Here Comes China Bulletin #0002 : America’s century of corporate dominance ends; how China was framed for Covid 19, and much more (Expanded edition)

"We made an enormous, front-page, top-of-the-newscycle fuss about Coronavirus, China, Coronavirus, wet markets, Coronavirus, bats, Coronavirus, people dying in the streets, Coronavirus, brutal crackdowns (always), and a dying, doomed economy caused by Coronavirus. Soon every living being on the planet knew every detail about Coronavirus and every aspect was examined, dissected, discussed, and analyzed. Everyone got a crash course in Coronaviruses. We were primed..."

The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.  – Lee Kwan Yew.

This week:

• America's century of corporate dominance ends
• Most top securities firms are Chinese
• Shanghai, the world's biggest, busiest port, got bigger and busier
• China's biggest chip foundry doubles spending and growth 
• 95% will give up their iPhones before giving up WeChat
• Pakistan gets a big security partnership
• China is America's biggest science collaborator
• Hong Kong CIA agent unmasked, flees
• 600 kph Maglev commuter train advances
• Private space companies going great guns
• BRI charges ahead
• A Covid-19 mystery is this week's #1 Long Read

The Economy

China dominated the Fortune Global 500 for the first time this week, with 124 Chinese companies vs. 121 in the USA. With Taiwan, China's total jumps to 133. Walmart (which retails Chinese goods) tops the list, followed by Sinopec, State Grid and China National Petroleum. When the Global 500 list first came out in 1990, there were no Chinese companies on the list. In 2001, when China joined the WTO, 12 Chinese companies entered the ranking. The reversal of leadership reflects long-running trends. The number of U.S. companies in the ranking has been declining every year since 2002, when it was 197. The number of Chinese companies has been increasing every year since 2003, when mainland China placed 11 on the list. [MORE]. 

The Economist magazine's definition of “Xinomics” :

The Economist magazine has vacillated between admiring and hostile images for China's leader Xi Jinping, perhaps a reflection of the uncertainties within the British establishment.

1. First, tight control over the economic cycle and the debt machine. The days of supersized fiscal and lending binges are over…
2. Second is a more efficient administrative state, whose rules apply uniformly across the economy…Red tape has been trimmed: it now takes nine days to set up a company…
3. Thrd, blur the boundary between state and private firms. State-run companies are being compelled to boost their financial returns and draw in private investors. Meanwhile the state is exerting strategic control over private firms, through party cells within them.  The Economist's editors conclude with this warning:

America and its allies must prepare for a far longer contest between open societies and China’s state capitalism…The strength of China’s $14 trillion state-capitalist economy cannot be wished away. Time to shed that illusion. [MORE]

Bets on a merger of China’s two biggest brokerages, CSC Financial and Citic Securities have left China with seven of world’s ten biggest securities firms in terms of market value.  The combination would create a company valued at more than $100 billion, surpassing even Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg. .[MORE]

Chi­na’s 51 Listed Banks Had a Non Performing Loan, NPL, Ra­tio of 1.6% at End of 2019. The “China Listed Bank An­a­lyt­i­cal Re­port 2020”  re­leased by CBA on 12 Au­gust in­di­cates that China was home to a to­tal of 51 listed bank as of the end of 2019.  Of these, 4 are global sys­tem­i­cally im­por­tant banks, and 13 are amongst the world’s top 500 fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions.  As of the end of 2019 their to­tal as­sets were 196.47 tril­lion yuan, for an in­crease of 8.91% com­pared to the start of the year, ac­count­ing for 82.04% of to­tal com­mer­cial bank­ing sec­tor as­sets in China. [MORE]

Shanghai Port, China's busiest, broke its own container traffic record in July with 3.9 million TEU passing through its terminals. Traffic increased 1.2% year-on-year and 7.6% on June, which suggests the Port has recovered from Covid-19 trade uncertainty.[MORE]

70% of smartphones shipped in the US in Q2 2020 were made in China, up from 60% in Q1. US smartphone market  shipments hit 31.9 million units, an increase of 11% from the previous quarter. Apple and Samsung still lead the way in smartphone shipments. Nevertheless, the latest data from Canalys shows that 7 out of every 10 devices sold in the US market have links to China. [MORE]

