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New WHO chief scientist backs China fact-finding mission to examine COVID origin

fortune.com New WHO chief scientist backs China fact-finding mission to examine COVID origin

Infectious diseases expert Jeremy Farrar has himself been at the center of the debate over the mysterious origins of COVID, which first broke out in China in late 2019.

New WHO chief scientist backs China fact-finding mission to examine COVID origin
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  • Humiliating China in what way?

    If this is a good faith question, I highly recommend looking into modern Chinese history, starting with the 1800s. Europe brought China to its knees. Massive EuroAmerican fortunes were amassed through getting 40% of Chinese people addicted to opium, Forbes among them. The Chinese attempt to protect their people by outlawing opium was met with orientalism by the merchants who convinced the British navy to attack China and force it to allow the drug trade. The Opium Wars is how Britain ended up occupying Hong Kong and how Europeans were immune to Chinese law in all the major port cities.

    When the PLA joined with the KMT to fight off the Japanese, the KMT then turned on the PLA and massacred as many as they could. The PLA eventually won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people and through a people's war and through conversion of thousands of KMT soldiers to the PLA defeated the KMT who ran away to Taiwan. The British then stepped in and prevented the PLA from continuing to pursue the KMT because the British wanted the KMT to be their puppet regime. And that's how Taiwan got into the mess it's in.

    The West spent a century dominating China, eventually even imposing tarrifs on behalf of China on goods that passsed through China, but all the tarrifs were collected by the Europeans! China finally stood up in 1949, but it has not finished pushing European influence out of its region. So the idea that the WHO should be trusted to be impartial when literally everything the West has done is weaponized against its enemies is laughable.

    • I am not going to listen to arguments based on events from 200 years ago. My family were being starved in Ireland back then.

      China was a closed nation for a very long time. Any developments in China are down to China themselves. Do you even know the term of the Cold War?

      There were no friendly arrangements between the west and China until very recent. The hand of friendship has been extended due to the collapse of Russia and the west recognising the futility of being aggressive for the sake of being aggressive. China also opened it borders, something unthinkable before the USSR collapsed. Since the cooling of relations between the west and China, China has abused that hand of friendship in many areas. Is it any wonder that hostilities are building up again?

      • I am not going to listen to arguments based on events from 200 years ago.

        Enjoy remaining incredibly stupid and easily manipulated for the rest of your life.

      • I am not going to listen to arguments based on events from 200 years ago

        1950 was less than 100 years ago dumbass

        The hand of friendship has been extended due to the collapse of Russia and the west recognising the futility of being aggressive for the sake of being aggressive

        The sino-soviet split and triangular diplomacy says what?

      • The US is based entirely on arguments from 200 years ago, the fuck you talking about?

        Your family was being starved in Ireland by the fucking English 200 years ago and Ireland is still dealing with English occupation of their land. The English also starved India, and it wasn't 200 years ago. You think that forced famine is somehow more relevant than the forced famine in Ireland? It's not. History is present now.

        China was a closed nation because why? Why is China being closed bad? Why is it European right to forcibly open China? What kind of fucking argument is that?

        And then to top it off you think the West gave up on being aggressive? What fucking planet do you live on because here on Earth the West is still bombing the shit out of countries, lynching national leaders in the streets, training terrorists and assassins, and violently killing and subjugating people all over the world. And you think the West extended a "friendly hand" that China has spurned. Holy shit you are fucking delusional. Read a fucking book.

        • And China is still stealing land and minerals from other countries. What exactly is your point? That the only people who should respect fairness and equality are everyone else except China?

          Go tell that to the Myanmar where you are currently stealing copper from mining, or the Uyghurs where genocide is very evident, or the many other areas China is nothing more than a shitty country to deal with. No owes China anything, and China certainly does not do anything for anyone else without self interest. You victimise your own people even when they are outside of your own borders. You intimidate the families of those who disagree with you. You steal kids from their home to reindoctrinate them. The list just keeps growing. China is not deserving of any respect, at least not anymore than the respect it gives to others.

          • And China is still stealing land and minerals from other countries. What exactly is your point?

