Professor Jiang and his mysterious media ascension

Social media’s reactionary hierarchy only has itself to blame for the Professor Jiang fiasco

This is an extended version of an article first published at Substack, 5 September 2026

There’s been a thorough post-Gamergate exclusion of women from the debate by pundits who were late to the fight. Mostly male, mostly white. If you were a woman and Chinese, you were doubly stuffed. Putting the ram into ramifications, it goes even wider. Exclusion from discussion of the forces you’d observed lining up against China over decades while the slow children caught up means time lost to any prospect of struggle. And this sorry situation doesn’t appear to disturb anyone’s ethics.  

It’s only this year in 2026 that the penny dropped for the commentators colonising social media: that China is the ultimate target of the hegemon state. As I’ve been pointing out in my contemporaneous Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, this phase was triggered with Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 Defence Planning Guide and has progressed ever since in ebbs and flows, which I charted as it happened, and always towards the same end.

Jiang’s Iran War “prediction”

I was permitted to argue these geopolitical tensions in the mainstream media during the brief “Golden Age” of British Chinese relations in which a semblance of balance regarding the sleeping dragon was allowed. Using this window to challenge reactionary narratives about China in the Guardian and on the BBC and elsewhere, I aimed to combat the dehumanisation of Chinese in the culture and show how the Empire’s dynamics of dominance were all working under the hood. 

I helped prevent one alarming anti-Chinese pogrom reach an ugly conclusion under Tony Blair. It was crucial to make sure the vacuum wasn’t total — invisibility renders you vulnerable whether for individuals or communities. In 2009, I was one of the few to go on the BBC to argue against demonisation of China during the Copenhagen COP15 climate change summit when the Danish Text scandal revealed the stitch-up of poorer nations. And then there was trying to head off the Iraq War. 

Of course, once Barack Obama performed his Pivot to Asia seeking to “contain” China, and Trump doubled down in his bid to out do his bete noir, I was silenced and rendered invisible in the media that once tolerated a lone Chinese dissenting voice. Even this was now too much for their objectives. The establishment required a total absence; a big blank canvas on which to project monsters. 

No problem, you might think. Surely there were enough concerned citizens who would have found the situation an undemocratic travesty of free speech and alerted their followers that support was needed. No such luck. I was “strategic competition” stranded on the beachhead, regarded, as I was to discover, a threat to the wave of newcomers now colonising the space. Attacked, marginalised, pillaged and deleted, for a crucial five years: all you saw was wall-to-wall mostly white guys reinventing the wheel and carving out their territory. And essentially nailing old hierarchies into place under cover of sympathy with the communist state.

They had to let one through eventually. It was supposedly Jiang’s “prediction” in 2024 that there would be an Iran war that propelled him into algo-boosted prominence. This was a surprise to those of us who had already been flagging it up with good reason. 

The Cassandra Curse

The curse of Cassandra was that she was always ignored. There are Greeks in that wooden horse, she’d yell, but would they listen? Departing from all common sense, they insisted on dragging their enemy’s gift into the city of Troy with the result that any Trojans who weren’t slaughtered were enslaved. Clever guys! 

Besides tweeting during Trump 1 what was to me the bleedin’ obvious, I was yelling an alert on my 15-year old Madam Miaow Twitter/X account two days after 7 October 2023 that Benjamin Netanyahu had just addressed the UN General Assembly two weeks earlier to call for joint “nuclear” action against Iran. (This was later changed to “military” in the record.) IRAN! The assembly’s collective response was luke warm. Oh, it’s just Bibi on his 30-year obsession again. 

But this time, something ugly slouched its way towards Bethlehem. What Washington and Israel needed was a build-up and getting the public on board for a major conflict that could lead to World War III levels of conflict. On President Joe Biden’s watch, Gaza looked like a first step and a warm-up for hostilities against a heavily-armed foe. This aspect required attention. Within a year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would be chucking weapons into Israel’s armoury at pace.

X deleted Madam Miaow that December — no violations, six appeals. The response was a big fat nothing from the “China-friendly” accounts. No debate on the topic. Utter silence on the censorship. Not one single, solitary new “China-friendly” account alerted their readers or asked them to follow my back-up account. But they did give the gabbling newcomer houseroom on their podcasts when they saw his algo-boosted numbers the following year. Jiang is described as “the man who predicted the Iran War in 2024” but was in fact much later to the news than those of us alarmed by Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN in New York on 22 September 2023. Even earlier, for many geopolitical analysts.

A bamboozled commentariat of gatekeepers

Jiang’s critics have grown louder as his questionable promotion beyond his abilities has become more apparent and suspicions have been raised. For me, not only was it the sudden inorganic swelling of follower numbers in a couple of years, but the regurgitation of obvious AI hallucinations, many favouring the Donald Trump orbit’s eccentric take on history. 

Such as on The Duran, where Jiang claimed the City of London was making its money from narcotics. Now, this may have been a foundational truth in the 19th century (see the Opium Wars) but to say London’s banking system was still dependent on the sale of drugs for its profits today, appeals to an audience raised on tabloid-level crime-capers. It blunts ability to analyse the world around you. And it chimes with the Trump narrative justifying bombing fishermen’s boats off the coast of Venezuela. Jiang’s statement’s were so increasingly bizarre that the hosts quietly dropped the video off their list. 

It also fits like a glove with Trump allies now going after an injured Britain with accusations of control of Libor exchange rates, and Lloyds shipping insurance that thwarts the president’s attempts to push tankers through the explosive Strait of Hormuz in his fantasy control of the Trump Strait.

America recapitalises in Opium Wars 2.0

“Trump is taking on global deep state, ” states Jiang. “The City of London, Wall Street, who he thinks caused him to lose election 2020. They exercise power by controlling three ways of generating immense profits … debt and gambling, slavery, and drugs. The City of London, it’s still a money laundering operation. If you’re Trump and you want to destroy the deep state, you attack what makes money, their drugs smuggling operations. When Trump says we’re bombing the drug smugglers and everyone’s, like, no, no, they’re fishing vessels, he’s telling the truth in this instance. I think they are actually bombing drug smugglers and so they’re trying to destroy the drug smuggling apparatus of the world. That is the grand play here, to weaken the globalist deep state by destroying their money-making operations.” 

That’s the genius Jiang analysis: that London makes its money from drug-smuggling operations and the human beings in boats bombed by remote actually are “drug smugglers”. Judge, jury and executioner in one robotic package. 

On London, he’s only a century out. The Opium Wars may have capitalised western industrial revolutions in the 19th century and were foundational to the banking system but drugs are not the engine now. London is not a drug-running centre that heroic Trump is trying to fell — it’s actually far worse if you understand how capitalism works. The assertion that Trump is heroically bringing down deep state by attacking “their drug-smuggling operations” is ludicrous. 

If anything, it is America that is now aping the British Empire in its own Opium Wars 2.0: the elite of the declining hegemon seeking to recapitalise using other people’s resources.

Jiang hallucinations

As for Jiang’s famed predictive ability, he says: “I don’t think Trump will actually invade Venezuela, I think that’s all bluster and I think you’ll see continual actions against drug smuggling operations around the world.”

