Trump Sends Hateful ‘Chinese Virus’ Tweet, But He Praised The Country’s Response For Weeks

Trump Sends Hateful ‘Chinese Virus’ Tweet, But He Praised The Country’s Response For Weeks

George Zornick

HuffPostMarch 16, 2020, 8:12 PM PDT

 Source: https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-china-virus-xenophobia-031259545.html

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President Donald Trump sent a xenophobic tweet Monday evening, noting that he plans to bail out airlines and other industries “that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus.” Only a few hours earlier, Trump held a White House news conference on the emerging coronavirus outbreak and was praised for finally offering a relatively sober assessment of the emerging disaster. But the president unleashed the real Trump online not long after, calling COVID-19 the “China virus” for the first time and giving voice to a hateful blame game that has been simmering among hardcore right-wingers for weeks. He used the phrase in a tweet again Tuesday morning.

Prominent Fox News voices like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have been intoning for weeks that the dangerous virus was China’s fault and decrying any criticism they faced for tying the infection to one country. “On the left, you’ve heard them tell you that the real worry is you might use the wrong word to describe what’s happening to the country,” Carlson said in late February. “Wokeness is a cult. They would let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength,” he would later say. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a close Trump ally, even suggested in January that the coronavirus was the product of a Chinese “super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens.”

There have been anti-Asian hate crimes in several places affected by the outbreak, and they appeared in New York City over the past week. It would be a dangerous development if the U.S. president decided to elevate that xenophobia.

It would also be hypocritical. For weeks beginning in late January, Trump praised Chinese officials profusely for their response to the virus, even as some global observers were raising reasonable concerns about early Chinese efforts to downplay the severity of the crisis. Time and again, Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak and even boasted of a U.S. partnership in helping China fight the virus — until Trump seemed to find a useful scapegoat. 

In an interview with Sean Hannity that aired right before the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, Trump declared: “We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing... . We’re offering them tremendous help. We have the best in the world for that.”

Three days later, on Feb. 7, a reporter on the White House lawn asked Trump if he was concerned that China might be covering up the extent of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has consistently praised China for sharing information with the global health community early and often, but inside the country, it was a different story, with Chinese officials keeping citizens in the dark and downplaying the severity of the coronavirus spread until it could no longer be denied ― and after many thousands of people had already been infected.

President Donald Trump holds a news briefing Monday on the coronavirus outbreak while accompanied by members of the coronavirus task force at the White House (Photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)

“No. China is working very hard,” Trump said in response to the reporter’s question. “They’re working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job.”

Questions about the Chinese government’s handling of the emerging global crisis soiled a talking point Trump was keen to push as the presidential election drew closer: that the economy was doing great, with no signs of trouble. In January Trump “signaled to advisers that he wanted to play it down” because he didn’t want to rattle financial markets, according to The New York Times. Trump also wanted to boast about a new trade deal with China and his former rival Xi. That was apparent at a Feb. 10 campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire.

“Last month, we signed a groundbreaking trade agreement with China that will defeat so many of our opponents. The money that’s pouring in, people don’t even believe it,” Trump said at the rally. “And, by the way, the virus, they’re working hard. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

That same day, he did an interview with Fox News. “Well, I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control. I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon,” Trump said. “You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that’s a beautiful date to look forward to. But China, I can tell you, is working very hard.”

Three days after that, on Feb. 13, reporter Geraldo Rivera again asked Trump if China was being honest about the damage being wrought there by the coronavirus. Trump granted maybe not — but sympathized with Xi. “I think they want to put the best face on it. So, you know, I mean, if somebody ― if you were running it, you’d probably ― you wouldn’t want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is because you don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said. “But, no, I think they’ve handled it professionally and I think they’re extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it’s going to be resolved.”

Trump repeated these lines again and again in the following days. “I know this: President Xi loves the people of China, he loves his country, and he’s doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation,” Trump told a reporter on the White House lawn on Feb. 18. The next day, he told a local reporter in Arizona, “I mean, I know President Xi ― I get along with him very well. We’ve just made a great trade deal, which is going to be a lot of business for Arizona and every other place. But they are trying very, very hard, and I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.” Five days later: “President Xi loves his country. He’s working very hard to solve the problem and he will solve the problem. OK?”

By this time, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was already criticizing China publicly for failing to let medical personnel in the country speak freely about the virus in the early days of the outbreak. 

As the novel coronavirus spread around the globe and looked to threaten the United States, Trump’s praise ceased. The first hint in public comments that Trump might seek to blame China came at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 29. “In our efforts to keep America safe, my administration has taken the most aggressive action in modern history to control our borders and protect Americans from the coronavirus,” Trump said. The virus, he added curtly, “Came from China.”