Technology

China Mobile completed its first 5G-V2X remote test drive in Xiong’an New Area on March 24, successfully demonstrating remote control of unmanned vehicles from through a 5G network from 12 miles away, enabling acceleration, deceleration, steering, and other operations with a delay of only six milliseconds, one-tenth the latency of 4G– a major achievement in integrating smart cities. Vehicle to everything (V2X) is a term that refers to high-bandwidth, low latency, highly reliable communication between a broad range of transport and traffic-related sensors. 5G mobile networks will be key to providing connectivity for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications.[MORE]

SMIC, China's No, 1 integrated circuit foundry, is planning to more than double its facility investment for 2020 from $3.2 billion to $6.7 billion.. SMIC’s sales rose 19% on year to US$938 million in 2Q 2020 and its foundry utilization ratio rose 7.4% to 98.5 percent YoY. The percentage of Chinese customers stood at 66.1 percent, up 9.2 percentage points from a year before.[MORE]

More than 100 veteran engineers and managers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world's leading chipmaker, have been hired by two Chinese chip companies since last year, the Nikkei Asian Review reported on Wednesday.[MORE]

China boasts the world's most new or planned chip plants and is expected to top other countries in chipmaking equipment spending, an indicator of investment for future chip facilities, in 2020 and 2021, according to SEMI, an industry organization. The country's top contract chipmaker, state-backed Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co., recently raised its capital spending for the second time this year to $6.7 billion for 2020. It also announced it will build a $7.6 billion joint-venture factory with Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, a state-backed high-tech zone, in another sign of strong government support for chip producers. (Nikkei Asian Review)

Yangtze Memory Technologies, China's top memory chipmaker demonstrated its 128-layer QLC 3D NAND flash memory chip at the China Electronic Information Expo this week. It is the industry's first 128-layer QLC 3D NAND. It has the highest storage density per unit area, the highest I/O transmission speed and the highest single NAND flash memory chip capacity of all known models. The two products have 1.6Gbps I/O read and write performance, and the single 3D QLC capacity is as high as 1.33Tb, which is 5.33 times that of the previous generation of 64 layers.[MORE]

China's fast reactor has completed testing with manual shutdown, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent commissioning phase to be transferred to the operations phase. Fast reactors are a class of advanced nuclear reactors with advantages over traditional reactors in safety, sustainability, and waste. The development is steady progress to technology that would be double and potentially three times as efficient with nuclear fuel–like going from 20 miles per gallon to 40 miles per gallon and eventually 60 mpg and maybe more. If China makes the transition that they are talking about then by around 2040 they can use these reactors to close the fuel cycle. Closing the fuel cycle means there would be virtually no nuclear waste or unburned fuel. The plan would involve regular reactors, fast reactors and offsite reprocessing (recycling of fuel) facilities. Fast reactors means the designs generates neutrons that are a hundred to a thousand times faster to split the even numbered isotopes of uranium. Unburned nuclear fuel is mainly Uranium 238 by mass. If you hit Uranium 238 with a fast neutron it briefly becomes Plutonium 239 before splitting. The impact is there if China follows through makes hundreds of reactors based on this technology. They could leverage this to phase out coal power significantly starting around 2040..[MORE]

The Transport Ministry has greenlighted stepped up tests on its 600km/hr magnetic levitation train–with no moving parts. “The development of high-speed maglev can help China seize the leading rail transit technology and maintain the country's advantage in the field of high-speed rail,” said Wu Donghua, deputy chief engineer from CRRC Qingdao Sifang, which built the prototypes. "The maglev train is currently the fastest available ground public transport vehicle … the 600km/h maglev train would fill a gap between high-speed rail and aeroplanes," said Wu. [MORE]

Culture

China’s anti-food-waste campaign is off to a strong start. The government crackdown on binge-eating livestreamers, mukbang, drew wide attentions and Other private and state organizations are wasting no time to comply with new instructions from Xí Jìnpíng aimed at curbing food waste and encouraging people to embrace a frugal lifestyle:

• The Wuhan Catering Industry Association advised restaurants to adopt the “N-1 model” whereby groups must order one dish fewer than the number of diners. Liaoning Province then decided (in Chinese) to introduce an “N-2 system,” under which a group of 10 people can only order eight dishes.
• In order to make “proper suggestions” about how much food a customer should order, a restaurant in Changsha, Hunan Province, placed (in Chinese) two scales at its front door and encouraged people to make their orders based on how much they weighed.
• Yesterday, the China Hotel Association, an organization representing both hotels and restaurants, issued a proposal asking its members to be more mindful of the amount of food ordered by their customers.
• This ties in nicely with the push to eliminate childhood obesity by 2030.