            Whataboutism. As far as I can tell, China is offering better deals to every country it trades with than the West does. The West use neocolonial debt traps to control the global South. China, however, forgives millions in debts and defers payments and interest every year and even the analysis from the most rabid Westoids shows that China is not engaged in debt trapping.

            China doesn't invade other countries and then grant mineral rights and extraction contracts to Chinese companies like the US does literally on every habitable continent. The US and UK overthrow democratically elected governments regularly in order to protect their oil interests. China does nothing like this. You are projecting Western behaviors onto China.

            I am not Chinese, you don't get to accuse me of doing these things. The Myanmar discussion is a little too fresh for us to have, we need some more clarity on what's going on. The Uyghurs though, you're gonna need to do some research on that. Most of the "evidence" is actually a braindead report from one man who is an evangelical Christian in Germany who thinks all the Jews will perish during the rapture which will occur in his lifetime, he thinks birth control in Germany is murder, and he thinks IUDs in China are genocide. The Uyghur population is GROWING in China and has been growing since records on this sort of thing began. There's never been a genocide in history where the target of the genocide has a population increase. There's no actual evidence for a genocide, just a warmongering narrative from the West, because that's what the West does - it lies in order to justify war. It's been doing it for hundreds of years now, nonstop. And you think the West stopped engaging in aggression and is just trying to be friendly with China. You're a fool.

            Everything else you wrote is just rabid orientalism. You're a racist and you'll believe anything the lying West tells you about their chosen racial enemy so you can sleep well at night knowing that when the US tortures prisoners with power drills and rape and genital mutilation that they're doing it for a good cause.

            • Wikipedia seems to disagree with their population increasing. In fact, it's saying their birth rate is decreasing compared to the rest of China.

              Also, I don't think it's just the one crazy guy. The UN also sent someone over in 2022, and they published the UN Human Rights Office report on Xinjiang, which was pretty damning. It's sources include interviewing people who lived in Xinjiang at the time the abuse had been reported. They also restricted where she could go so she couldn't do a full investigation, which also isn't a great look. And this was by Michele Bachlet, someone who had been accused of being too soft on Beijing before, who praised China before, and who you'd probably agree with on other subjects like Israel's occupation of Palestine and who disagrees with US sanctions during the pandemic.

              • The wikipedia article cites Adrian Zenz prolifically. So most of what you're reading comes from the same ridiculous and disgraced source that nearly every other report on the matter comes from. But, the Uyghur birthrate IS decreasing. That's what happens universally when communities become more affluent, more educated, and more secure. But what's the population growth rate? It was 11.4% growth. Now it's 3.7%. Is that a decline in population? No. It's an increase in population, a 3.7% increase in population. Explain to me how a genocide increases the population by 3.7%. I'll wait.

                Also, I don’t think it’s just the one crazy guy. The UN also sent someone over in 2022, and they published the UN Human Rights Office report on Xinjiang, which was pretty damning.

                That UN report literally cites Zenz as it's primary form of evidence that doesn't come from sources managed by the intelligence community. Remember that the CIA has an East Turkistan project to incite terrorist violence by spreading extreme interpretations of Islam in the reason as an explicit program to destabilize China. You cannot trust anything that the West touches in this regard. That's why we refer to the 30+ countries with Muslim majorities who actually toured Xinjiang and say not only is there no genocide but in fact Xinjiang is a place that is good and healthy for the continuation of the Uyghur culture.

                It’s sources include interviewing people who lived in Xinjiang at the time the abuse had been reported

                But aren't actually in Xinjiang. There are plenty of people who claim to be from the region. There are also plenty of people who were arrested due to actually being involved in extremist groups with ties to the CIA program. These groups had several different ways of identifying themselves including dress, vocabulary and talking points, and interpretations of history and religion, and symbolism. They also have networks that connect them to wider regional logistical partisan and terrorist networks. So when they escape Chinese law enforcement and get out of Xinjiang, they tell their story about how they were imprisoned after being profiled for wearing "traditional" clothes, all the while if you actually go to Xinjiang people are wearing traditional clothes all over the place, and most of them know what the extremists look like, what they wear, how they talk, and where they congregate.

