WHO team says lab leak unlikely, and a meeting of minds in India and China on 'hostile foreign forces'
Welcome to today’s The India China Newsletter.
In this issue, I’m looking at:
- The WHO expert team in Wuhan says SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t likely a lab leak
- Pakistan seeks debt relief from China on repayments for power projects
- Did China miscalculate on the LAC, asks a former Indian foreign secretary
- A sharp fall in birthrates in China
- The rise and fall of Clubhouse in China
- India, China and a meeting of minds on ‘hostile western forces’
The Wall Street Journal reports on the WHO China joint expert team’s press conference today after wrapping up two weeks of investigations in Wuhan:
The virus that causes Covid-19 most likely jumped from one species to another before entering the human population and is highly unlikely to have leaked from a laboratory, a leader of a World Health Organization investigative team said at a news conference in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
In laying out the possibilities for origin of the pandemic, the WHO team said Tuesday it was also possible that the virus may have been transmitted to humans through imported frozen food, a theory heavily promoted by Beijing. But the team said the most likely scenario was one in which the virus spilled over naturally from an animal into humans, such as from a bat to a small mammal that then infected a person.
“Did we change dramatically the picture we had beforehand? I don’t think so,” said Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food-safety expert who spoke on behalf of the WHO delegation. “Did we improve our understanding? Did we add details to that picture? Absolutely.”
…
The preliminary findings aren’t likely to calm the political controversy around the investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Both Beijing and Washington traded blame throughout much of 2020 for the early spread of the virus, and the WHO visit was arranged only after lengthy negotiations with the Chinese government.
WHO researchers, including Dr. Ben Embarek, had previously deemed the likelihood of transmission to humans through frozen food as being very low. Only a handful of potential incidences of transmission have been documented during the past year.
“It seems to be extremely rare, and that being the source of the infection seems to be extremely rare, and that is happening in a world where you’re having half a million cases now every day,” Dr. Ben Embarek said in a Jan. 31 interview. “Transposing that onto last year in Wuhan when the virus is not widely circulating in the world and thinking that could be the introduction is not the most likely scenario.”
Pakistan plans to ask China for debt relief on payments owed for power projects financed over the past 8 years under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, reports Bloomberg:
The Belt and Road program had found new life in Pakistan last year with the signing of $11 billion worth of projects, most of which went to revamping the nation’s railway system.
While Chinese financing has helped Pakistan diversify fuel supplies, it has also resulted in a surplus of electricity, which is problematic for the government in Islamabad because it is the sole buyer and pays producers even when they don’t generate. To help tackle the issue, the government has negotiated with power plants, which produce roughly half of its electricity, to lower rates.
Pakistan will formally make the request to defer debt payments to China, as well as other plants that were part of the latest power policy, after it concludes deals with those local power producers to reduce electricity tariffs, said the person with knowledge of the matter. Debt relief from China will also help the government reduce power payments.
Shyam Saran, a former foreign secretary and one of India’s sharpest China watchers, writes in Hindustan Times:
What China did not expect was that India would not confine its response to managing the border dispute but would extend it to attacking Chinese commercial interests in India and aligning itself more closely with its Quad partners. The Indian side has upped the ante by taking two steps, one military and one economic — occupying the heights in south Pangong and by permanently banning 59 Chinese apps. Earlier, the signal given was that these commercial actions could be reversed if relations came back on an even keel. The onus is now on China to escalate both on the border, but importantly in other dimensions of the relations. Should China seek to push India out of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation? What about India’s membership of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank or the BRICS Development Bank? Should it lead in disbanding BRICS which may bring it into conflict with Russia and other members? Should it retaliate commercially, which it has not done so far?
The fact that both sides find continuation of talks useful is positive, but it appears that the initiative is no longer on China’s side. Jaishankar has stated quite unambiguously that other aspects of India-China relations could not be insulated from the disturbance to peace and tranquillity on the border. The reaction from the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman was to urge that the border situation should be delinked from other aspects of bilateral relations, knowing full well that this is no longer possible. China has miscalculated and does not know how to extricate itself. Has it, for a change, bitten off more than it can chew?
The number of newborns registered with the government in China dropped almost 15% last year:
According to figures published by the Ministry of Public Security this week, there were 10.03 million new babies registered in 2020, compared to 11.79 million the year before -- a decrease of 14.9%. The news comes as last year, China recorded the lowest birthrate since the People's Republic was founded in 1949.