The Great American Firewall

President Donald Trump has ordered ByteDance to divest the US operations of its video-sharing app TikTok within 90 days. This comes on top of an executive order he issued last week that would prohibit certain transactions with TikTok unless ByteDance divests it within 45 days.[MORE]

TikTok plans to step up opposition to a ban on US operations, as criticism grows at home the firm is kowtowing to American demands. Negotiations with Microsoft and social media giant Twitter for a forced sale are unlikely to succeed.[MORE]

US companies with strong business ties with China are boycotting White House plans to restrict Tencent’s WeChat app, claiming that such drastic sanctions could jeopardize their great share in the Chinese market. More than a dozen major US multinational companies, including Disney, Ford, Intel, Morgan Stanley, UPS, Apple and Walmart, raised concerns in a call with White House officials Tuesday about the potentially broad scope and impact of Trump’s executive order targeting China, which is set to take effect late next month, noting that the consequences for US companies could be “severe”. The loss for US companies could be unmeasurable. For instance, Apple spent years building China into a $44 billion growth driver, but without the app that has become an inseparable part of Chinese people’s daily life, Chinese smartphone users may reconsider their attachment to the US tech giant.[MORE]

95% of Chinese users would rather give up their iPhone than WeChat, survey shows. WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, most of them from China. According to a Bloomberg survey, 95 percent of 1.2 million people said they would switch to an Android phone rather than give up WeChat if it were banned.[MORE]

Google says it won’t give user data to Hong Kong authorities. BACKGROUND: The 2009 Urumqi religious riot that killed over 200 civilians and injured thousands more was coordinated through Facebook and, when the Government asked Facebook to cooperate with the Police, Facebook refused and has been blocked ever since. The following year, on January 12, 2010 Google announced that it would no longer conform to China’s censorship laws, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.” Twitter and Youtube, which took the same stance, were blocked. [MORE]

The Wall Street Journal's August 5th editorial: “Last year TikTok was accused of censoring videos of Hong Kong protests. ByteDance denied this and said protest videos didn’t appear in users feeds because they weren’t popular with users.” The implication is that it is the duty of TikTok and other social media to promote events like the Hong Kong Protests, but TikTok has not allowed them to show up in newsfeeds as Facebook and Twitter have. It's no secret that Washington uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other outlets to push its geopolitical agenda, and to weaken Russia and China and other anti-imperialist states. However, the new question is: Was Social Media created simply to serve empire? Was this the entire purpose to begin with?  The idea that TikTok is illegitimate because it does not allow Hong Kong Protest videos to blow up in people’s news feeds gives that impression. Social media may have been a geopolitical scheme all along. –Caleb Maupin for  New Eastern Outlook.[MORE]

Geopolitics

A new intelligence arrangement between Beijing and Islamabad is the culmination of a series of previously unreported moves designed to help China exploit its economic investments in Afghanistan. In an unprecedented move, China has granted the Pakistani Defense Ministry access to one of the most secretive gatherings within its military infrastructure as a show of good faith. Little is known about the Joint Staff Department within China's elite Central Military Commission, including who attends, but access has historically been limited only to senior Chinese leaders. However, as a part of Beijing's realization it needs Pakistan's experience in neighboring Afghanistan as well as Islamabad's connections to the insurgent groups operating there who will determine the war-torn country's fate, it has invited a Pakistani general to sit in on its highly restricted meetings as an observer.

 Covid Corner

APPEAL FOR HELP: If you or anyone you know of contracted Covid-19 in 2019 and had their case confirmed by laboratory testing, please contact us here to pass on the information. The Long Read, below, explains why.