Early, constructive pressure from Trump on China to be honest with its people about the outbreak might have helped slow its spread. But Trump declined because lavishing praise on Xi Jinping and the deal they struck helped Trump’s politics. At the time, it was also in Trump’s interest to minimize the risk of a global pandemic, which would spook investors. Now Trump looks to be pulling a 180-degree turn and looking to blame the entire outbreak on China. It again suits his politics — and they are very dark.

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Người Việt Nam và Hiểm Họa Bệnh Dịch Vũ Hán

Người Việt Nam và Hiểm Họa Bệnh Dịch Vũ Hán

Là người mang giòng máu Việt Nam hiện đang sống lưu vong trȇn đất nước Mỹ, chúng ta luôn thừa hưởng những di sản tốt đẹp đạo đức từ ngàn xưa của dân tộc Việt Nam và nhất là tiềm tàng di sản văn hóa giáo dục và nghệ thuật âm nhạc của Việt Nam Cộng Hòa. Tuy Việt Nam là nơi chôn nhau cắt rún của chúng ta, nơi mồ mả tổ tiȇn giòng họ cha mẹ anh chị em chúng ta hiện đang nằm dưới gót sắt của cộng sản Việt Nam, nhưng nước Mỹ hôm nay chính là quȇ hương thứ hai cưu mang chúng ta, một tổ quốc thứ hai, nơi con cháu chúng ta chôn nhau cắt rún, và chính là tổ quốc mà họ sẽ chấp nhận hy sinh bảo vệ.

Là người Việt Nam, đứng trước những khó khăn mà nước Mỹ gặp phải vì lây nhiễm đại dịch Vũ Hán, phát xuất từ thành phố Vũ Hán (Wuhan) thuộc tỉnh Hồ Bắc (Hubei) của Trung cộng chúng ta cần phải hết lòng tuân thủ những quy định y tế phòng chống dịch bệnh và các thông báo lệnh khẩn cấp ban hành từ các cơ quan chức năng chính quyền, theo sát những diễn biến về y tế sức khỏe công cộng để theo đó bảo vệ sức khoẻ của cộng đồng và cho gia đình cá nhân.

“Ᾰn Cây Nào Rào Cây Nấy,” “Uống Nước Nhớ Nguồn,” Một Con Ngựa Ðau, Cả Tàu Không Ᾰn Cỏ,” Bầu Ơi Thương Lấy Bí Cùng, Tuy Là Khác Giống Nhưng Chung Một Giàn,” … là những phương ngôn muôn đời của giòng giống Lạc Việt.

Tình yȇu dành cho tổ quốc thứ hai cũng ngang bằng với tình yȇu dành cho tổ quốc Việt Nam khi xưa chúng ta từng phục vụ xã thân cho đại nghĩa dân tộc mà biểu tượng là Việt Nam Cộng Hòa với lá cờ Vàng Ba Sọc Ðỏ của ba giòng máu Việt Nam. Hiểm họa đại dịch Vũ Hán tại Mỹ là một bài học nhắc nhở chúng ta về tình yȇu đó hôm nay lớn mạnh hơn bao giờ hết khi tất cả từ trường học, nhà thờ, cộng đồng, công sở, tiệm buôn… cùng chia xẻ lo âu chung. Các thanh niȇn Việt Nam trưởng thành tại tổ quốc thứ hai cần luôn tự nhắc nhở bản thân về những lý tưởng khi cha ông các anh đã bỏ đất nước Việt ra đi trước đại dịch cộng sản Việt Nam vào ngày Quốc Hận 30/4/1975 mà luôn thức tỉnh, cầu tiến trȇn đường học vấn, và sẳn sàng lȇn đường phục vụ cho tổ quốc đất đai biển hải đảo, và vũ trụ không gian của tổ quốc Mỹ khi tổ quốc kȇu gọi.

Hoàng Hoa

Quan Ðiểm Việt Nam

Rights groups condemn 10-year jail term for Vietnam blogger

World

Rights groups condemn 10-year jail term for Vietnam blogger

AFPMarch 9, 2020, 10:51 PM PDT

Source:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/rights-groups-condemn-10-jail-term-vietnam-blogger-052556775.html

 

Vietnamese blogger Truong Duy Nhat was a regular contributor to Radio Free Asia and a critic of the government (AFP Photo/-)

The jailing of a Vietnamese blogger for 10 years was condemned by rights groups Tuesday as "unacceptable" and an attack on free speech.

Truong Duy Nhat, a regular contributor to Radio Free Asia, was found guilty in a brief trial Monday of defrauding the public of $560,000 when he worked for a state-owned newspaper in the central city of Danang in 2004, state media said.

