Access to the cliff village of Atulieer, Zhaojue county, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Sichuan province. Photo: IC Photo via AFP
A three-minute video that went viral showed up in my e-mail inbox. The video, a version of which was posted by the British Broadcasting Corporation among others, showed cliff dwellers clambering up and down a steel ladder in the mountainous southern region of China.
There were women carrying heavy appliances on their backs, elderly women being piggybacked by younger men, a young mother with an infant on her back and a rope on her hand tied to a toddler, all making their way up the vertical ladder. At the top, they stepped on ledges narrower than the length of their feet as they negotiated the cliffside path to their homes.
Just seeing the sheer drop turned my legs to jelly, but the villagers sauntered with casual aplomb as if taking a routine stroll through the park.
The clifftop village called Atulieer is at the southern edge of Sichuan province. At a 1,600-meter elevation, the village consisted of 84 households belonging to the Yi ethnic minority. Four years ago, a newspaper showed photos of schoolchildren going up and down an 800-meter network of rattan ladders with no handrails.
Their school was located at the bottom of the cliff. One couple would not let their daughter attend school until she was 11, when they felt she was strong enough to “walk” to school safely.
After the national publicity, the local government built a 2.8-kilometer network of steel ladders with handrails along the face of the cliff. The new ladders made it much easier for the villagers to take their produce to market, cutting the travel time from three hours to one.
This year, as part of China’s poverty alleviation program, the 84 households are being relocated to new apartments about 70km from the cliff dwellings. The residents will have kitchens, toilets and running water for the first time in their lives. They will purchase their apartments at less than one-thirtieth of market rate.
They will also participate in the local economy without the disadvantage of having to scale the cliff, and their children can attend school on level ground.
Because of the national publicity on the village, it will be turned into a tourist attraction with a cablecar for the tourists. Some of the cliff homes have been converted into guest houses. In case you’re interested, if is located in Zhaojue in Sichuan province. Tourism will become an important source of income for these Yi minority people.
Some time in history, the Yi people found rich farmland at the top of the cliffs and have settled there since the Yuan dynasty (800-900 years ago). For generations, they enjoyed a life of self-sufficiency and feeling of security free from the dangers of marauding soldiers and bandits. But the modern economy has passed them by and their location became a severe handicap as they were not able to keep up with modern development and progress.
This year is the turn of the clifftop village to be part of the national poverty alleviation program. According China’s State Statistics Bureau, by the end of 2012, there were nearly 100 million people in rural areas living below the poverty line. By the end of 2019, there were only 5.5 million such people.
By end of this year, the headcount of those still living in poverty will be fewer by at least the 84 households that moved to their new quarters.
Part 2: The Republican senator's accusations are not supported by facts on the ground, or by science
Politicocalled Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas the No. 1 coronavirus China hawk. This was not an honorific title but well-earned and well deserved. He has been the most vicious attack dog on State Secretary Mike Pompeo’sblame Chinateam.
As early as January, when the world was just beginning to grasp the full significance of the novel coronavirus, Cotton charged that the virus came from the virology lab in Wuhan. He planted the seeds of accusation without providing any supporting evidence, but that’s how propaganda is supposed to work.
Sometimes he shared with the media that it may have been an accident that the lab let the virus loose. Other times he hinted that the lab may have created the virus to let loose on the world. His allegations were carefully vague so that he could not be pinned down.
Pompeo and President Donald Trump play the same blame game even though the US Director of National Intelligence issued a press releasestating: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” (Of course, this statement is subject to withdrawal, if the boss threatens to fire the Director.)
Cotton follows Ferguson
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Cotton also accused China of deliberately letting the virus loose on the world. He was drawing on Niall Ferguson’s assertion that China let international flight depart from Wuhan, which was factually incorrect. Daniel Bell, a fellow academic showed Ferguson that the Wuhan airport shutdown all flights, not just domestic on January 23. Ferguson would not retract but stand by his lie.
It’s widely recognized that every lie diminishes the reputation of the perpetrator, but Cotton has an ulterior motive. He wants to sue China for compensation for the economic damages and lives lost due to Covid-19. Of course, he would never call the contagion by the official name. To him, it’s always the “Chinese” virus.
Cotton cleverly thought he could lead a lawsuit to cancel the trillion-dollar IOU the US government owes China. Frankly, that’s a lot of trouble to weasel out of a trillion-dollar debt. It would be much easier for the fed to simply print one or two or three trillion dollars with the snap of Congressional fingers. Larry Kudlow, President’s economic advisor, also shuddered at the thought of what such a default would do to the credit worthiness of the dollar.