                They also restricted where she could go so she couldn’t do a full investigation, which also isn’t a great look

                Because the West has a history of using the lie of "impartial inspections" for espionage and war propaganda. China has no requirement to comply with Western inspections while not a single Western organization is doing inspections or oversight of the CIA program for East Turkistan extremism or any of the dozen other programs that the West created to do harm to China.

                And this was by Michele Bachlet, someone who had been accused of being too soft on Beijing before, who praised China before, and who you’d probably agree with on other subjects like Israel’s occupation of Palestine and who disagrees with US sanctions during the pandemic.

                Appeal to authority. I don't give a shit what her former opinions on this are. Her position on this topic uncritically cites a right-wing anti-semitic German evangelical who's report stated that China was installing over 100 IUDs per person and also counted removal of an IUD the same as the installation of an IUD and then construed access to voluntary family planning medical care as evidence of genocide despite population continuing to grow. Remember that the UN didn't even allow the PRC to be part of the UN until 1971, instead giving the seat to the KMT in Taiwan during the most violent and brutal years of the White Terror when the KMT killed tens of thousands of people for the political crime of agreeing that the PRC was now the government of China. So, expecting the UN to be an impartial and valid arbiter, especially in matters regarding China, is just ignoring the entire history of the North Atlantic's relationship and the UN's relationship with China.

                • To be fair, I'm basically with the UN on this in that I'm not fully convinced it's a genocide, but there's a lot of evidence against them of at least some human rights abuses. Like it might be tending towards cultural genocide, through not letting them wear their clothes or practice their religion or culture, which would be how the population is still increasing.

                  As for it all just being Zenz's word, what about the satellite pictures of their massive camps and their growth, videos and pictures of their re-education schools (think I saw this on the Jon Oliver episode of the subject?), Xi's 2017 order that all religions have to be Chinese in nature, and some Uyghur saying they had family members arrested and now don't know where they are, like Ilham Tohti.

                  Like it could be that these camps are necessary to quell a massive terrorism group, and at least they said the schools have been dismantled, but it comes off as the Islamophobic version of the WW2 Japanese-American internment camps where innocent are thrown in with the guilty. Why else would they need to be that big? And not letting people see the prisoners like that guy I linked above isn't great either. It's not a great look, especially since the people defending it are usually the same people criticizing the US's massive prison industrial complex, although I sometimes confuse the views of ML communists, who might be okay with that if they were used on the right people, and anarchists, who I know are definitely not.

                  I think the Jon Oliver video convinced me the most along with normal news articles detailing the history and China's treatment of the region. Do you have a source for the East Turkistan Project? It comes off as a conspiracy theory.

                  And I know it's trite, but if you've got a YouTube video debunking Jon's, I'd be curious to hear it out, too. It's like one I heard before debunking Jon's video on Venezuela helped convince me at one point that it's our complicated than it seems. But the Uyghur situation I'm still not convinced on. I'll read up on the East Turkmenistan thing and see if there are any links between them and US Int, but still, there might just be more than one bad guy. Too many accusations and China is being so secretive. China is allowed to be distrustful of the West, but I don't think that trumps human rights.

                  • I don't have a John Oliver video, but I do have this https://xinjiangahr.carrd.co/ which is a collection of well-researched data on the subject, gathered up in an easily approachable and surveyable format

                  • Sources on East Turkestan project:

                    https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202205/t20220507_10683090.html (Chinese source which cites its references)
                    https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/east-turkestan-islamic-movement-etim (Pro US/CIA source that shows you what the Western narrative is)
                    https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=4767d3ce-8490-464f-8508-d8f3b7878808&subId=703775 (PDF of Australian minister's analysis of the situation submitted to Australian parliament to oppose sanctions)
                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkistan_Government-in-Exile (note that the East Turkestan Govt in Exile was formed in Washington DC and operates out of Washington DC)
                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party (note that the US has listed this extremist party as having "training and financial assistance" from Al-Qaeda and ...)
                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_Mahsum (But the party was founded by in 1940 and associated with Islamic extremists fighting the USSR, which we know the US funded and trained)
                    https://apnews.com/article/79d6a427b26f4eeab226571956dd256e (AP article about how Uighur's are fighting against Assad in Syria after being trained by Al-Qaeda)
                    https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2021/10/05/bidens-era-of-strategic-competition-494588 (politico short blurb about how the Taliban is cooperating with China to remove East Turkestan militants from the Chinese border now that the US has left the region)
                    https://www.ned.org/testimony-by-damon-wilson-before-senate-foreign-relations-committee-on-democracy-and-human-rights-us-tools-and-responses/ (NED, the CIA's "legal" arm, states they support Uyghur partners)
                    http://english.scio.gov.cn/xinjiangfocus/2020-03/05/content_77241200.htm (Chinese article, but really well done history. If you don't believe the CIA/Dalai Lama connection, just read his brother's book)

