure on everyone: the Koreans, Vietnam, everyone,” he told the newspaper. “Asian countries cannot act as they want vis-a-vis China because it’s the big power in the neighborhood.” While Cambodia closed its borders to several Western countries in mid-March, it started military drills together with hundreds of Chinese soldiers, which concluded this Monday.

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/

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Former National Security Adviser John Bolton condemned China for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak and called on the rest of the world to “act” and hold the communist government accountable.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party have been accused of silencing doctors and critics in the early stages of the coronavirus, costing thousands of lives.

Now that they have seemingly turned the corner in tackling the virus at home, the communist-run nation has now positioned itself as the country ahead of the coronavirus curve, and has routinely made unsubstantiated claims that the U.S. is behind the crisis.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE

In turn, President Trump has routinely referred to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”.

Despite no longer seeing eye to eye with President Trump, Bolton, a notorious hawk, took China to task Saturday morning for their role in the spread of the virus.

“China silenced coronavirus whistleblowers, expelled journalists, destroyed samples, refused CDC help, and concealed counts of deaths and infections. It’s fact there was a massive coverup. China is responsible. The world must act to hold them accountable,” the former U.N. ambassador tweeted.

CHINA RECASTS ITSELF AS GLOBAL CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE LEADER

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China has been mounting a very public — and largely successful — humanitarian campaign to come across as a strong world leader.

China’s private and public sectors are working in lockstep to fast-track aid to countries that are in desperate need of it. Earlier this week, Xi pledged to send more medical experts to Italy, a country on track to surpass China in the number of coronavirus-related deaths when the numbers are tallied at the end of Thursday.

However, President Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric against China, blasting its government for its claim that the U.S. military planted the virus in Wuhan.

Critics have condemned the president’s rhetoric as “racist” and “xenophobic” while defenders insist it reflects the origin of the virus and how the Chinese government is responsible for mishandling the outbreak.

Fox News’ Barnini Chakraborty contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/john-bolton-declares-china-responsible-for-coronavirus-outbreak-the-world-must-act-to-hold-them-accountable

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The Senate Democratic leader, who has little good to say about Trump most days, tweeted, “Hang tough on China, @realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down. Strength is the only way to win with China.”

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