More recently, Cotton thought out loud on Fox News that it was fine for students from China to come to the US to study Shakespeare but not for quantum computing or artificial intelligence. That was a strange juxtaposition.
Study football at Arkansas
Of course, if Chinese students aspire to become Shakespeare scholars, they would surely apply to Oxford and Cambridge. University of Arkansas might be a back-up choice if the student couldn’t get into University of Alabama to study college football.
Cotton appears to be under the notion that Chinese students majoring in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) come to the US to steal secrets. Quantum computing and artificial intelligence happens to be two disciplines that Americans scholars are just as likely to go to China to study as vice versa. In some ways, China is as up to date and may be even ahead of the US.
It’s apparent that Cotton doesn’t understand much about STEM education in the college and post-graduate level. There is a bit over 1 million international students studying in the US and slightly over one-third is from China. Most of them are self-funded by their families. Since Beijing is not paying their way, there’s no need to spy for their tuition.
More importantly, foreign students pay full tuition and represents a significant source of revenue for American colleges and universities.
Especially at the graduate school level, university STEM departments depend on the quality of the students to maintain the quality of the research output and thus maintaining their reputation for excellence. A recent surveyshowed that among nations, students from China ranked second highest in I.Q. while the American students came in at No. 28. That’s why top tier schools such as MIT, Stanford and others aggressively recruit students from China.
Another surprising revelation was that the top five most popular majors among the Chinese students were respectively business management, computer science, finance, mathematics and economics. This suggests that students from China are not just coming for STEM but just as interested in learning how to manage businesses the way it is done in the West.
Students from China have discovered that they are four times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime while in the US (and this was before the coronavirus induced xenophobia) than if they stayed home. In addition, with Trump’s randomly arbitrary granting of student visas and visa renewals, interest in studying in the US is flagging. A decade ago, enrollment in the US increased by nearly 30% every year. For the academic year of 2018-19, the increase was only 1.7%.
Lancet: the U.S. screwed up
Cotton was also part of the chorus accusing China of covering up the seriousness of the virus. Not so, said Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of Lancet, who praised China’s international cooperation and pointed to five papers published in January. It was U.S., U.K. and other countries in the West that squandered February and March, he lamented.
Lancet is world renown, peer reviewed, medical research scientific journal. An open statement signed by 27 scientists from around the world was published on February 19in Lancet declaring their solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.
Their open letter in part said: The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
At the end of April, the world was greeted with the news that the first double blind, international study has found Remdesivir made by Gilead to be 30% more effective in helping a patient recover from Covid-19. Not a miraculous cure or vaccine to be sure, but a step in the right direction and the stock market responded positively.
The paperwas published in Lancet and the title of the paper included the words: “a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial.” The clinical trials were performed in China and the investigators were Chinese. It’s an example of the benefits of international collaboration and cooperation.
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, was often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Even if Pompeo, Cotton et al., succeed in blackening China and obscuring its contribution, how will the world and the American people benefit from the absence of cross border collaboration? How will lies cure America of the Covid-19 epidemic?
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, was a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was Hitler’s minister of propaganda from 1933 to the end of World War II. Whether Goebbels actually said that or not doesn’t matter anymore. It had been attributed to him so often and for so long, it might as well be true.
Same rule applies today. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has been busy acting as President Donald Trump’s chief minister of propaganda blaming China for every conceivable and inconceivable action and non-action as related to the novel coronavirus.
Although Pompeo comes to his current job with impressive qualifications for fabrication, drawing on his tenure as former head of CIA, he is not just lying for self-amusement. He has to orchestrate the maximum blame game on China to cover up for the fumbling incompetence of the Trump administration in dealing with Covid-19.
Just as the latest announced death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. exceeded 26% of the world’s total, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, triumphantly proclaimed that combating the epidemic was an “American success story.” Since the U.S. represents less than 5% of the world’s total population, it’s hard to imagine what a less than success story would have looked like.
But no, Kushner’s boast should not be regarded as an amateur attempt at propaganda. It was simply blatant bloviating baloney. Pompeo has much more capable core of adjutants to carry out the Nazi like tactics of misinformation.
One prominent example comes to mind is Niall Ferguson. He put his considerable academic reputation behind his assertion that that China deliberately contaminate the world by permitting international air travel from Wuhan even as domestic travel was locked down. Needless to say, this revelation caused quite a sensation, perfect for Pompeo’s blame game.