                    https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/why-xinjiang-is-central-to-us-cold-war-on-china/ (Great article by Vijay Prashad on the strategy without the accusations of direct CIA training)
                    https://www.newsclick.in/the-US-trying-light-match-islamic-extremism-china-xinjiang (Another great article about the origins of US-led jihad and the origins of Uyghur extermism)
                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB9HRKKZHak (Interview with Vijay Prashad about the topic)
                    https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/inss/strategic-perspectives-42.pdf (Page 16 centers the jihadist terrorism in the region that extends from the 80s into today and is recognized by US academia and military)

                    Like it might be tending towards cultural genocide

                    Still no. What the US is doing to the native population is cultural genocide. Xinjiang is a legally protected autonomous region explicitly to prevent assimilation as a requirement to engage in society. They teach and speak their native language in school, they conduct commercial and government business in their native language. China is running the most complex multi-cultural society in the history of the world. They are not engaged in cultural genocide.

                    through not letting them wear their clothes or practice their religion or culture

                    There are more mosques per capita in Xinjiang than anywhere in the world. The clothes and practices you're talking about are explicitly East Turkistan separatists, a movement with no basis in history that was fomented by the CIA in a radicalization program, the existence of which is public knowledge, with the explicit purpose of destabilizing China, just like the CIA used to train Tibetan terrorists and then airlift them into Tibet.

                    As for it all just being Zenz’s word, what about the satellite pictures of their massive camps and their growth, videos and pictures of their re-education schools (think I saw this on the Jon Oliver episode of the subject?), Xi’s 2017 order that all religions have to be Chinese in nature, and some Uyghur saying they had family members arrested and now don’t know where they are, like Ilham Tohti.

                    Since the days of the Mujahideen, the US and British military intelligence agencies have been developing a perverted interpretation of Islam for the purpose of creating religious extremists, training them in guerilla warfare, and aiming them at countries they want to control. The Uyghur's of Xinjiang are the target of the CIA East Turkistan radicalization program. The satellite pictures do not actually show anything like what would constitute even a human rights violation let alone a genocide. Prisons and re-education are literally the response to the radicalization program. The number of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang plummeted through this program, and instead of vilifying Islam, like the West does, the autonomous region is still autonomous. Xi's order that all religions must not call for the destruction of the Chinese state is pretty straightforward. If the USA is inventing a history of East Turkistan and wrapping a religious fervor around the project to separate from China and create an independent Islamic state, then the solution is to establish that Islam is just fine, but religious justification for terrorism and separatism remove the protection from the state that all religions have. Thus, Xinjiang is still massively Muslim and the state is allowed to arrest extremists who justify their extremism with a perverted interpretation of Islam and they get reeducated IN ISLAM to show the contradictions in their position. They are reeducated away from the radicalization programs of the CIA and MI6.

                    but it comes off as the Islamophobic version of the WW2 Japanese-American internment camps where innocent are thrown in with the guilty

                    Stop projecting Western racist atrocities on the rest of the world. Chinese people were exposed to the worst excesses of European racism. They are steeped in that history. They have zero desire to repeat it. They are not rounding up everyone who looks Muslim. They are, however, likely catching some innocent people in their efforts to stop attacks at the root. On balance, since they aren't harming these people, but rather establishing a process by which they can be sure they are deradicalizing as many people as they can, I think we can agree that it's better than the dragnet the USA implemented after 9/11 and the number of innocent people they kidnapped, tortured, and put in secret prisons in other countries and left them to rot or die.

