Plague, protests and how the hybrid war on China is prolonging Covid-19 pain in the West

Covid-19 and the UK's missing PPE - NHS health-workers you need this!

Medics leave Wuhan after the Covid-19 lockdown ends - official date 8th April 2020

I'm back after a long break following my bout of strange, dry bronchitis in December (Loved One had a dry hacking smokers' cough in parallel) which lost us Christmas and New Year, through the coronavirus crisis, a ramped up Cold War on China, and world-wide Black Lives Matter protests set off when African-American George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on camera in front of us over an agonising 8 minutes and 46 seconds of horror, supposedly over a $20 bill.

I've been spending far too much time on Twitter. There's always somebody wrong on the internet, as the cartoon goes, but some of the toxic outbursts prompt a response before their narratives set like concrete. I should remind myself regularly that social media - especially the Twitter hellhole that hosts Trump - is a vast undifferentiated id. So what did I expect?

If it wasn't for the mainstream media (MSM) news blackout on all things positive about China, I might be more focused on getting my second poetry book out of the way so I could concentrate on my own writing, which I used to do for pleasure. However, in this science fiction writer's coma dream where we've all been trapped ever since David Bowie died in January 2016 and took all the cosmic glue with him, the sleep of reason has produced monsters of planet-destroying magnitude.

I was brought up to believe that the Fourth Estate — our print and broadcast journalism — was there to protect us, to defend science-based truth as we've known it for 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment. (Hah, as I write that I realise that's about the same timespan during which African-Americans have been enslaved and Jim Crowed in America, so maybe there's a clue in there, somewhere.) However, the complete partisan absence of media coverage of, for instance, Hong Kong's US NED-backed Trojan Horse protester violence — beating, maiming, incinerating, killing Chinese civilians for a whole year with not one death by cop — is a whole other revelation.

🚺 How Hong Kong Protesters Treat Women 🚺

Get to know your friendly neighbourhood Hong Kong freedom fighters by taking a look at how they treat women.

Note: includes video from July, this isn't new for them guys.

Say hi to your Nobel Peace Prize Nominees.#HongKong #Freedom pic.twitter.com/y8V6LjHRvl

— Daniel Dumbrill (@DanielDumbrill) November 12, 2019

Along with locusts, floods, fires in Oz and first-born (loosely, Huawei's "detained" Meng Wanzhou and Hunter Biden) we added plague to our biblical disaster list in January. After some initial fumbles, by 12th January China managed to identify, sequence and share the gene code of the "strange pneumonia" novel coronavirus that's been circulating around the globe possibly for years when it erupted in a potent new strain in Wuhan. But – oy vey! – the co-ordinated Cold War hate-fest aimed at China, intensifying Trump's three-year trade war, has been as breath-taking as the Covid-19 disease.

This week there's been another city lockdown following Thursday's Covid-19 flare-up in Xinfadi, Beijing's major wholesale food market, imported on salmon or rainbow trout, possibly from Norway. Fish: cold, moist, on ice, an ideal transportation system for a virus. BTW, "Fish cannot be infected by coronavirus." Luckily, everything's in place to contain the outbreak so let's hope the US and UK are paying attention this time. More on America and its Thucydides Trap travails later.

In the UK, arrogance and incompetence from the Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings government has brought Britain to its knees. Instead of learning from the Covid-19 road map drawn for us by China, as New Zealand's Jacinda Arden did, the political, media and even some of the science establishment got jealous and arsey about China's unprecedented lockdown of 1.4 billion human beings in order to contain the virus and starve it of hosts.

The mainstream media (MSM) mostly joined the news blackout on anything positive about China's management of the virus after Trump's U-turn in March led to co-ordinated attacks on China. While China sent a medical team to the UK at the end of March, along with PPE and 300 ventilators when hospitals were running out, the BBC countered with the bogus "faulty equipment" smear and the ever-hateful Guardian spun it as "China portrays itself as a global benefactor". Because, of course, the Yellow Peril can never act out of altruism, empathy, humanity, ethics or just plain practical understanding that the virus doesn't respect borders. Johnson dithered, caught the thing, nearly died himself, and has led us to having getting on for the worst death rate in the developed world: 41,662 to date (in a population of 66.6 million) with no end in sight. On top of which, to brighten your day, that's no light at the end of the tunnel. That's the Brexit train headed straight for us ...