As propaganda goes, Pompeo could not have been given a more powerful cudgel against China. Unfortunately, it was not true.
Another scholar, Professor Daniel Bell, did fact check on Ferguson’s claim. To save Ferguson from public embarrassment, Bell privately contacted him to tell him that the Flightstats from Wuhan airport showed that all the flights, domestic and international, were shutdown from Wuhan at noon on January 23. Therefore, the charge that China deliberately let air passengers contaminate the world was untrue.
Ferguson could have admitted to making an error and issued a retraction, but that’s not how Nazi style propaganda works. He didn’t back down but went public with his reply. He said, in his blog, “Even if, as seems on balance likely, no flights left Wuhan for domestic or foreign destinations after January 23.…” He goes on to contend that enough people had been allowed to leave Wuhan because of the Chinese New Year before January 23, and thus his claim was not wrong. How lame can he get?
Both Bell and Ferguson own first rate academic credentials and have published many books. Bell is teaching in China while Ferguson is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on Stanford University. The one blemish on Ferguson’s record was for teaming with a Republican student group in attempting to uncover dirt on a progressive student activist whose pointed criticism was annoying him. As a result of the scandal, he had to resign from a conference chairmanship.
Ferguson’s affiliation with Hoover has a consequential multiplier effect. His notoriety from his China attack set a precedent for other rightwing colleagues in Hoover to join the chorus castigating China. Lanhee Chen, formerly a young staffer for Mitt Romney and now also at Hoover, has been especially energetic making the media rounds adding his voice to the lies scripted by the chief minister of propaganda. It’s not for certain that he knows much about China, but he knows how to take the cue from Pompeo, Ferguson et al.
Next installment: profile of another adjutant minister of propaganda, Senator Tom Cotton.
Republican campaign strategy: blame it all on China
It’s official now. For the coming election, the Republican Party will bet the house blaming everything on China. The 57 page “Corona Big Book” prepared by O’Donnell and Associates, the party’s strategist, outlined all the waysto lay the blame on China, to accuse the Democrats for being soft on China and to vow to make China pay for the coronavirus.
This GOP strategy leaves no room for Joe Biden and the Democrats to out trump Trump. The “Book” also recommends not to bother defending President Donald Trump. In other words, all offense and no defense. Presumably, the strategists are clear-eyed and can see that Trump is not defensible.
The PBS Newshourreported that at the daily coronavirus briefing Trump spoke, on the average, four times longer than the combined times for his two scientific advisors, Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci. His White House staff, not wishing to see daily displays riddled with gaffs, wanted to cancel these briefing, but Trump refused because he doesn’t want to miss any opportunity for exposure on national TV.
Bleach as home remedy
Needless to say, his off-the-cuff utterances can become rich material for the Biden camp to build into campaign spots. Why not, for example, interview some New Yorker who drank bleach as a cure for Covid-19 and ask that person what he/she thought of Trump prescribing without a license?
A key part of the GOP strategy is to accuse China of months of cover up and hiding the virus from the world. Many, including me, have not been able to find any possible gaps in the timeline communicated from China that could span anywhere close to a month.
A more recentanalysiswas posted last week by Vijay Prashad. He carefully examined the events inside China and the Chinese interaction with the World Health Organization from December 31 to the end of January. He could not find any supporting evidence for even the one western mediathat claimed China withheld information on the outbreak for 6 days from January 14 to 20.
From January 24, 2020 to February 20, researchersfrom China published 15 scientific articles in New England Journal of Medicine, Lancetand Journal of American Medical Association, each paper reporting on the ongoing progress on their investigations of the novel coronavirus. Publishing at such a rate in peer reviewed scientific journals was phenomenal and hardly consistent with any conspiracy to withhold data and information from the world.
Trump abetted by Dr. Deborah Birx also pointed to the orders of magnitude lower death rate from China compared to the western countries as a clear indication that China has been lying. Not so fast, said John Walshin Asia Times. China’s death rate was consistent with neighboring countries in Asia and Australia.
The real difference was that western countries ignored the lessons learned in China while the neighbors in Asia did not. Lockdown and social distance were absolutely necessary to flatten the curve and bring the contagion to heel, which many states in America were observing more in the breach.
If the Biden advisers decide to mine the alluvial nuggets that Trump has carelessly strewed about and treat them as issues to draw attention to his ineptitude and disqualifiers as president, they can start with the Covid-19 timeline in the U.S. There are many versions and this is just one. This timeline compilation identified the days Trump played golf, the days spent on the road campaigning, and a list of all the inconsistent and contradictory statements he made to the press.