The global vaccine race moved from research and development to the market after Russia announced its approval of the world's first COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday. Chinese experts say the move will encourage more nations to accelerate their pace while the COVID-19 pandemic has not yet been brought under control globally. China, the US, Russia and some EU countries are completing COVID-19 vaccine R&D, and China is likely to follow Russia soon. 6 vaccines have entered Phase-III clinical trials, including 3 developed by China - 28 in clinical trials - 139 in preclinical stages.[MORE]

A coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by Sinopharm appeared to be safe and triggered antibody-based immune responses in early and mid-stage trials, researchers said. The shot did not cause any serious side effects, according to a paper published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by scientists who are part of Sinopharm and other China-based disease control authorities and research institutes. The results were based on data from 320 healthy adults in Phase 1 and 2 trials. The candidate triggered robust antibody responses in inoculated people, but it remained unknown if that was sufficient to prevent COVID-19 infection, researchers developing the vaccine said in the paper.[MORE]

Debt Trap Diplomacy

The term “debt trap diplomacy”—meaning that China builds influence over other nations by deliberately causing them to take on more debt than they can handle—was coined in a report commissioned by (and custom designed for) the US State Department and written in May 2018 by Sam Parker of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Parker, who has no expertise in economics or developing economies, wrote that China’s relationship to the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota is a “template” of how China intends to treat other nations–but Hambantota is the only example that critics can come up with and it was not a Chinese idea, but a Sri Lankan government plan to ease the congestion at the only major port of the country, the Colombo Harbor Port, and building an industrial zone in its vicinity.  The three stages of its development , including building a container terminal, cost US$ 1.1 billion.This plan dates back to 2002, long before the BRI was conceived. Building power plants and industrial zones to foster economic activity was part of the “Regaining Sri Lanka” economic program. Most commercial shipping between East Asia and Europe passes 9 nautical miles south of Sri Lanka, the port holds great potential for development of shipping services, transshipment, and industrial zones benefitting from the available transport means to world markets.  [From: Why China’s ‘Debtbook Diplomacy’ is a Hoax by Hussein Askary and Jason Ross, authors: Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa.[READ THEIR REPORT]

Cold War

China is America's top collaborator on science & engineering publications–26% of American international coauthored publications are with China–and America is China's top collaborator: 44% of China's international pubs have a US coauthor. [MORE] 

State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi:  "China’s major achievements in the past decades show that the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics fits China and enjoys the firm support of the Chinese people. It has also benefited the world and people of other countries, including the American people. China-US business ties support 2.6 million American jobs. Trade with China helps each American family save US$850 every year. Over 70,000 American businesses have made investment in China with a total sales volume of US$700 billion. Among them, 97% are making a profit. Even with the trade friction and COVID-19, the vast majority of American companies in China still want to stay and are doubling down on investment in China." [MORE] 

Economist Yu Yongding flags risk of Chinese bank assets being seized overseas: Financial sanctions could come in any form, so Beijing must be prepared for worst-case scenario, says Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China’s central bank. In 2012, Bank of Kunlun was cut off from the dollar payment system, suffocating its cross-border business. Bank of Kunlun, the key Chinese conduit for transactions with Iran,  halted handling payments from the Islamic Republic under pressure of imminent U.S. sanctions against the country, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Kunlun in 2012 for conducting business with Iran and transferring money to an entity linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.[MORE]

Environment

"Our modeling analysis shows if cost trends for renewables continue, 62% of China’s electricity could come from non-fossil sources by 2030 at 11% lower cost than achievable through a business-as-usual approach. Further, China’s power sector could cut half of its 2015 carbon emissions at a cost about 6% lower compared to business-as-usual conditions. An 80% reduction in 2015 carbon emissions is technically feasible as early as 2030, but requires about a 21% higher cost than the business-as-usual approach, for a $21/tCO2 cost of conserved carbon. Rapid cost decrease of renewables and storage accelerates the decarbonization of China’s power system". From NATURE COMMUNICATIONS. By Gang He, Jiang Lin, Froylan Sifuentes, Xu Liu, Nikit Abhyankar & Amol Phadke. [MORE]