For our frontline health, care-home and transport workers bravely serving the public in bin bags or nothing against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, I've presented the video at the top of the page to show the layers of Personal Protection Equipment required to keep you properly safe. This is the state-of-the-art PPE that stopped Chinese health workers dying. This is what you need, what you deserve. Make sure you get it.

EDIT: I've been advised that Hybrid Warfare is a more accurate description of what's happening than "asymmetric" so I've changed it to "hybrid" in the headline.

Study in The Lancet documenting how China managed the Covid-19 outbreak, published 4th June 2020: Active case finding with case management: the key to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

Alibaba produced the Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 (GMCC) international resource for tackling the pandemic, including multilingual manuals on specific aspects available for download. 

China: scapegoat and diversion from what ails western capitalism

We all know the United States of America was built on an ancient Native American burial ground, courtesy of European immigrants. Another original sin was slavery; kidnapping men, women and children from Africa for the brute workforce that built so much of America's wealth.

Then there's the 1 per cent ripping off the American people for decades, failing to invest in infrastructure, education, housing, healthcare while the richest 26 individuals took as much as the bottom half of humanity.

And now the US teeters on the edge of the worst economic recession since 1929. The national debt increased to $22 trillion with Trump adding over $2 trillion so far and China's new wealth is expected to pick up the declining superpower's tab as a result of Trump's trade war shakedown.

The next recession will have no China in shock absorber mode as the world's growth engine the way there was in 2008. By allowing other nations to devalue their currencies next to the yuan while China took a massive hit, they helped float the global economy out of the bankers' crash. The next time we hit the buffers, China can't keep us out of trouble because someone sawed off the branch we're all sitting on.

How can it be that in three years the whims and caprice of one man has brought us to the brink of a major recession against which we have no more ammo? Trump and his billionaire friends have the reckless assurance of men with access to luxurious nuclear shelters as far away as New Zealand who assume they can flit off and leave us to face the mess they created if this goes to a hot war. They probably think the planet is overpopulated anyway, so what's a population cull to them? Having tried to short China and Europe into the ground, they'll buy up everything at firesale prices in the wreckage they've made of our human society.

A whole new Orwellian narrative has been shaped to justify the coming grand larceny: Trump's US and its supporters at home and abroad accusing their mark of exactly the same crimes and misdemeanours of which they themselves are guilty.

Manipulating the currency? China spent vast amounts of its reserves propping up the yuan even under assault from Trump's trade war and resulting negative market forces. Trump's real demand isn't that China should stop manipulation (which isn't happening) but that it should start manipulating its currency upwards in favour of the dollar.

Theft of intellectual property? Hawkish commentators conflate actual theft (against which there are laws) with the agreed exchange of assets between one side that had cash (Edit: and access to their huge 1.4 billion market, a fifth of humanity) and one that had know-how. The Art of the Deal, remember? Besides which, the tech ship has sailed.

China has caught up and now outpaces the previous pack leader. America's security forces aren't that worried about Huawei spying on them. That's America's own trademark schtick as we know from a blizzard of information: Edward Snowden whistleblowing on the NSA, US tech's own back doors (hello, Cisco) and that pesky bug that sat on Angela Merkel's personal mobile for ages. No, America is alarmed because Huawei's new technology has overtaken the US with unhackable quantum cryptography at the core of 5G, which means they will no longer be able to spy on their friends, enemies and their own people. (See Crypto AG)

Cruelty? That good ol' Yellow Peril trope always comes in handy. China may be heavy-handed in dealing with murderous terrorist attacks and trying to avoid its own 9/11 but so far it hasn't bombed a string of third countries leaving depleted uranium, land-mines and cluster bombs to continue their destruction.