                    Why else would they need to be that big?

                    Do you have any idea how big Xinjiang is? How many people are in ISIS or Al Qaeda? Would you rather the prisons actually be small fenced in yards with people packed in like sardines? Or should the facilities for these people be large, spacious, and accommodating? Maybe you can't imagine China imprisoning people and treating them well because the US treats pregnant women like dogs by packing 4 of them into a single cell or because they put toddlers in solitary confinement. But the PLA won the war because they showed the KMT soldiers that they were far more humane, far more thoughtful, and far more just than the KMT was. That history doesn't die easily.

                    And not letting people see the prisoners like that guy I linked above isn’t great either

                    China has no obligation, while fighting a Western radicalization program, to let Westerns inspect their operations. Beyond the possible ways that could be used to inoculate new radicalization targets against reeducation, the West has zero moral standing and cannot set these terms and China is letting them know they have no grounds to impose terms on how China fixes a mess the West created.

                    especially since the people defending it are usually the same people criticizing the US’s massive prison industrial complex, although I sometimes confuse the views of ML communists, who might be okay with that if they were used on the right people, and anarchists, who I know are definitely not.

                    Anarchists don't support China, so that's easy. Listen, the US imprisons so many people that even with massive prisons in Xinjiang China's prison population per capita still doesn't even come close to the US's. The US also has a massive extractivist parole system so you can't even count just the people in prison you also have to count all the people with ankle bracelets AND all the people with $50k in debt to the prison that garnish their meager wages for the rest of their life. You are projecting Western atrocities onto China and then getting confused why people who criticize American atrocities also support China. It's because you are imagining Western atrocities are equivalently happening in China when they aren't.

                    China is allowed to be distrustful of the West, but I don’t think that trumps human rights.

                    China is distrustful of the West because the West is the worst offender against human rights the world has ever seen, and a lot of those human rights atrocities happened under Western occupation of Asia.

                    • It'll take me awhile to go through all them lol, but thanks for all the sources. You're one of the few people I've seen from lemmygrad or hexbear not just immediately default to ad hominem attacks, trolling, and pig poop balls, and I appreciate the actual attempt at a discussion in good faith instead of shouting "racist lib" and running back to your echo chamber to make fun of how clueless all us libs are. I appreciate it.

                      Some good points there, but I will say, you're acting like the West are the only civilizations which have ever committed atrocities, which I think is a mistake to make. Every large group of humans have been capable of doing such horrible things, as we've seen in wars and such all over the world.

                      • The West is quite literally the only civilization that ever dominated 80% of the world. The West is the only civilization to engage in full on extinction hunting, from the buffalo in America to steal treaty land to the deer on Taiwan to many other animals. The West is the only civilization to develop fascism. What we all know and understand as systemic racism is a Western system. The West developed capitalism and spread it. The West created the most effective and brutal forms of chattel slavery, apartheid, and genocide.

                        But more importantly, none of those things are merely "in the past". Unlike the ancient histories of atrocities, the atrocities of the West have been happening in an unbroken chain of events for the last 600 years to the present day. Your daily coffee, tea, banana, coca-cola, potatoes, corn, sugar, and many many other foods are the direct heritage of the brutality of the West and it has never let go of its spoils. The king of England was photographed on his recent coronation wearing literally millions of dollars of stolen resources from India. The West forced famines on people, continues to extract billions from the people they have subjugated, and continues to launch wars of dominance destroying the lives of millions.

                        No one has killed more people, dominated more land, systematized more brutality, dehumanized more thoroughly, and benefitted from it all more profitably than the West. And when we finally dismantle the West and reverse the damage it's done, then maybe a new violent force will arise and after a couple centuries you can argue that it's not just the West. Until then, drop the whataboutism.

      • People like you: I don't care about history, we're different today and you should let us do what we want.

        China: go fuck yourself.

        And yet people like you are shocked that's what China tells you. China's been here for thousands of years, for China 200 years is recent history. It's cute that your people were starving though, hopefully that happens to you.

      • Imagine somebody you dated physically and emotionally abused you for 20 years and then 10 years later they get upset that you still care about something that happened so long ago lmao

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