Belt & Road

Pakistan approves US$6.8bn railway upgrade, its most expensive project under China’s belt and road plan. Pakistan’s existing 2,655km railway tracks will be upgraded to allow trains to move up to 165km/h – twice as fast as their current speed. Beijing has pledged more than US$60 billion for infrastructure projects in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. [MORE]

Uzbekistan’s Energy Ministry has announced the completion–on time and on budget–of the three-year project to modernise the Kadyrinskaya Hydropower Plant. “The modernisation of the Kadyrinskaya HPP-3 plant is a great step forward in making effective use of Uzbekistan’s hydropower potential and forming a unified system for managing water and energy resources,” Uzbekistan’s Deputy Energy Minister Sherzod Khodjaev said. “Progress in Uzbekistan’s hydropower industry will increase energy efficiency and the contribution of renewable energy to the country’s energy balance,” he added. The project relied on  a leading Chinese hydropower enterprise and a team of Chinese specialists, Uzbekistan’s Energy Ministry said on August 3, adding that the project cost was $27.6 million, and capital was provided through a $9.8 million Eximbank loan from China and $17.8 million from Uzbekistan’s own funds.[MORE]

Covid-19: Cui Bono?

Afterthoughts on the Aftermath

By Godfree Roberts
Cunning Plan
https://youtu.be/ACnqI1l4I9s

Since Coronavirus outbreaks under Presidents Ford and Bush produced only hugely expensive, failed vaccines and political headaches, the policy has been to ignore moderately lethal outbreaks and conflate their results with seasonal flu stats–an eminently sensible policy that many experts have publicly endorsed.

That's why Washington ignored a novel coronavirus when it began circulating here in 2019. Sure, it killed some people in aged care homes and a few youngsters, but the CDC attributed them to vaping (and did not recant when the Mayo Clinic disproved that) and allied Western countries followed suit for the same reasons. Practically speaking, what else could they do?

We could have saved those old lives if we followed WHO guidelines and implemented cordons sanitaires, mass testing and tracing, etc., and disrupted the economy, but the lethality of the virus did not warrant that and the idea was discarded because, even if our governments were competent to manage such a campaign–and Katrina suggested that they are not–the economic cost was literally incalculable.

But there was a fly in that ointment: overlooking the outbreak would only work if every national CDC agreed to follow suit and we knew that China's would not.

The CDC's Linda Quick was in Beijing, embedded at their CCDC, training Chinese field epidemiologists to track and investigate diseases and she told us that, in case of a coronavirus outbreak, Beijing had pre-authorized implementation of the entire WHO playbook nationwide. So we recalled Dr. Quick in July, 2019 and came up with a cunning plan: “Nobody does coronavirus testing and, when the virus reaches China...we’ll blame them for the outbreak!” Win-win! High fives!

Everything went according to plan, pretty much. Our allies didn’t test for Coronavirus; outbreaks were ignored or blamed on vaping; concerned officials were hit with cease and desist orders; NIH Coronavirus meetings were moved to secure facilities and information was released on a need to know basis; a ‘BLAME CHINA!’ memo went out to embassies worldwide; and, when the virus reached China and their detection system worked and they followed WHO guidelines we chortled gleefully and publicly predicted that it would tank their economy and anyway they deserved it because human rights, freedom, Jesus, and slitty eyes. 

We made an enormous, front-page, top-of-the-newscycle fuss about Coronavirus, China, Coronavirus, wet markets, Coronavirus, bats, Coronavirus, people dying in the streets, Coronavirus, brutal crackdowns (always), and a dying, doomed economy caused by Coronavirus. Soon every living being on the planet knew every detail about Coronavirus and every aspect was examined, dissected, discussed, and analyzed. Everyone got a crash course in Coronaviruses. We were primed.

But, like the geniuses who planned the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and everything else, Washington hadn’t considered that, after all that attention, we could no longer ignore the Coronavirus in our midst and, finally, in mid-March, the CDC gave up trying and lifted the testing ban. But it was too late. The virus that was so deadly, so terrifying that China had shut down to deal with it, was in our midst. 