Describing the sentence as "harsh and totally unacceptable", Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called for the "immediate release" of Nhat who had posted articles critical of the government on his blog.

RSF ranked Vietnam 176th on its 2019 World Press Freedom Index as one of the world's biggest jailers of journalists and bloggers.

"Officially convicted of abusing his professional position, he is in fact paying dearly for his professionalism," said Daniel Bastard, RSF's Asia-Pacific director.

Radio Free Asia also condemned the conviction as "unjust" and "a blow against free speech and free expression."

All media in Vietnam is state-run and independent journalism and bloggers are banned.

Since its hardline leadership took power in 2016, the country's single-party state has tightened its grip on criticism and different viewpoints.

This is Nhat's second prison stint. He was jailed for two years in 2014 for "abusing democratic freedoms" for critical blog postings.

He was discovered in a Vietnamese prison in March last year after fleeing to Thailand seeking refugee status with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The circumstances of Nhat's return to Vietnam were never clarified by Hanoi.

Don’t Let the Chinese Government Escape Blame for Coronavirus’s Initial Spread

World

Don’t Let the Chinese Government Escape Blame for Coronavirus’s Initial Spread

Therese Shaheen

National ReviewMarch 10, 2020, 3:30 AM PDT

 Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/don-t-let-chinese-government-103028577.html

From almost the very beginning of the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis in January and early February, it’s often been asked whether it might be the “Chinese Chernobyl.” Could the crisis expose the weakness of the mix of oppression, information control, and social disgust that underpin the Chinese Communist regime and trigger its collapse? Others have suggested that it might instead be “president Xi Jinping’s Tiananmen,” meaning he will use all the tools at his disposal to tighten down and prevent, well . . . a Chinese Chernobyl.

It is too soon to know what may happen. But it’s not too soon for attempts to whitewash the timeline and Chinese-government actions in the earliest moments of the crisis. Indeed, even now, the level of public anxiety about both the virus and what the Chinese government is doing and saying about it remain high.

 

It is helpful to review the current status and the timeline that got us here. On Monday, February 24, the World Health Organization determined that reported cases of COVID-19/coronavirus had peaked. At the time, there were about 76,000 reported cases in China, and about 1,800 cases elsewhere in the world. In the United States, there were 14 reported cases. As of March 7, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and state and local public health reporting suggest the number is more than 300 cases, a twenty-fold increase. Globally, there are more than 100,000 cases, with more than 350 deaths in Italy alone.

The world has barely begun to reckon with what the Chinese government claims to have gotten under control. It’s true that forced quarantining and other extreme measures in China played a critical role. The World Health Organization report of its February mission to China praises the PRC for its response: “The response structures in China were rapidly put in place according to existing emergency plans and aligned from the top to the bottom. This was replicated at the four levels of government (national, provincial, prefecture and county/district).” The leader of the World Health Organization mission to China in February, Canadian epidemiologist Dr. Bruce Aylward, encouraged the world to “access the expertise of China,” adding that “if I had COVID-19, I’d want to be treated in China.”

But the WHO report and subsequent reporting about what the world can learn from China represents a real-time cleansing of the actual record, a record that includes intentional obfuscation and failure to respond in the early stages of the crisis. This includes the government’s early attempts to stifle communication about the virus, the censorship of doctors and others on social media as cases were being observed in late December, and the continuing suppression of information on social media across the country about how the government, from President Xi Jinping to local administrators, continues to mislead the public and the rest of the world.

On March 3, researchers at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy published “Censured Contagion,” a report that meticulously documents a timeline and body of facts that paint quite a different picture than the WHO report, and placing WHO’s accolades for China’s “response structures” that were “rapidly put in place” in doubt. The WHO report concludes that the beginning of the epidemic was December 30, 2019, with the collection of samples from a pneumonia patient in Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital. Data provided in graphics in the report show essentially zero cases before that date.

Yet the Munk School researchers found that censorship of certain keywords in social media had already begun by then. They highlight social-media reports during the prior week by doctors reporting an unknown pathogen, linking it to the Wuhan seafood market. By December 31, social-media channels, including WeChat, were already censoring the terms “Wuhan seafood market” and “unknown Wuhan pneumonia.”

As careful as the recent Munk School report is, its essential elements were available to WHO researchers before they made their February 16-24 trip and wrote their report praising the PRC response. On February 1, the Washington Post published a story excoriating Beijing’s early handling of the outbreak. The story includes anecdotes consistent with the Munk School analysis, such as how the Wuhan Public Security Bureau on New Year’s Day had begun detaining people for “spreading ‘rumours’ about Wuhan hospitals receiving SARS-like cases.”  The government-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the Post reported, called on those online to “jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace.”

