@ChuYang_Journ
 
To achieve its “zero Covid” goal on the 19th, Guiyang transfers positives and close contacts to surrounding counties. Early hours of this morning, a transfer bus heading to Libo had a rollover accident, which tragically killed 27 passengers. 20 people are still under treatment.
 

@ChuYang_Journ
 
Hashtag of the incident is getting trendy on Weibo. Briefly went through the posts. The dominant voices are critical of extreme Covid  policies and measures. It is only a matter of time before the topic is censored.
 

@willripleyCNN
 
Taiwan has experienced more than 50 earthquakes in the last 24 hours since a 6.4 quake hit Hualien County on Saturday and a stronger 6.9 quake on Sunday. Two of those small quakes hit during my live report from Taipei just now...and three more since then.

Don't touch foreigners, warns senior health official after China's first monkeypox case

A top Chinese health official has warned people against touching foreigners, a day after mainland China confirmed its first case of monkeypox.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo on Saturday that the country's Covid-19 restrictions and tight border controls had thus far prevented the spread of monkeypox -- until a case "slipped through the net."

"It is necessary and important to strengthen the monitoring and prevention of monkeypox," Wu wrote in his post, emphasizing the risk of disease spreading through international travel and close contact. He gave five recommendations for the public -- the first being, "Do not have skin-to-skin contact with foreigners."

@WilliamYang120
 
"#Taiwan’s de facto ambassador in London received a special invitation to sign the book of condolence for the Queen, the island’s foreign ministry said, adding he was given the same treatment as other dignitaries."

In early April 2020, Chinese authorities in the southern city of Guangzhou, Guangdong province, which has China’s largest African community, began a campaign to forcibly test Africans for the coronavirus, and ordered them to self-isolate or to quarantine in designated hotels. Landlords then evicted African residents, forcing many to sleep on the street, and hotels, shops, and restaurants refused African customers. Other foreign groups have generally not been subjected to similar treatment.

On April 12, Guangdong authorities announced that all foreigners in the province must accept “Covid-19 prevention and containment measures” including “testing, sampling and quarantine.” In practice, the authorities just targeted Africans for forced testing and quarantine. They visited homes of African residents, testing them on the spot or instructing them to take a test at a hospital. Some were ordered to self-isolate at home with surveillance cameras or alarms installed outside of their apartments.
 
There was no evident scientific basis for the policy. Most imported cases of Covid-19 to the province were Chinese nationals returning from abroad. Many Africans had already tested negative for coronavirus, had no recent travel history, or had not been in contact with known Covid-19 patients.
Elsewhere in China, some Africans reported police and local officials had harassed them, and hospitals and restaurants turned them away.

the Han majority has systematically targeted the Black community as being super-spreaders of COVID-19. As a recent migrant-minority community in China, the Black experience has been defined by vulgar racism, exploitation, and stigmatization. This is not surprising, as anti-black racism in China is embedded in Han-minzu racialist ideologies, which perceive Blackness as occupying the bottom of the racial totem pole (Dikötter, 1992; 1997). In the context of COVID-19, the Black community in China was again a target of multiple racial projects (Omi & Winant, 1994) that sought to label their bodies as diseased and physical presence as a threat to the viability and safety of the Han majority. The resulting actions led to wholescale banning of Black individuals from entering restaurants, engaging in business transactions, seeking medical attention in hospitals, renting apartments, and were forced into government-sanctioned quarantines (Marsh, 2020).

One response to this discrimination manifested on the social media platform, Twitter, which was used by the victims of the targeted attacks and activists alike to expose how the Chinese government is systematically facilitating discriminatory policies against Black migrants in China.

the reality is that the experience of the Black community in China in the context of COVID-19 is a reflection of a deeply embedded racial project in which Han Chinese are believed to be culturally and racially superior to other ethnic minorities in China, including the Black migrant community (Dikötter, 1992).

Even symbolic Blackness in Han culture reflects the identifier of the labor class who are labeled colloquially, “black-headed people” (Dikötter, 1992, p. 11). The negative portrayal of the Black community is sourced in a larger history where they were targeted and racialized in previous epidemics in fact, “race-making of people, viruses, and the places they share became a powerful means by which Chinese public health professionals made sense of infectious disease” (Mason, 2015, p. 2).

The turning point in the global media's attention on anti-Black racism in China was the viral post of a local McDonald's restaurant hanging a sign in the front door stating, “we’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant. For the sake of your health consciously notify the local police for medical isolation, please understand the inconvenience caused” (Deabler, 2020). Such an act showed the normalization of discriminatory behavior in contemporary China, where Han owned stores often hang signs banning the entrance of Blacks, Uyghurs, and other minorities.

Our analysis further revealed how anti-Black racism is embedded in Chinese politics and society, facilitating the indiscriminate, lived racism on Black bodies and lives.

https://twitter.com/axios/status/1571689927078707200
 
President Biden again vowed in an interview this evening that American forces would defend Taiwan if China's military invaded the self-governing island

In the speech, Tsai laid out “four commitments”: that the nation will adhere to a free and democratic constitutional system; that the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other; that the nation will resist annexation or encroachment upon its sovereignty; and that the nation’s future must be decided in accordance with the will of Taiwanese.

Biden Says He Warned Xi of Investment Chill If China Backs Putin

President Joe Biden said he warned Chinese President Xi Jinping it would be a “gigantic mistake” to violate sanctions imposed on Russia, but that there’s been no indication that Beijing has provided weapons to Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.

“Not long after that, I called President Xi -- not to threaten at all, just to say to him, ‘we’ve met many times.’ And I said, ‘if you think that Americans and others are going to continue to invest in China based on your violating the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia, I think you’re making a gigantic mistake, but that’s your decision to make,’” Biden said.

Biden told CBS there’s so far no sign of material support for Russia by China. “Thus far, there’s no indication they’ve put forward weapons or other things that Russia has wanted,” he said, declining to elaborate.

The South Korean government has reportedly advanced the deployment of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile defense system, by granting more land to the US for the operation of the unit in Seongju, a move that represents a risky path of enhancing Seoul's alliance with Washington at the cost of China ties, analysts said.
 
Observers warned that escalation of the situation and further deployment of THAAD risks dragging China-South Korea relations into the abyss again, which is against South Korean interests, as the US is never a reliable ally