After watching China’s riveting demonstration of State competence and social cohesion–and seeing that they were willing to sacrifice their entire economy for it, we became convinced that Coronavirus was worse than the Black Death and demanded that our government DO SOMETHING. But the government had never planned to do anything and its response was much worse than Katrina and we’re living with its consequences now and will be for years, as we are living with the consequences of the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and everything else. That’s the price we pay for letting unqualified amateurs run our country. 

China, of course, is run by professionals and, after the SARS outbreak, they commissioned three professional studies. 

1. One on prevention, which led to their establishing an expensive, 70,000-node coronavirus detection system that gave every ER physician one-click access to CCDC headquarters. That report was the work of George Gao, current head of the CCDC (and publicly furious that Wuhan politicians meddled with his system).
2. One on treatment: how to deal with tens of thousands of very sick people and feed millions in quarantine. The Communist Party has superb logistic skills so they took that job.
3. And a report on the broad implications of pandemics, which was the work of the old guy, Liu He, to the right of Xi Jinping in the photograph below (who is also in charge of trade negotiations with the US and, simultaneously, the EU, in addition to being buddies with Ray Dalio).
   

   ---

   

Liu He’s report analyzed pandemics from the Plague of Constantine to the Black Death and the Spanish Flu and concluded that they often result in regime changes and even shifts in the balance of global power. So, since the WHO’s plan would get them into the shutdown in an orderly fashion, and the CCP’s ninety-three million members would handle logistics, he recommended focusing on how China would come out of the lockdown. Anyone can shut down an economy, he said, but nobody had ever restarted one from scratch. Beijing set 5,000 PhDs to work with several supercomputers, with this result:

Now it’s over.

We did what we did. 

China did what China did. 

Maybe dirty tricks were involved. 

Maybe it was bad luck or bad judgement.

Maybe we’ll find out and maybe we won’t.

We can ban TikTok and call China names but it makes no difference. 

We lost world leadership and China won just as they planned: without firing a shot.

Time to move on.

_______________________________

T.P. Wilkinson comments: The US cannot allow China’s rise and cannot prevent it by soft means. Nor will an invasion lke Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam work, and the nuclear option is out of the question. The most viable option is to destroy China with bioweapons. The coronavirus was applied via US Army athletes in Wuhan during the World Military Games on Oct 28–27.  The US may have attempted to immunize the general population with a less virulent coronavirus, possibly SARS-CoV-1 which would explain why the White House called the pandemic ‘a hoax’. 

Now there are too many people on the gravy train. The peculiar aspect of this kind of suppression is its fundamental character: having grasped the dependence of all research and all careers on grant-based research, the agents know that no one will admit to something whose truth would destroy their personal career. The competition for grants stimulates compliance. The naive will always ask, "Why would they do that?" because there is little awareness of how organisational power is exerted, especially in science and medicine, so it is not enough to show that the story has been manipulated. One has to show how and why the innocent actors participate in the fraud–wittingly and unwittingly.

Academic institutions, especially the ancient ones, have always served Church or State power. Business corporations seized power a century ago and took control of the patronage system called ‘Science’. If Covid-19 is a global armed propaganda operation, the rollout required control over the ‘science,’  aggravated by the fact that, despite the vanguard work done in Russia and China, the Anglo-American elite controls the world's scientific establishment. In other words, since the corruption is systemic, it is hard to isolate the Covid project as a special case.

One only has to consider that in the US the NIH is the most powerful funder of the establishment medical journals. The interlocking directorates assure that all the leading journals know and follow the party line. The US journals have the most prestige in the world, so publishing a gross deviation from them is no help for second- or third-tier journals. Since science, medicine and technology are all covered by the halo of objectivity - despite evidence to the contrary- not even Chinese or Russian scientists would refuse fellowships in the US or UK offhand.

I believe that is also why (aside from the national security aspect) China remains tight lipped with respect to the Western story–merely denying that it caused anything or was attacked.

Yes, there is a story here, but I fear it is an archive and forensic report- maybe even an autopsy. Web sources are being scrubbed daily which makes even archival research difficult. A chronology is always needed because the reader usually cannot recall even yesterday's weather or what he ate for dinner.

If you, or anyone you know, contracted Covid-19 in 2019 and the infection was confirmed by laboratory testing, please contact the author immediately.