So, that’s aged well. On top of which, where is the proof that the Venezuelan boats were carrying narcotics? Drugs are the new WMD for the not very bright who’ve blown their brains on an excess of Guy Ritchie and Marvel movies. The Sackler family and medical industry have done far more damage to America. Where drug problems do exist, they are a symptom of a failing society and not a cause. And they’re mostly imported into the US by Americans anyway. Why are commentators capitulating to the sensationalist role of drugs in the spotlight but won’t go anywhere near the CIA’s history of narcotics dealing? Doesn’t Jiang know that drug villainy as he tells it serves as the narrative McGuffin, a shiny object deflecting from the overriding dynamics of the declining hegemon’s bid to remain top dog.

Felix Abt and others detect similar eccentricities in the bogus professor’s schtick. Abt writes of Jiang: “He has dismissed subjects including evolution, Roman history and the Holocaust as ‘nonsense,’ while entertaining conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and claims that the Moon landings were faked. These are not minor disagreements among historians. They are enormous claims that require enormous evidence.”

Jiang and the Enlightenment

Both Trump and enablers of his invented reality such as Jiang mount a further assault on the science-based Enlightenment with gaslighting exercises in mass manipulation. In this real world chaos, everything solid melts into the air. Perfect for the monsters grabbing the world by the pussy. If your lips are flapping and you’re not calling it out, like Jiang and his podcast hosts, then you’re part of the machine. 

Why are the pundits so slow? Why so exclusionary and lacking in solidarity or generosity? Why so territorial about the space they’ve occupied like colonials of old from which they’re blocking insights and input?  

In 1870s America during the economic downturn, Chinese were scapegoated. Attitudes towards the men who’d travelled so far from home to help build America — constructing the first transcontinental railroad for Central Pacific — deteriorated to the point that demagogues such as Denis Kearney in California were whipping up anti-Chinese pogroms in an atmosphere where it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white male. Not unlike today. Lynchings of the scapegoated minority occurred, culminating in 1882 with the Exclusion Act aimed specifically at the Chinese.

In Britain and the rest of Europe, too. The hideous excesses of the Opium Wars that founded so many financial institutions, funded the British administration in British-ruled India and create the big East Coast dynasties in America, needed rationalisation and justification. Threadbare arguments that abounded then remain today: it was about free trade; they were asking for it; they’re not properly human anyway. 

At one point I’d hoped this a thing of the past. That we were all far too sophisticated to fall for something so crude. But when you press certain weaknesses and contradictions, you realise it’s all still punted up to and including Julia Lovell’s Opium War revisionist love-note to British Empire and the ignoble men who made their fortunes from opium. Despite a thorough debunking from me in 2012, Lovell’s book, The Opium War, enjoys pride of place in the British Museum shop. The author is invited to curate their Asia events. Quite fitting, really, to be so beloved by the kleptocratic institution. This stuff has deep roots in service to western empire.

On that “no original thought” cliché

The stereotype has always been that Chinese are incapable of original thought. That we can only copy. That our thinking is a pale shadow of the dominant group’s excellence. However, the group hates it when we display a capacity for imagination and ingenuity but will tolerate a simulacrum if it’s in an institutional form whose fortune they can ride. Such as Jiang and his algo-boosted numbers. When Mike Marqusee congratulated me on my “flair and imagination” in bringing media skills into the Left during several campaigns in 2001, my supposed comrades kicked up a storm. 

You must forever be the Green Hornet’s sidekick, even if you are Bruce Lee. 

In fact, I’ve watched aghast over many years as the dominant group has played catch-up, only getting on board when something was up for grabs. Or, amusingly, when it was safe. I was inadvertently something of the canary down the mine. The creature sent into the minefield, only to look back once the terrain was tested, to see the barbarian horde of prospectors bearing down to carve out their newly safe turf. 

One core fear of theirs is, if a Chinese person can articulate and fight for their situation, what need of the army of white saviours? The prospect of Chinese able to see events coming down the pike well in advance terrifies the Masters (and Mistresses) of the Universe who can’t. The same malign dynamic as observed in Western ruling-class resistance to China’s rapid progress runs through its petit bourgeois gatekeepers who haven’t shaken off their class position: as above, so below. Given a fractal reading, what China the country can do, so can individual Chinese in a big geopolitical Mandelbrot set of consciousness. The horror, the horror!

Our commentators, some of whom were actually opposed to China when it was struggling, had a turning on the Road to Damascus when the odds changed. But at base, the dynamic is the same. A classic Yellowface attempt at replacement. The fundamental progressive, socialist principle of linking arms in struggle with the target group is utterly alien to them.

A McCarthyite climate

I would add, in case some have forgotten, that when the latecomers arrived in numbers after the Hong Kong riots, I welcomed them, using the heft of Madam Miaow to amplify and publicise them. There had been an almost complete vacuum. The deputy ambassador in London had been so wounded by the silence of people who had received friendship and embassy hospitality that he contacted me and even asked me to address one of their events.  

It was a chilling McCarthyite atmosphere in which no-one in Britain was speaking up. I can only recall Martin Jacques, one financial journalist and a couple of Labour MPs who were rapidly put under heavy manners. 

Once it looked safe and the dam started to break, George Galloway asked me for help. I was pleased to orientate him around the Twitter China debate, recommending speakers for his talk show. Other newcomers said they were so alarmed by the Chinese media’s failure to engage in the battle shaping up that they suggested a comradely approach to authorities in China.  

Then, suddenly, they clammed up. In a decidedly unheroic grasping of the chance to dominate, no-one engaged with me. Some attacked me. When I pointed out to one who’d been painting diaspora Chinese as treacherous, that we weren’t all Vickies and Gordons, he blocked me. The hugely algo-boosted French guy gloated that he was ignoring me and would continue to do so. Others used struggles in which I’d personally been involved, such as Yellowface exclusion, as content but wouldn’t interview me about the events. Another used the insight I’d given him, about the opium being destroyed by seawater and lime and not burnt, a point which was emblematic of my years-long challenge to British academia who had insisted it was so, as if it was his own when it would have made an interesting podcast chat. Galloway just turned nasty — no explanation, no discussion, no comradeship. It goes on and on.

Jiang verbiage vs social practice

White guys ganging up on the Chinese woman who’d been fighting on this front for so long did remind me of the eight-nation invasion of China at the dawn of the 20th century. The dynamic of white saviourship and exploitation by Empire’s little pashas are still here. Throw in the clown professor for entertainment and tokenism but keep out the Chinese woman with praxis and political chops. There has been no raised consciousness, just information used as currency. And data exchange is a far cry from analysis.  

Algo-boosted latecomers took full advantage of the inbuilt anti-Chinese bias in the system’s cultural codes while they built careers and reinforced their own class position. They effectively did the state’s work for it, attacking and rendering invisible the Chinese who’d fought not only the media awareness battles, but was active in political defence of Chinese: against efforts to build a pogrom at home as well as a war abroad.  

Chinese readers should note that many of these belated China-friendly accounts generally do not actually like Chinese but they like the high status that vestigial colonialised brains afford them. We used to call them FILTH: Failed In London, Try Hong Kong. My dad who, among other things, was in the delegation that negotiated the end of the British embargo on China in the 1950s and ‘60s, taught me the words, “adventurers,” “opportunists” and “careerists” at an early age. So I should have expected it.  