Intriguingly enough, the timeline said Trump was first warned about the virus on January 8, which he ignored.
Timeline exposes Trump’s malfeasance
It turned out that the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention had contacted the U.S. counterpart in Atlanta on January 3to inform Dr. Robert Redfield of the appearance of as yet unidentified, pneumonia inducing virus. It took a few days for this news to filter its way through Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, to Trump. According to insiders, Trump either did not regard Azar highly or the department particularly important or both and did not take the report seriously.
If a cover-up took place, it was due to Trump’s negligence and not taking his responsibility seriously. Looking at the timetable, the Biden camp can see that Trump frittered away more than 6 weeks. Those were precious period that the Trump White House should have been using to mobilize the nation and prepare to deal with the invasion of Covid-19.
Laying the blame on China is to distract and take attention away from the malfeasance of the Trump administration. Other than Trump’s core team, everybody else in the world understands that the blame game accomplishes nothing, and worldwide collaboration is required to bring the pandemic under control.
There is another reason to take a different approach to using the Covid-19 as a campaign issue. By calling the novel coronavirus the Chinese virus, the Trump administration has made Asians living in America targets of racial epithets and physical attacks. There are around 20 million Asian Americans in America. Biden can win their support by just referring the virus as Covid-19, the official WHO designated name. Of course, proactively defending Asian American civil rights would also be the right thing to do.
The other part of the GOP strategy is to accuse Biden and the Democratic Party for being soft on China. What should Biden do? To deny being soft on China or to show that he is tougher on China than Trump would be a losing proposition. Every denial would prompt another challenge until the defense runs out of responses.
Instead the Biden camp should turn the issue on its head and examine what Trump being “hard” on China has done for the American people.
Trump’s damage
The most obvious is the tariff war initiated by Trump. Biden’s team of economists should study the amount of “free” money collected from the tariff for America (a point of pride for Trump) vs. how much businesses and farmers lost in export sales. Also, how much prices went up because of the duty on imports from China and therefore the rise in cost of living for the American people.
Trump equates free trade to be equal bi-direction volume of trade and considers trade deficit to be a personal affront. When Trump launched the trade war, he thought he would reduce the trade imbalance. The last time I looked in Augustlast year, the trade deficit with China actually increased and had not narrowed.
Candidate Biden also needs to think about the difficult tasks after the election if he wins. If the pandemic is still around, he will have to work with China to fight the contagion together. If the infections are already under control, he will need to come up with a mutually beneficial economic expansion plan to help the US recover.
He will face a tough challenge. The animosity toward China has been stoked to hystericallevels by partisans on the left and the right. The tension was heightened by the novel coronavirus. Biden will need the courage and wisdom to articulate a vision where China and the U.S. doesn’t have to be friends but can openly trade and do business together. The more activity the two countries do together, the more they will stimulate each other’s economy and hasten recovery.
The International Monetary Fund is calling the pandemic “the great lockdown” and a crisis like no other in history. Their best guess projection for the global economic growth in 2020 is an unprecedented negative 3%. The U.S. is projected to shrink by -5.9%. The only economies expected to end the year on the plus side are China at 1.2% and India at 1.9%.
A lot of uncertainties and unknown lie ahead. The actual economic projections could be way off but the relative difference IMF assigns for China and the U.S. is saying that should the two countries continue to exchange body blows, China will emerge better off than the U.S. even if both end up losers.
Such dire IMF forecast should fortify Biden as he dismisses the right wing pushing to totally decouple with China. No one spelled out the insanity of decoupling with China more lucidly than Peter Beinart in the Atlantic.The Biden brain trust would do well to study this essay carefully and map out a plan for the future for growth, and avoid the destructive path Trump has embarked.
Dr. Koo has often provided non-mainstream views of US-China relations, racial profiling of Chinese in America, business strategies for Asia, and travelogues of China, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Middle East.
George came to the U.S. as a child from China, grew up in Seattle and educated at MIT, Stevens Institute and Santa Clara Univ.
Dr. Koo has recently retired from a world leading advisory services firm where he advised clients on their China strategies and business operations. He is founder and former managing director of International Strategic Alliances.
He is a former member of the board of directors of Las Vegas Sands and now defunct New America Media and a current board member of Freschfields LLC, a green building platform start-up.
Dr. Koo is a frequent speaker in various public forums on China and U.S. China bilateral relations. He writes for online Asia Times.
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