A manic energy has gone into turning China into America's dark mirror, eclipsing and absolving the US of its Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo horrors in the public eye. Reading claims about three million Uyghurs supposedly being tortured to death by nazis, I'm reminded of New Labour's dodgy dossier insisting on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Chalabi's role banging the wardrum for the Iraq War.

In 2002, the year following the 9/11 attacks, the United Nations Security Council declared an official terrorist threat in a region of Stans that's been named "East Turkistan" [EDIT that's territory within China]:

'The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is an organization which has used violence to further its aim of setting up an independent so-called “East Turkistan” within China. Since its establishment, ETIM has maintained close ties with the Taliban, Al-Qaida (QDe.004) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (QDe.010). It was founded by Hasan Mahsum from Xinjiang, China, who was killed by Pakistani troops in October 2003. ETIM is currently led by Abdul Haq (QDi.268), who was also a member of Al-Qaida’s Shura Council as of 2005. ... In recent years, ETIM has set up bases outside China to train terrorists and has dispatched its members to China to plot and execute terrorist acts including bombing buses, cinemas, department stores, markets and hotels. ETIM has also undertaken assassinations and arson attacks and has carried out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets abroad. Among the violent acts committed by ETIM members were the blowing up of the warehouse of the Urumqi Train Station on 23 May 1998, the armed looting of 247,000 RMB Yuan in Urumqi on 4 February 1999, an explosion in Hetian City, Xinjiang, on 25 March 1999 and violent resistance against arrest in Xinhe County, Xinjiang, on 18 June 1999. These incidents resulted in the deaths of 140 people and injuries to 371.'

There have been many more since then.

Friendly advice on how to deal with jihadiism humanely and allowing Uyghur cultural integrity (the vast majority lead normal lives), could be welcomed, only not from the nation that's used two nuclear bombs on civilian populations, waged a vicious war in Indo-China, destroyed Iraq and Libya, and destabilised so much of the world while ripping off its own workers for decades. If peace could be achieved for Northern Ireland and South Africa, then maybe some sort of peace and reconciliation could be had here if Certain Parties stopped stirring it up.

Meanwhile, it's a year since Jamal Khashoggi was butchered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey but Trump rewards the regime behind the killing with more weapons, and now even plans to provide nuclear technology despite US bombs still killing citizens in Yemen.

At home, baby prisons, child death and disappearances; a president in thrall to the National Rifle Association (NRA) while mass shootings at schools and public places proliferate; deaths of African Americans by cops; a president expressing a raging tyrant's desire to maim, hurt, kill, destroy with dark age punishments such as snakes and alligators, flesh-piercing spikes and shooting migrants in the legs. Climate change, the environment, fossil fuels ...

Perhaps Trump is only clumsily trying to finish what Obama started with his pivot to Asia and setting up the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2014, since when the US has poured $29 million into Hong Kong. I'm curious to see how Britain and America will deal with street protests when similar eruptions occur at home.

The Hong Kong protesters had me at democracy. There's an unpleasant authoritarianism in Chinese society (and increasingly out in the open in Britain and the US) that should be challenged from below. That's healthy. But they lost me at "Democracy" when that word is used as a Stars 'n' Stripes and Union Jack-waving euphemism for bringing back the old colonial oppressors ... as if Trump and Boris Johnson are really defending the principle of free speech. How much actual democracy did Hong Kong Chinese enjoy under British rule?

It is hardly a class war for liberation when HK protesters, who are not prospering under this vestigial British imperial system, refuse to take on the property tycoons who manipulated some of the most expensive real estate in the world. For a potted history and illuminating overview, read this:

'British imperialism, in the 155 years it ruled Hong Kong, denied rights to millions of workers. There was no elected government, no right to a minimum wage, unions, decent housing or health care, and certainly no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. These basic democratic rights were not even on the books in colonial Hong Kong.