And we know from South African apartheid and American slavery that intimate relations with non-whites does not make you a non-racist.  

So all Jiang did was make the most out of an opportunity that was set up for him. Don’t blame him when so many constructed the conditions that made it possible.

Further reading

Read Felix Abt’s article on Professor Jiang: The “Chinese Professor” Who Fooled the Internet’s Biggest Gatekeepers

The Raft of the Medusa: how the eff did we get here?

Anna Chen on the pitiful state of the discourse: Stopping the Iraq War 2001-3 20th anniversary: How the press was done.

Anna Chen's China pages: 30 years of analysis and commentary.

Trump bullies world into disastrous Opium Wars 2.0

First published 30 May 2026

Can China trust the USA or is Trump laying a trap?

In a lively conversation with Jeff Rich about the American elite’s ultimate goal, we discuss Trump’s visit this month to China and his meeting with Xi Jinping. What did the Trump circus achieve? Why did Xi mention the Thucydides Trap? Where are all the women? 

The American superpower’s Opium Wars endgame

Why is the Trump administration seemingly defying logic and starting wars, destabilising the world and threatening to wreck America’s own economy? 

There are three imperatives dictating why America’s elite will never reverse now they know how much destructive power there is in the economic Armageddon they aim to bring on.

It’s no good just saying they’re mad, amoral or complete fash. They have a super-objective and they are following it blindly as if in a dream. Drunk on power, hypnotised by wealth, careless of consequences to others, this feral pack’s dream is our nightmare.

The US elite have no incentive whatsoever to stop.

i) They think they can repeat the enrichment of the Opium Wars in the 19th Century that financed the British in India, the East Coast dynasties and their industrial revolutions.
ii) They welcome the collapse of the global economy so they can buy up everything at fire-sale prices. 
iii) They think they will sit out wars that get too close and too hot in their luxury nuclear bunkers. They even plan deadly drone strikes from the gold ballroom roof in case their own people rise up. 

It is not in their interest to be well informed or wise – those are diversions from the path to “winning”. No wonder they hate experts and are happy to demolish 400 years of science-based Enlightenment.

Ultimate clash

But this impulsive behaviour has real world repercussions. Even without taking the Iran conflict into consideration, the global economy could tank 36 percent if Europe carries on targeting Russian refineries and oil infrastructure in the Ukraine war (MacGregor). The Great Depression saw a drop of 20 percent.

The start of the war in Ukraine in 2022 shot prices up to over $120. Attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have now knocked out an estimated 13-17 percent of its oil refining capacity. So, how is the oil price still hovering at around $90 to $105? Desperate to keep the oil price down to placate the voters, Donald Trump is using up US reserves to manipulate prices. At this rate, he’ll run out by July or August. 

However, as if that’s not bad enough, the Iranians have threatened to remove a further 25 million barrels a day from the global market if the US and Israel resume attacks. That could mark the end of us. Yet still they think they’ll teach Iran a lesson — big joke. Oblivious to the risks, America and Europe think they’ll recapitalise their battered system in the ultimate clash with China, as was done in the 19th century Opium Wars. If only they realised that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train speeding down the tracks. 

There’s still Cuba to come.

And, yes, they are mad, amoral and complete fash. 

Sorry for repeating myself but the US elite, along with their feral sidekicks, have sheared off from the rest of society. This being a class war, the surplus labour (that’s us) isn’t included in the party.

Trumped up forced labour charges against allies

EDIT 3 June 2026: Talk about always crashing in the same clown car. Trump can’t even keep his allies on board. In an amusingly cynical exploitation of unverified western claims of forced labour of Uyghurs in China, Trump has hoisted competitor economies by their own petard. He probably thinks this is a masterful martial arts reversal but it’s more like the Joker handing a snapped pool cue to his economic rivals and telling them to fight to the death for survival. Oh what a tangled web we weave. 

Of course, the US has nearly 2 million incarcerated felons. That’s the fifth biggest prison population in the world behind Rwanda, El Salvador, Cuba and Turkmenistan, 40 percent of them Black. They happen to be forced to make goods for the privatised prison system. The 13th amendment allows slavery for prisoners so that’s all right, then.

Further reading on the Opium Wars

Video discussion originally published at The Burning Archive Substack 

And The Burning Archive YouTube

The Steampunk Opium Wars in the belly of the beast, 2012: groundbreaking theatre at the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich, home of the Royal Navy. 

The Opium War by Julia Lovell: book review by Anna Chen, 2012. Western academia’s rationalisation of the coming war on the rising superpower resorts to victim blaming and defence of the narco-capitalists who carved up China in the 18th century Opium Wars. 

Shakedown: America’s 21st century war on China. The Opium Wars on steroids

VIDEO: How America wrecked Britain and China’s Golden Age

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.

Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.

Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”

“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.

To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.

Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?

Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.

Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.

How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!

The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.

Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”

Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?

The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.

In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.

Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!

In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.

Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.

So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?

Nope.

Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.

Made in China 2025

Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.

In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.

We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.

Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.

Britain and the China Golden Goose

Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.

China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.

And then … and then …!

2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.

“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018

Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.

Brexit wrecks it

American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.

Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.

Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.

Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.

Clown car reverses gear

The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.

Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.

In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.

Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Britain hangs on to benefits

However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.

In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.

Superman versus Kryptonite

Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.

He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.

The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.

A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.

US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021

Eurasia land mess

A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.

The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.

With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.

In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.

Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.

Europe, your nine lives are up

The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.

Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.

France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.

NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.

It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack

About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the Curse of Erysichthon

Anna Chen – First published 5 July 2025, Big Beautiful Bill

Capitalism eats itself: Erysichthon of Thessaly, cursed with an insatiable hunger by Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth. Trump’s Big Beautiful bill

Big Beautiful Bill burns the Earth to pay the rich

Not only does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill turn his Blackshirt boot-boy ICE forces into his own army, bigger than the FBI, DEA, US Bureau of Prisons put together (as AOC points out), it takes money from vital climate change policies to give to his already bloated elite backers.

Trump’s promised huge tax cuts for the rich will be directly paid for by cutting tax incentives for renewable energy designed to save the planet. You’d think he’d baulk at ending climate change measures that created jobs in red states like Texas, but, no. Along with cuts to medicaid, MAGA are being hit by a triple-whammy from their hero.

A walking casebook of Greek tragedy character flaws, Trump sports inverse parallels with a raft of mythological and folk characters. One that often springs to mind is a composite Robin Hood and King Midas: robbing the poor to pay the rich and everything he touches turns to sh*t.

The curse of Erysichthon

Why do they do it? Loved One tells me of 700-800 US billionaires, 33 are estimated to make over a $billion a year. Millions suffer to enrich a tiny band for whom being the richest on the planet will never be enough.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast once related a conversation with a vulture capitalist and one-time Trump backer (worth: $6.1 billion). Asked why he bilked a petrol pump attendant when he was already so rich, he replied, “I want it all”.

That, dear reader, sums up the mindset of what we’re dealing with. I want it all.

The elite’s elite are stricken with a relentless hunger that can never be satisfied.