WHO and its director-general, the Ethiopian politician Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have received criticism for their own response to the crisis. Michael Collins at the Council on Foreign Relations labeled it a joint “dereliction of duty” in a searing blog post in late February. Collins correctly concludes that WHO “laundered” the PRC record, damaging its own credibility by doing so.

The most galling result of that image-burnishing is the ubiquity of coverage — and repetition by third parties who don’t care to find out the truth — to the effect that the world should actually thank the PRC for its strong reaction, because it bought the world the necessary time to prepare for the challenge. Science magazine online, the publication of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, posed the question this week: “Can China’s COVID-19 strategy work elsewhere?” This is just one example.

This reflects what we already know about the Chinese government. It is developing into a modern state, one whose public-health system has significantly advanced from its ordeal with the SARS epidemic just 20 years ago. Per capita wealth is up more than 300 percent, and the Chinese share of the global GDP has more than doubled, from about 7 percent to more than 16 percent over the same period.

Alongside that growth and progress, though, China under President Xi is ever more repressive. It uses some of the most sophisticated technology in the world simply to control its population.  That includes Internet censorship, social-media monitoring and tracking of ordinary citizens, and the mass detention of Muslims and other minorities.

But Chinese government face-saving is not stopping at the Chinese border. It is also attempting to control the narrative through state-controlled media, and through their willing partners in the West, including WHO. Government propagandists published a compendium of state-news agency articles, official government statements, and other documents in a book called A Battle Against Epidemic: China Combatting COVID-19 in 2020. The publication faced immediate scorn in social media within the country.

Fortunately, despite the well-documented censorship of social media, citizen journalism continues. A popular meme shows Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist whose social media questioned the “Wuhan pneumonia” in late December and who eventually died from the virus, with barbed wire where his facemask should be. Several citizen journalists have gone missing, including in Shandong province, where there have been reports including in the Epoch Times that significant underreporting of COVID-19 by official statistics continues despite the WHO declaration that the caseload has peaked.

In times of duress, the most innate qualities of countries tend to predominate. That’s what we’ve seen with the PRC. We can recognize the intensity of China’s public-health response. But we should acknowledge and condemn the methods by which the world was kept in the dark for too long, and the means by which Beijing continues to interrupt the flow of information. We should not be thanking Beijing for its actions. Instead, we need honesty and the pursuit of the truth to defeat this challenge. And we must acknowledge that the Chinese government’s actions early on almost certainly led to the global crisis we’re facing.

More from National Review

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• Escape from Wuhan
• China Quarantines Wuhan to Prevent Spread of Coronavirus

Vietnamese influencers who attended fashion weeks in Europe test positive for COVID-19

Vietnamese influencers who attended fashion weeks in Europe test positive for COVID-19

Staff Writer, SingaporeEditorial Team

Yahoo Lifestyle SEAMarch 8, 2020, 11:38 PM PDT

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/vietnamese-influencer-27-who-attended-fashion-weeks-tested-positive-for-covid-19-063813809.html

 

Nga Nguyen attends the Fashion For Relief London 2019 dinner at The British Museum on September 14, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Fashion For Relief)Since Friday (6 March), Vietnam had reported 14 new cases, bringing its total to 30. Among the latest cases, two influencers were reported to be tested positive for COVID-19. The two women, who are sisters Nga Nguyen, 27 and Nguyen Hong Nhung, 26, had attended fashion week events in Europe, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).The two sisters attended fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, and even documented their travels on their personal Instagram before deleting their posts. Prior to arriving in Hanoi, the two sisters, who come from a wealthy family of steelmakers, flew business class via Vietnam Airlines, Coconuts Media reported.

Fashion editors who attended the shows in Europe have been asked by their companies and governments to self-quarantine at home. One magazine editor Grace Jiajing, who attended Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks, documented her stay-at-home notice by Singapore’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) in various posts.

In a post, Jiajing, editor-in-chief of PIN Prestige, said she received three notifications by text messages, asking her to verify if she had been staying at home, and in another paragraph, she said that an officer from ICA even requested for a photo verification.

Restrictions were in place over at Milan Fashion Week, with some fashion houses opting out of public viewing. One was the Armani house, who closed its autumn/winter show to the public and livestreamed the event instead.

According to Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, Italy's fashion chamber, at least 1,000 Chinese fashion reporters, buyers and designers skipped Milan’s Fashion Month, the period in February when designers showcase their collections.

As for Paris Fashion Week, some Chinese brands including Shiatzy Chen, Masha Ma, Calvin Luo, Maison Mai and Uma Wang dropped out of shows. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton​ canceled a reception for its 2020 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, although no reason was given.