For the past 25 years, including this year, Hong Kong has been ranked No. 1 in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s list of countries with the “greatest economic freedom”—​meaning the least restraints on capitalist profit taking. Hong Kong’s ranking is based on low taxes and light regulations, the strongest property rights and business freedom, and “openness to global commerce and vibrant entrepreneurial climate … no restrictions on foreign banks.” For this Hong Kong is the “freest society in the world.”

This “freedom” means the world’s highest rents and the greatest gap between the super-rich and the desperately poor and homeless. This is what Hong Kong youth face today. But the youth are consciously being misdirected to blame the city administration for the conditions Hong Kong is locked into under the “One Country, Two Systems agreement.”'

Like Trump and Brexit, the Hong Kong protest is a revolution from the right. Trump just threatened to mention Hong Kong, but do us a favour and investigate the Bidens. All of this happening now just as America is hitting the buffers and China's economy and 1.4 billion-strong market presents a juicy prize.

As the late Hugo Young told me when we were concerned that his newspaper, the Guardian among several others, was blaming the UK Chinese for starting the 2000 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak (and for which Chinese Brits were vindicated) in a diversion for Tony Blair: "There are wheels within wheels." He had to tell the staff to knock it off around the same time that even more examples of anti-Asian bias emerged after a Readers' Editor's investigation.

As far as the bourgeois liberal commentariat goes ... now, him I miss.

Winston Churchill on the partition of China: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph."

New York Times Xinjiang papers "Absolutely no mercy" ... but for who? 

Lucy Sheen's moving documentary, Abandoned Adopted Here, launched at SOAS, 7th April

Abandoned Adopted Here — SOAS

7 pm.7th April 2016.
DLT Lecture theeatre. SOAS. London. WC1H 0XG.

The first public screening of the acclaimed documentary - Abandoned Adopted Here by Lucy Sheen.

From 50s, 60s Colonial Hong Kong to pre-multicultural UK, a group of Hong Kong foundlings were transracially adopted. Lucy interviewed a few of her fellow adoptees to explore whether their experience of identity and belonging had been as challenging as hers. How far do other British East Asians feel a lack of belonging or identity or is it just something that culturally displaced babies and children feel?

This documentary has been selected for screening at Singapore World International Film Festival, Hong Kong World International Film Festival and Minnesota Transracial Film Festival.

“Abandoned Adopted Here is one of the best treatments of transracial identity in film that I have seen.” - Dawn Tomlinson, President of AdopSource Minneapolis.

Abandoned Adopted Here challenges the idea and concept of transracial adoption. This documentary, by looking through history and the differences of cultures, discusses the impact of this phenomenon and how that affects the adoptees and the British East Asians in the UK society.

The documentary will be screened at the DLT Lecture eatre at SOAS, followed by a Q&A section chaired by Dr. Diana Yeh.

Name of Contact: Heather lai
Company Name: Foundling Productions - Lucy Sheen
Contact Phone Number: 07796678882
Contact E-mail: heather_lai@hotmail.com , lucy.sheen@icloud.com Box-office website: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/date/239995 Website Abandoned Adopted Here

Bruce Lee died 40 years ago: new exhibition celebrates Chinese actor's life

When I was growing up in the far east ... of London, the only representations of east Asian women available to this little half-Chinese kid were supine sex-doll lotus blossoms like Suzy Wong and Juicy Lucy, or dragon lady real-life horrors like Imelda Marcos and Madam Mao. Male examples were no better. Screen Chinese were largely consigned to quivering cowards or fiendish villains. Poor Bert Kwouk had to play an assortment of buffoons and bogey men such as Kato in The Pink Panther and the Japanese officer in the TV series, Tenko, but at least he was in work.

Bruce Lee's arrival on the scene altered perceptions and challenged stereotypes. A wing chun kung fu-trained martial artist and actor born in San Francisco to parents from Hong Kong, he was admired by people of all races, becoming an icon for minority ethnic groups who had a beautiful Asian hero to look up to at last. Not only men of Chinese and east Asian heritage, but also south Asian and African Caribbean men were inspired by this handsome super-talented Chinese American. His screen success gave rise to the mega-hit single "Kung-fu Fighting" and even my dad raised his head out of his political tomes for long enough to appreciate that a legend had landed.