The most apt classical analogy in this instance is probably King Erysichthon of Thessaly. Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth, cursed him for being destructive and greedy. Disrespecting the gods by cutting down a sacred grove to build a feasting hall was surely gagging for a fitting punishment. She invoked Limos, the spirit of insatiable appetite, until he consumed everything he had and ended up devouring himself. Unfortunately, it’s us they’re feeding on.

Reverse Robin Hood in Britain

Similarly in Britain, PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves operate from the Monsters Handbook. They relentlessly take money from the poorest and most vulnerable whom capitalism had left behind and shovel it into the defence industry, whose stock is rocketing. Coincidentally, £5 billion a year “saved” in social funding cuts is the same amount given to Ukraine. No mandate, no discussion.

Starmer refuses to fund his pet projects and proxy wars by taxing the billionaires whose wealth has soared since Covid.

He won’t touch Amazon, which notoriously pays no tax in the UK despite the country making him £27 billion a year. Jeff Bezos is worth $220 billion, and makes $8.99 billion per month, $31 million per day, $8 million per hour, $3,715 per second. He can rub our faces in it by spending 34 million dollars or pounds or whatever fantasy profligacy it takes for a three-day wedding jamboree in Venice like the last days of the Roman Empire while the world burns.

Gloves are off. This is naked Class War.

See also The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Covid Timeline Vs Trump Spin: 110 Dates To Remember

Anna Chen – First published 19 February 2025

How the Covid Pandemic was weaponised (Pic: fusion medical animation Unsplash)

A Short Aide Memoire For The Next Four Years. The Covid Pandemic

For the full detailed timeline, please bookmark the updated Page 6 ~Timeline of The Covid Pandemic

We’re about to be hit by another wave of “blame China” by the Trump administration and his allies for the devastating Covid pandemic. Part diversion from his own super-spreader actions, and part casus belli, sowing the seeds of fantastical demands for “reparations” to justify plundering the rising superpower, we need an overview of just what happened.

Among the narratives being circulated is RFK Jr’s assertion that the virus was designed to attack whites and blacks while leaving Chinese and Jews safe. If anything, Asian males are more vulnerable to the virus due to having a higher density of ACE2 receptors, the mechanism by which the virus enters the body. This has been known since at least April 2020. More publications containing the scientific evidence can easily be found with a simple search.

And Elon Musk has revived the lab creation theory in a cynical game of whack-a-mole.

The next pandemic is warming up to be Bird Flu, or H5N1 which has a 50 percent fatality for animals and humans. The US response has been as slack as with Covid after confirmation of the pandemic in 2020.

SARS 1, SARS-C0V-2 and Bird Flu are airborne. Be smart, wear a well fitting N95 or FFP2/3 respirator.

So, in the absence of any credible mainstream media investigation, lets remind ourselves of so many forgotten moments.

A Covid Timeline: 126 Things You Might Have Forgotten About The Pandemic

Timeline drawn from over 500 pages of notes. Compilation and analysis by Anna Chen, 19 February 2025

January 2017: The outgoing Obama administration runs President Donald Trump’s incoming officials through the White House National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, otherwise known as the pandemic team.

31 May: The first of Trump’s Covfefe tweets appear 31.05.17

18 December 2017: Trump designates China a “strategic competitor”.

19 December 2017: In the middle of a flu pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announces it is restarting funding on Gain of Function, paused since October 2014 under Obama.

2017-18 flu season is bad. “The deadliest in a decade.”

22 March 2018: Trump appoints John Bolton as National Security Adviser, head of the National Security Council.

12 April 2018: John Bolton ousts Trump’s appointed head of the pandemic response team, Tom Bossert.

10 May 2018: NSA director John Bolton ousts another pandemic expert, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. “This means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security.” Trump dissolves the White House NSC pandemic team with some surviving staff drawn into the newly formed Counterproliferation and Biodefense directorate under Bolton who claims he is merely “streamlining”. “After he became national security adviser, John Bolton eliminated the office as part of an NSC reorganisation, as he did not see global health issues as a national security priority.”

6 July 2018: Trump begins his trade war on China, destabilising a global economy just emerging in sync from America’s devastating Great Crash of 2008. He launches with an initial salvo of 25% tariff duty on around US$34 billion of imports from China, including cars, hard disks and aircraft parts. China doesn’t buckle. China retaliates with a 25% tariff on 545 US goods worth the same.

1 December 2018: Meng Wanzhou, Huawei chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder Ren Zhengfei, is arrested on a stopover in Canada on an extradition request from the US. Trump later announces he’ll intervene if he gets his trade deal with China. She isn’t freed for nearly three years, leaving Canada 24 September 2021.

January-August 2019: Crimson Contagion exercise: “A joint exercise conducted under the Trump administration from January to August 2019, in which numerous national, state and local, private and public organizations in the US participated, in order to test the capacity of the federal government and twelve states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China.”

March 2019: The UK PPE emergency stockpile has fallen 40% since 2013, down £325m to £506m in March

4 March 2019: The US government approves resumption of Gain of Function creation of deadly human flu virus from Avian Flu. Scientists object and sound the alarm.

12 March 2019: The University of Barcelona in Spain announces (June 2020) that waste water collected 12 March 2019 contains traces of the novel coronavirus, nine months before Covid-19 is identified in China. * On the same day, only months after a joint naval exercise with China, and on the eve of a possible end of Trump’s trade war with a deal that sidelines European business interests, the EU echoes Washington’s definition of their trade partner as an economic competitor and systemic rival. The EU slams Italy for joining the Belt and Road Initiative, a trade route running across the length of the Europe Asia landmass and beyond. Having been bailed out by China after America’s devastating 2008 crash, the EU complains about China’s subsidised economy. French President Emmanuel Macron demands a coordinated, united approach to China.

23 March 2019: Italy becomes the first G7 European nation to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) signing up to a trade deal worth $2.9 billion. The US was always unlikely to accept this even though China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, invites them to join BRI. Italy will be the European country hit hardest by Covid in 2019-20.

24 April 2019: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, begun 2013, has signed up 126 countries by 24th April, with trade volume surpassing $6T.

26 April 2019: Unhappy with China’s BRI milestone, China hawks grieve in their discontent. In May, the following month, a US delegation arrives in London and orders the UK rip out their Huawei 5G infrastructure, much of which has already been paid for. They shout at the GCHQ officials for five hours. Former British National Security Adviser and later, Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch: “The encounter exposed that the US case was really political, not technical. So GCHQ stuck to their guns, and, initially, so did the prime minister. (Theresa May)'” Boris Johnson acquiesces in May the following year.

30 June 2019: Mysterious respiratory disease breaks out in the Greenspring Care Home, Fairfax county, Virginia USA, results in 54 illnesses, 18 hospitalisations and two deaths. The care home deaths are remarkably similar to Covid but are never explained.

Summer 2019: NED backs Hong Kong riots – China doesn’t buckle

July 2019: Having already disbanded the US pandemic team, Trump closes the CDC’s 47-strong Beijing office, recalling the last remaining CDC officer in July.