China's demographic issues could pose serious issues for the world's second-largest economy when the current working-age population reaches retirement. Experts worry if the trend continues, or the population begins shrinking, China may get old before it gets rich.
According to the most recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics, there were 250 million people over 60 years old in China last year, around 18% of the population.
The South China Morning Post on the rise and fall of Clubhouse in China, which I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter was blocked in China after a few days of an unexpected but delightful spring:
A widely read article published by Chinese tech media Pingwest sarcastically described mainland Chinese users of Clubhouse as “opinion leaders in the cryptocurrency investment community, venture capital partners with substandard performance, chief executives of failed start-ups [and] high-class Chinese who overestimate their own importance”.
[Ouch! It goes on:]
Before it was blocked, Clubhouse had not managed to woo mainland Chinese internet heavyweights to rival the likes of Elon Musk, who recently joined the service.
Some Chinese key opinion leaders (KOLs), including Luo Yonghao, an online talk show host famous for a failed mobile phone company, made an appearance in a Clubhouse chat room but later commented that he could not stay for longer than 10 minutes.
Ren Yi, an online political commentator known as Chairman Rabbit, speculated on Chinese social media Weibo on Saturday that the app could in future become a haven for people expressing one-sided opinions that were “anti-communism, anti-establishment and anti-China”, given that the app is not easily available to most of the general public.
Li Yuan in the New York Times probably captures the feelings of many:
For years, the Chinese government has prevented its 1.4 billion people from speaking freely online. A digital wall separated them from the rest of the world.
Then, for a precious few days, that wall was breached.
Clubhouse, a new social media app that emerged faster than the censors could block it, became a place for Mandarin Chinese speakers from the mainland and any place else to speak their minds. They had a lot to say.
In Clubhouse’s audio chatrooms, people from the mainland joined those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the global Chinese diaspora and anybody else who was interested to share their thoughts. The topics ranged from the politically charged (repression of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, censorship) to the mundane (hookups) to the unexpected (hemorrhoids).
The Chinese government blocked the app Monday afternoon. I knew it was coming, and yet I still didn’t expect to feel so dismayed.
Those conversations helped illuminate why the Chinese government blocks free speech online in the first place. Those free-flowing exchanges threaten to debunk the caricatures that the state-controlled media often foists upon the Chinese people. The state media dismisses people like the Tiananmen protesters, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong or those in Taiwan who want the island to take a different path from the mainland.
Likewise, mainlanders got a chance to prove that they aren’t brainwashed drones. People who had been demonized got a chance to speak out and be humanized.
And finally…
Jyoti Malhotra writes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new phrase of the moment, what he calls FDI or Foreign Destructive Ideology:
Certainly, PM Modi’s early warning that he will not tolerate criticism of India is also embedded in the Right-wing politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Even in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government had refused to entertain a European Union delegation that had wanted to submit a critical memorandum.
As prime minister, Modi gave foreign policy a fresh, hard-Right lease of life. The first pushback in the first term came against foreign NGOs like Ford Foundation and Greenpeace. The message was: comply, or shut shop and get out of India if you want to focus only on the bad news.
Foreign Destructive Ideology, to my ears, sounded uncannily similar to a phrase you’d have heard if you’ve followed Chinese politics, ‘hostile foreign forces’, which has for long been the favourite catch-call phrase to blame and deflect all internal problems on outside elements to absolve the leadership of any responsibility:
jìngwài (díduì) shìli : Catch-all scapegoat for anyone or anything that does not conform with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doctrine. The central government has blamed "foreign forces," sometimes adding that they are "hostile," for orchestrating the 1989 protests, stoking the Hong Kong protests of 2014, and causing "ideological problems" at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. And when homegrown movements arise, like the Southern Weekly protests of 2013, Internet users will remark on how “busy” the foreign forces must be.
Meanwhile, speaking of other uncanny similarities, the Indian Express reports today of the Indian government considering raising a force of ‘cyber volunteers’ to report on ‘anti-national activities’:
In a controversial move, the cybercrime cell of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has started a new programme under which citizens can participate as volunteers to identify, flag and report to the Government illegal and unlawful content, including child pornography, rape, terrorism, radicalisation and anti-national activities.
Sources told The Indian Express that the programme will be piloted on a trial basis in Jammu and Kashmir, and Tripura, and that its scale would be calibrated depending on feedback.
With all the differences on the border and other issues, perhaps there are other areas where India and China may find a meeting of minds, after all.
Thank you for reading.