To mark forty years since Bruce Lee's death on 20th July and to celebrate and honour his life, an exhibition has just opened in Hong Kong.

It's justly deserved. Lee was not only an outstanding practitioner of kung-fu — famous for his speed, power and grace — he was also majorly intelligent and a deep thinker. While teaching his art to Hollywood movie actors such as James Garner, James Coburn and Steve McQueen (already an expert in the Korean art of Tang Soo Do), he was developing his own martial art style, Jeet Kune Do (the way of the intercepting fist), which took the best from a range of forms from across the globe including western boxing. He backed it up with an interest in philosophy which he'd studied at the University of Washington, so it was much more than just about the best way to hit people: it was about discovery and growth of the self.

He co-starred in the television series The Green Hornet (1966-7) as the masked chauffeur, biding his time, working on his big break. George Takei who played Sulu in Star Trek recalls in his autobiography, To the Stars, how in a break between takes while making the pilot episode, he, James Doohan and Lloyd James were captivated by a young Asian man who was limbering up.

"Suddenly, he exploded in a burst of kicks and leaps and twirls that was a symphony of speed. Our chatting ceased. We stood there, stunned. Then he repeated the ballet. His movements had grace; his body, control and elegance. We were mesmsrized. Then the flash detonation of energy astounded us a second time.

Just then, an assistant poked his head out from his soundstage and called. "We're ready for you on the set, now, Bruce." As we stood open-mouthed, he quietly slipped back in. It had been an incredible demonstration of what incredible feats the human body is capable of. And we had just chanced upon this extraordinary spectacle.

We later learned that the martial artist was a young actor named Bruce Lee and that he was working on a new television series that had just sold called Green Hornet.

When the role that Lee helped devise finally came up — Kwai Chang Kane in the television series Kung Fu (1972-5) — he was considered too Chinese (some say his accent was considered too thick) and the part was given to David Carradine acting in yellowface. While Carradine's diction may have been pristine, he lacked Lee's awesome martial arts abilities. One Kung Fu studio vice president said, "If we put a yellow man up on the tube, the audience will turn the switch off in less than five minutes." This was ultimately the producers' loss — think how much that franchise would be worth now had Lee starred in it.

The rejection was reminiscent of what happened to Anna May Wong in the 1930s when she lost out on what would have been the pinnacle of her career when the starring role of Olan in Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster, The Good Earth (1937), was given to Louise Rainer.

Lee made a handful of legendary martial arts films, chiefly for Golden Harvest in Hong Kong: Enter the Dragon, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, Fist of Fury, and Big Boss.

When he died in Hong Kong aged 32, on 20th July 1973, it sparked a storm of conspiracy theories. So great was the shock of his early death that many claimed he'd been murdered: that's when I learnt from my martial arts father about the existence of something called dim mak, a technique for killing with only one or two fingers applied to the right spot. (My half-brother once described seeing dad use the softened technique, where the use of three fingers dissipates the energy and only stuns, when he was in his 70s and fending off a racist assault by several thugs on the tube.) Dad said there was also a technique that resulted in major organ failure after days or weeks and that he thought this might have been used on Lee.

However, various investigatons including one by Scotland Yard concluded that he'd had an allergic reaction to a painkiller containing Equagesic, which had swollen his brain.

To double the Lee tragedy, his son, Brandon Lee, followed him into the movies, only to be shot and killed in 1993 while filming his big break in The Crow. There was no union firearms safety officer on set; the actor aimed directly at Brandon when he should have been instructed not to, and a small fragment of a bullet had remained in the gun and been overlooked. This event has spawned its own conspiracy theories and Brandon has become something of a legend himself.

No matter how some malign forces still resist, Bruce Lee broke the spell of Chinese presented as dehumanised beings unworthy of respect, love, honour and inclusion. A poet and a scholar, actor and martial artist with emphasis on the artist", he exemplified the best in humanity. Rest in peace, Bruce.