July 2019: In the UK, the new Prime Minister Boris Johnson abolishes the UK pandemic team in the same month as Trump shuts the US CDC’s Beijing office. Temporarily mothballed by former PM Theresa May (to focus on Brexit), the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was designed to ensure the UK was prepared for a pandemic.

19 July 2019: Fort Detrick’s army laboratory is closed by the CDC due to leaks.

August 2019: The first case of EVALI (e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury) is reported to the CDC in early August.

6 September 2019: Federal health officials announce five mysterious deaths linked to vaping: seven by 17 September. X-rays show the same glassification of lungs that will show up in Covid.

September 2019: Trump closes the PREDICT early warning programme designed to alert the government to potential pandemics only three months before first Covid cases are found in China.

9 October 2019: A strange lung disease in the military. “The U.S. Army has hospitalized two soldiers with severe lung damage linked to vaping, a cigarette alternative that is responsible for 18 deaths in a multi-state outbreak. As of October 1, roughly 1,000 lung injury cases associated with vaping have been reported to the CDC from 48 states and 1 U.S. territory.” Nowhere else in the world outside the US and the military experienced vaping deaths.

18 October 2019: The international Military Games are hosted in Wuhan. 300 American military servicemen and women take part. The same day sees the launch of Event 201 in New York, a table-top pandemic exercise.

24 October 2019: Five of the US military develop a fever and are taken to an infectious diseases hospital for treatment. The following February, the head of the Wuhan Jinyintan hospital where they were treated insists it was malaria, not the novel coronavirus. China is malaria-free.

4 November 2019: Trump posts another covfefe tweet. “How do you know it was a “mistweet?’ May be something with deeper meaning!”

November 2019: The Pentagon briefs Nato and Israel about the coming Pandemic. But doesn’t warn China.

17 November 2019: Trump’s non-routine visit to Walter Reed Hospital raises suspicions that the president received an early coronavirus shot.

21 November 2019: Evidence that the virus could have been circulating in the world prior to the first cases in China. In addition to the virus found in Barcelona sewage earlier in March, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence is found in Milan, Italy, in a four-year old boy “with no history of travelling” who falls ill in November 2019. The sample is taken 5 December and later identified, corroborating earlier waste-water samples. COVID-19 antibodies are found in nearly 12% of Italian 959 lung cancer screening blood samples drawn September 2019 to March 2020. Fourteen percent of the positives are from September. In Late November, viral RNA is found in wastewater in Brazil. In France, antibodies are found in serum samples collected in November, and viral RNA is detected in December “in a respiratory sample from a patient hospitalised for haemoptysis”. If Covid was present at this time or earlier, by the time it was discovered in China in December, it would have been all over the country, not just Hubei province.

22 November 2019: Fort Detrick prepares to reopen after two breaches of containment closed it earlier in the year. “In one instance, personnel deliberately propped open the door to the autoclave room while the employee removed biohazard waste.”

1 December 2019: First symptoms for COVID-19 found in Hubei in a 55 -year old man.

10 December 2019: Huanan seafood market’s Covid case zero in Wuhan. Wei Guixian, a seafood merchant, first feels ill. Earliest ascertained market case.

13 December 2019: 106 Covid antigen-positive readings were found in 7,389 American Red Cross blood samples taken across nine states in the US between 13 December 2019 and 17 January 2020 (tested 2021). This number of samples with SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies present indicates an initial infection around August 2019 and that it was already well established by December. Within this batch, reactive antibodies were found in samples from California, Oregon and Washington, 13-16 December 2019. Similarly, antibodies were found in samples from Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin in early January. There’s been no public investigation of samples taken earlier than December.

16 December 2019: Why would Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison depart for a mysterious holiday at a US military resort in Hawaii, right in the middle of the bushfire emergency? Cut to April 17 the following year.

18 December 2019: There’s enough of the virus circulating in Italy for waste water samples collected on the 18th December to allow the detection of viral RNA.

27 December 2019: In Wuhan, Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Hubei Provincial Hospital, reports the viral pneumonia of unknown origin to Wuhan Hospital management the day after she notices four unusual cases in her unit. Over the next two days, the Chinese CDC is alerted. France gets its first case when a sample taken on the 27th from a fishmonger who has never travelled to China later tests positive for Covid (confirmed May 2020).

30 December 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission alerts the city’s hospitals and institutions with instructions. Copies are leaked.

31 December 2019: The Wuhan MHC reports the unknown viral illness on its website. The news is picked up by the news agencies and the WHO.

1st January 2020: The head of China’s CDC, George Gao, speaks to the US CDC director, Robert Redfield, about the spread of a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan with a further phone call on the 8th. Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is shut down for disinfection and investigation, followed by bans on live animals from all wet markets, as well as the sale of wild animals to restaurants. In the US, 2020 is election year for Trump.

2 January 2020: Reports that this isn’t SARS 1 but is a “novel coronavirus”. Most of the 44 infected patients are men. We’ll later find out that the virus enters via ACE2 receptors and Asian males have the highest density of ACE2. 66% of patients were exposed to Huanan seafood market. The WHO in China offers support to the National Health Commission and requests further information. The WHO informs the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) about the cluster of cases in the PRC – GOARN partners include “major public health agencies, laboratories, sister UN agencies, international organizations and NGOs”. The Lancet reports on the cluster of 41 cases in Wuhan.

3 January 2020: A busy day. Chinese officials formally provide information to the WHO on the cluster of 44 cases of ‘viral pneumonia of unknown cause’ identified in Wuhan. Robert Redfield informs Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, about the new coronavirus in China. Azar tells the White House. Azar instructs his Chief of Staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council. Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci warns CNN, “The current flu season is on track to be one of the worst in years,” as severe as the 2017-18 season which was “one of the worst in years, the deadliest in a decade.”. * In the UK, Health minister Matt Hancock is alerted to the outbreak, speaking to health officials on the 6th. Back in China, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and School of Public Health, receives sample swabs from Wuhan and starts to map out the first complete genome of the strange pneumonia.

4 January 2020: Trump plays golf. Iranian Major General Qasem Suleimani is assassinated by a US attack drone at Baghdad international airport. Iran will be one of the first countries to be infected with Covid, its political elite hit especially hard from its first case on 19 February.

5 January 2020: Wuhan Municipal Health Commission gives briefing updates, reporting 59 cases. Lab tests rule out SARS, MERS and other known respiratory pathogens, indicating this is a new or “novel” coronavirus. China informs the WHO which then releases its first briefing on cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. It later emerges that, on 5th January, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai-led consortium, which includes China’s CDC, sequences the genome in 40 hours and uploads the genecode to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), also giving it to Eddie Holmes. Trump plays golf.

6 January 2020: A China Level 2 emergency is declared by the National Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China’s CDC).

7 January 2020: Chinese authorities announce the virus has been identified as a novel coronavirus, similar to the one associated with SARS and the middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS). It is initially named 2019-nCoV. At a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, general secretary Xi Jinping personally orders officials to control the outbreak.

9 January 2020. The first known deaths from Covid occur on the same day in the US and China. Lovell “Cookie” Brown becomes the first officially recorded death in America, only identified later. Later, five others Covid deaths are found to date from January raising questions about when it started. The CDC’s director, Robert Redfield, admits to Rep. Harley Rouda at the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing in March that they were misdiagnosing early Covid deaths as flu.

11 January 2020: The consortium, led by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and School of Public Health, had sequenced and deposited the complete genome code at the US NCIB on the 5th. On the 10/11th, Professor Zhang approves public release online by Eddie Holmes. The genome is deposited on GenBank on 10 January and released on the consortium’s behalf by Eddie Holmes on the 11th. The complete GENOME, submitted 5 January 2020. The WHO makes the announcement to the world.

13 January: China gets its Covid test. The Germans have theirs on the 16th. The US doesn’t get a test until early February and it doesn’t work. It takes until 15 March for 10K Americans to be tested. Later, there will be calls for CDC director Redfield to resign.

14 January 2020: The WHO’s press briefing states: “it is certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission”. Their tweet reads: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel ‪#coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in ‪#Wuhan, ‪#China”.

15 January 2020: US markets close at an all-time high. Trump signs Phase One of a trade deal with China, declaring his 18-month old trade war a success. China agrees to buy an additional US$200 billion of American goods and services over the next two years. Tariffs are halved or suspended.

16 January 2020: Germany develops its own COVID-19 test. Russia will start producing its first tests on 24th January. Countries begin to ramp up their own tests. On 7 April, the WHO accepts two diagnostic tests for procurement.

17 January 2020: The Chinese CDC director George Gao and his team arrive in Wuhan to supervise the control and prevention efforts of the outbreak.* In the UK, a government document is published confirming that, delaying action in response to the Covid virus and abandoning the Precautionary Principle, officials breached their own scientific risk standards. * The US CDC sends 100 staff to three US airports to screen passengers for the virus.

18 January 2020: Beijing takes over responsibility for the pandemic from the Wuhan local government and sends in renowned Dr Zhong Nanshan to investigate. Wuhan’s Baibuting community go ahead with their Chinese New Year “Pot luck” banquet with 40,000 guests, gaining notoriety in China. The mayor later resigns under public pressure but insists that the spread was judged to be “limited between humans” at the time. * Saturday: Alex Azar calls Trump at Mar-a-Lago but is told by the president he is being alarmist.

19 January 2020: Gao and his team conclude that there was “‘very efficient’ human-to-human transmission ” The WHO tweets that “there is evidence of limited human-to-human transmission of nCOV.” Trump plays golf.

20 January 2020: A crucial date. Dr Zhong Nanshan confirms Covid human-to-human transmission after medics are infected and two patients unconnected to Wuhan are found in Guangdong. This confirms its airborne status. A total of 200 cases have been confirmed in China. China CDC reports: “Scientists from the China CDC identified three different strains of the 2019-nCoV, confirming that the original Wuhan coronavirus had mutated into two additional strains.” A WHO field team visits China. * In the US, the CDC develops a test but one of the three small sequence components proves inconclusive and the test fails, halting testing in February. Both the US and South Korea report their first confirmed cases of COVID-19.

21 January 2020: A Seattle man recently returned from Wuhan becomes the first officially known infection in the US. Originally thought to be a teenager on 24 February, when Dr Chu and her team conduct tests in Seattle without government approval in February, they discover that the coronavirus was already well established from at least mid-January. * In the UK, New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) scientists recommend the elevation of the UK risk warning from “very low” to “low”. Falling back on “herd immunity” assumptions, NERVTAG says tough measures would only delay the outbreak, not prevent it.

22 January 2020: Trump: “We have it under control … gonna be just fine.” * The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) meets formally for the first time. So does Cabinet Office Briefing Room A (Cobra), chaired by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, and missed by Boris Johnson. Scientists observe Sage has a “shocking lack of expertise – no molecular virologists, immunologists or intensive care experts.” No-one sounds the Covid alarm: “the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn’t study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China.” SAGE’s John Edmunds says no-one thought it politically acceptable to shut the country down. Brits flying home to the UK from Wuhan are neither screened on arrival not contacted by government agencies.

Thursday 23 January 2020, 10am WUHAN LOCKDOWN BEGINS: Beijing locks down Wuhan, home to 11 million, followed by two other cities in Hubei province – Huanggang and Ezhou – in an unprecedented region-wide quarantine. All transport in and out of Wuhan is halted, followed by the others in lockdown. 15 other cities lock down the following day. WHO case numbers confirmed to date: 575 in China. The WHO warns the world to prepare for a global lockdown: “This outbreak was detected because China had put in place a system specifically to pick up severe lower respiratory infections. It was that system that caught this event.” * UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock updates Parliament. Risk level is set to “Low”.

24 January 2020: The first Covid deaths are reported in China which now has 830 confirmed cases (later discovered to be 9 January). Beijing sends to Hubei 346 national medical teams of 42,600 medical workers and more than 900 public health professionals. Details of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention diagnostic Covid tests are published at the WHO website. “By the end of March it had conducted well over 320,000 tests.” Stunningly, two hospitals are built in 10 days at Huoshenshan and Leishenshan. Daily production of N95 masks is increased from 6 million to over 205 million by the end of April. China’s vast scales of production enable it to supply itself and much of the world with PPE. * In the US, the Washington Times accuses the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab of creating COVID-19, a week after the US-funded Radio Free Asia starts the ball rolling – no-one produces any evidence. Cases are now showing up in the US, UK and across Asia.

25 January 2020 CHINESE NEW YEAR: The next day, more China hawks including Steve Bannon and Tom Cotton accuse China of creating the virus in a lab. Two days after China’s unprecedented region-wide lockdown, Brits who flew home to the UK from Wuhan just before the lockdown have still not been screened on arrival not contacted by government agencies.

26 January 2020: In another attack in the Washington Times, “Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program.”

28 January: President Donald Trump is briefed on the seriousness of the pandemic by his NSA. He orders evacuation of the American consulate in Wuhan by 747 plane, hundreds of passengers likely carrying the virus. But despite being informed how deadly the coronavirus is – including that it is airborne – he persists in playing it down, calls it a hoax, undermines the science and holds unmasked superspreader rallies for nearly two months. Carl Bernstein says he has no moral compass. CDC Director Robert Redfield gives cover, telling state public health directors that “the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time and CDC believes the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is low.” Redfield will later deflect from his shortcomings by pushing the lab-leak “China did it” conspiracy.

29 January 2020: Columbia epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, dubbed a “virus hunter,” flies to Guangzhou at China’s invitation where he meets Zhong Nanshan. The following day they fly to Beijing. On Lipkin’s return to the US, he is extensively interviewed in the media. In February, the US CDC will send a “team of experts” to China as part of the WHO team to “look at the raw data”.

30 January 2020 GLOBAL EMERGENCY: The WHO finally declare coronavirus to be a globally Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). * Known global cases: 7,834. China: 7, 736 (plus 12,167 suspected). 98 cases in 18 other countries, 170 deaths. * US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Smith sees the economic advantage in a Covid industry and tells Fox News: “I think it will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America, some to the US. … the fact is, it does give businesses yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain.” * UK Chief Medical Officers raise risk from “low” to “moderate”.

31 January 2020: The date Britain leaves the EU. Boris Johnson announces the Brexit departure in a speech but no mention of Covid. The UK declines to join a European scheme to source Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). A Tory clique wins the contracts for PPE, much of it not useable. * In the US, Trump bans flights from China three days after his calamitous evacuation of Wuhan. Alex Azar declares an emergency in the US. * Eighty-three Britons are evacuated from Wuhan and land at RAF Brize Norton, UK. * In Italy, two cases of Covid are confirmed nearly three months after a swab taken from a four-year old boy in Milan on 5 December has proved positive when tested.

February: The US is officially in recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, having expanded since June 2009 after China floated the global economy out of America’s Great Crash, 2008. Remember, this is election year.

1 & 2 February 2020: Trump plays golf.

3 February 2020: In PM Boris Johnson’s “Superman” speech, he dismisses the Covid emergency. He observes that Trump is “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy,” and is unsparing in his criticism of Washington’s trade war with Beijing. An angry phone call from Trump comes a few days later …

4 February 2020: Chris Whitty briefs Boris Johnson who tells him he is “overreacting”. The UK Foreign Office tells 30,000 British nationals in China to return home. There are no screening facilities or information leaflets at the airports. * On the ocean, the British registered Diamond Princess is the first cruise ship to be stricken with Covid: over 700 are infected and 12 people die. * The US CDC decides to manufacture Covid tests and distribute them under the FDA to state public health laboratories but doesn’t tell commercial labs to begin manufacturing. All non-CDC tests were effectively banned until late February. (Read the whole thread!)

5 February 2020: After 13 days, China’s Covid cases peak. They will reach zero by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. * The US CDC begins tests but botches it. “While other countries have been able to run millions of tests, the CDC has tested only 1,235 patients.” The CDC labs are described as “filthy” and “contaminated“.

7 February 2020: US public health laboratories finally begin to receive the CDC’s kits but they are found to be not working due to contamination. * Trump phones Boris Johnson and takes out his frustrations on him. He rages at Johnson for not ripping out £billions of Huawei 5G infrastructure we’ve already paid for as ordered by his envoys during his and Theresa May’s tenure as prime minister. Johnson acquiesces in June after Trump bans Huawei from using US-made chips.

8 February 2020: A Shanghai press conference confirms the virus is airborne.

10 February 2020: Trump: “It will go away in April.” Despite the Covid test fiasco, the president submits a budget proposal seeking a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the CDC, or about a 9 percent cut.

11 February 2020: The virus is officially named “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS‑CoV‑2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. * A WHO press conference announces the disease is officially named COVID-19. The WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reverses his classification of Covid as airborne to droplets when cued by Mike Ryan, but refuses to blame China for Covid. In November 2020, Tedros’s Ethiopia homeland has its first civil war outbreak for 20 years. Trump will pull the US out of the WHO at the start of his second term in January 2025.

12 February 2020: Boris Johnson misses 4th Cobra meeting.

13 February 2020: US politicians dump their stocks a week before the Covid market crash “Black Swan” event. * In the UK, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock fail to dial in to a conference call with EU leaders and health ministers to discuss coronavirus response. Over the next six weeks they will fail to attend a further seven such calls. * In China: Beijing sacks Communist Party heads in Hubei over ‘botched’ outbreak response in provincial capital of Wuhan.

14 February 2020: France announces first Covid death in Europe. * China reports 5090 new cases, 63,851 in total. Good news from Chinese scientists that antibodies in recovered patients can kill the virus. * After CMO Chris Whitty reassures Downing Street that there is no sustained transmission outside Wuhan, Boris Johnson goes on holiday for ten days at Chevening, reminiscent of Australian PM Scott Morrison taking a holiday at a US military resort on Hawaii before Christmas during the bushfire emergency. (Johnson took a New Year holiday in the Caribbean.) “Complete government breakdown”

15 February 2020: 760 million people are in lockdown in China. The western press gloats shamefully, no compassion or empathy, unwilling to learn lessons, not understanding what’s headed their way. China’s 76-day sacrifice will end up eradicating the virus only to be overwhelmed by variants stewed up abroad and forced to abandon Zero Covid measures two years later.

18 February 2020: UK care workers denied PPE when an NHS briefing states it “should not be needed” when dealing with Covid-19 patients who would be isolated.

19 February 2020: First confirmed case in Iran which becomes the world’s second epicentre.

20 February 2020: Stock market crash begins. Drops 30% by 23 March, the biggest fall being on the 16th. Ends 7 April when investors can reload at rock bottom prices.

21 February 2020: NERVTAG approves “moderate” risk assessment. Estimates 1.3 million dead but recommends no action.

24 February 2020: Routine contact tracing in the UK is halted. General testing will stop on 12 March. Health Secretary Matt Hancock sets up a new Test and Trace agency in May under his horse racing associate, Dido Harding. Total cost will amount to £37 billion.

26 February 2020: “Trump: Within a couple of days it’ll be close to zero.” The president replaces Alex Azar with Mike Pence over the testing debacle.

27 February: Trump: “One day, like a miracle, it will disappear.” US Covid testing restarts.

28 February: Trump: “Coronavirus is the Democrats’ new hoax.”

2 March 2020: PM Boris Johnson chairs his first Cobra meeting.

5 March: The US gets its Covid tests. Unfortunately, they don’t work.

6 March: “Anybody can get tests. They’re perfect”

9 March 2020: Italy extends lockdown from northern regions to entire country.

10-13 March 2020: 60,000 people attend the UK Cheltenham Race Festival every day. Local Gloucestershire hospitals end up with double the recorded deaths of nearby Trusts Bristol, Swindon and Bath. Dido Harding sits on the Cheltenham Festival board and is a Jockey Club director. On 7 May, she will be made head of Britain’s abysmal Track and Trace, costing billions, and made a life peer as a baroness. UK Chief Science Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance defends not banning the Cheltenham gathering: “The most likely place you are going to get an infection from is a family member, a friend, someone very close in a small space, not in the big space.”

11 March 2020: The US bans flights from Europe, except the UK, for 30 days. At the House Oversight and Reform Committee on 11 and 12 March, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Robert Redfield give testimony on the pandemic. One key issue is the test kit debacle. Redfield admits to Rep Harley Rouda that they have been misdiagnosing early Covid cases as flu. Rouda: “We could have people in the United States dying from what appears to be influenza when it could be the coronavirus?” Redfield: Some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”

12 March 2020: With 590 known cases of Covid in the UK and rising, the government stops Track and Trace, defended by Chris Whitty, who says no social distancing measures will be introduced. The Lancet calls this “playing roulette with the public.” * 50K fans cram into Afield Stadium to watch Liverpool play Atletico Madrid. Lewis Capaldi performs for 12K fans armed only with bottles of hand sanitiser. Boris Johnson holds a press conference after a Cobra meeting, telling people to stay at home for 7 days if they feel ill. Thinking of banning large events but won’t close schools. Patrick Vallance then pushes “herd immunity” line: “it is not possible to stop everyone getting it. And it is not desirable either, he says. He says you want people to pick up immunity.” * China argues back: see “How the Wolf Warrior was invented”.

13 March 2020 TRUMP’S U-TURN: President Donald Trump U-turns on Covid and declares a national emergency, adding, “I don’t take responsibility at all”. * In the UK, the Government Chief Science Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, says 60% of the population must be infected with Covid in order to achieve “herd immunity”. UK IPC downgrades Covid from airborne to droplets.

14 March 2020: Spain goes into lockdown. In China Shenzhen closes. * The WHO’s Margaret Harris questions the UK’s decision to pursue “herd immunity”.

15 March 2020: The US begins staggered, limited shutdowns starting with the New York City public schools system. California follows with a state-wide stay-at-home order four days later on 19 March. Trump plays golf.

16 March 2020: Trump: “Our response is a ten.” * Canada goes into lockdown. * UK Professor Neil Ferguson publishes a study showing that doing nothing will lead to over 500,000 deaths in Britain.

17 March 2020: France begins lockdown. * In the UK, “the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, wrote to hospital chiefs, telling them to ‘urgently discharge’ patients to help free up 15,000 beds for the expected first wave of hospital admissions.” It’s not until 15 April that Matt Hancock announces plans to test all patients before entering care homes. Boris Johnson blames care homes. Dominic Cummings blames Matt Hancock.

19 March 2020: China reports zero new cases of Covid for the first time. * PM Boris Johnson tells Chancellor Rishi Sunak: “We’re killing the patient to tackle the tumour… Why are we destroying the economy for people who will die soon anyway”.

20 March 2020: The White House sends a blame China cable to state department officials. * The UK closes schools from today.

23 March 2020 UK LOCKDOWN: The UK finally locks down for the first time, to 10 May. * The US stock market crash bottoms out.

25 March 2020: Trump: “We’ve done one helluva job.” India locks down. * In China, the Hubei lockdown is lifted, leaving Wuhan as the last to open.

27 March 2020: A Chinese team of medics and equipment fly into London to share their knowledge and help our pandemic efforts. Their boxes are marked with the Chinese flag and Union Jack and carry the promise: ‘We will get through this together!’ They are ignored.

28 March 2020: Trump extends social distancing measures to 28 April. The official US death toll stands at 2,000, having doubled in two days. * In the UK, The Lancet is scathingly critical: ‘The UK Government’s Contain–Delay–Mitigate–Research strategy failed. It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow WHO’s advice to “test, test, test” every suspected case. They didn’t isolate and quarantine. They didn’t contact trace. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque.” * The WHO mysteriously and wrongly claims Covid is not airborne. It retracts the claim a day later, and is criticised 3rd April by aerosol scientists.

31 March 2020: Mike Pompeo tells Americans abroad to fly home “immediately”. US domestic flights continue.

2 April 2020 UK CARE HOME SCANDAL: UK government publishes Care Home guidance requiring testing only from hospitals, not the community. Health secretary Matt Hancock had previously ignored Chris Whitty’s advice to test “all going into care homes”, blaming shortage of tests, resulting in mass infection and many deaths. “… as ministers rushed to free up 25,000 hospital beds amid fears the NHS could be overwhelmed confirmed that ‘negative tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home’”. * In China, Shenzhen bans the eating of cats and dogs as part of a wider clampdown on consuming wildlife.

3 April 2020: At a White House briefing, the CDC recommends wearing masks outside the home.

5 April 2020: PM Boris Johnson is hospitalised with Covid.

7 April 2020 midnight WUHAN LOCKDOWN ENDS: China ends the unprecedented Wuhan lockdown at 76 days having eradicated the virus by day 43 – the last in China. From now on there will only be outbreaks to firefight on a smaller scale until variants stewed up abroad overwhelm their Zero Covid strategy two years later. In total, 25 cities locked down, containing 101,602,895 people with 4,632 deaths and over 82,000 cases according to the National Health Commission. * US CDC Robert Redfield downplays Covid: death toll will be “much lower” than the projection of 100K-240K.

9 April 2020: Free antigen tests are made available in England.

15 April 2020: Official US death toll reaches 25,000.

17 April 2020: The 57-page “blame China” memo is published by State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s Republican allies. On the same day, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Foreign Minister Marise Payne divert blame onto China and start calls for an inquiry. The blame-game is taken up by politicians and media in the West and sucks all the energy out of public health efforts to eradicated the virus.

20 April 2020: Eighty UK healthcare workers are dead with no proper PPE in sight. * The WHO director confirms only a low number of Covid case have developed antibodies meaning herd immunity isn’t happening. * The FT acknowledges China is staging an economic recovery.

22 April 2020: Six weeks after abandoning contact tracing, the UK government announces it is to resume in May.

27 April 2020: The Trump administration continues to confiscate PPE from countries and blue states, hijacking 5 millions masks from veterans’ hospitals. Trump demands reparations from China for Covid fallout in Opium Wars 2.

10 May 2020: Boris Johnson announces plans to end lockdown just as we are nearing zero Covid. Critics say the UK closed too late and opened too early.

28 May 2020: The UK launches its Test and Trace service under businesswoman and a director of The Jockey Club and Cheltenham racecourse, Dido Harding, appointed by Matt Hancock on 7 May. Hancock is a Cheltenham regular and trained as a jockey. It fails to find a quarter of cases and isn’t fully operational until 4 June, after lockdown ends. Called an “absolute shambles,” “flying blind”. Costs £37 billion over two years with little to show for it. * US Covid deaths exceed 100,000.

20 June – 22 September 2020: Trump holds 18 campaign rallies – unmasked – resulting in an estimated 30,000 extra cases and a possible 700 deaths, according to Stanford research. ““The worst part is that this doesn’t even capture Trump’s many superspreader events on White House grounds or the last five weeks of events across the country.”

23 September 2020: Letter from former director of the CDC, Bill Foege, to current director Robert Redfield is damning of Redfield’s performance and urges him to resign. “1) Despite the White House spin attempts, this will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country. The biggest challenge in a century and we let the country down. The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic. 2) The cause will be the incompetence and illogic of the White House program. 3) The White House has had no hesitation to blame and disgrace CDC, you and the State.”

1 October 2020: Trump tests positive for Covid, days after attending unmasked events at the White House and a presidential debate with Joe Biden.

4 October 2020: “Herd immunity” is formalised by the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, opposed by most of the science community. It is impossible to achieve herd immunity (we are not cattle) when a virus mutates so fast.

19 September 2024: Cell paper identifies Wuhan seafood market as animal spillover to human site. Persuasive argument for natural cause but still doesn’t explain the earlier evidence of the virus in US (Red Cross blood samples) and in sewage in Italy and Spain.

Further Reading

The Covid Pandemic, Page 1: How coronavirus was weaponised – natural disaster, man-made calamity
The Covid Pandemic, Page 2: Sir Patrick Vallance’s Sky News “herd immunity” interview, 13 March 2020. Full transcipt.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 3: How “herd immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever. Public Health vs Big Business conflict.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 4: Medical journals and videos on damage to the brain and immunity system by SARS-CoV-2
The Covid Pandemic, Page 5: I caught Covid again and it’s not getting any better. Covid Inquiry: denial of Airborne vs Droplets mode of transmission prolonged the pandemic
The Covid Pandemic, Page 6: (This page) Covid Timeline vs Trump spin – 110 dates to remember

Anna Chen - political and cultural analysis of US-China relations