Beijing's Fear of "Splittism"

"The Chinese police's stability maintenance methods directed toward me were becoming more and more cruel and crazy." 

"They detained me at will without following legal procedures, taking my cellphone and even giving me a psychiatric evaluation."

"I can no longer continue to accept the ravaging of my personal dignity, the trampling of my honour and the threat to my body."

"I am willing to wait for months, because I feel safe in Taiwan. I want to go to the United States. I think Taiwan is very safe and there are no security problems. Taiwan has democracy and liberty as its shelter, so Taiwan is safe for me personally. But security is not my first option in where I settle, I have a lot of work to do in the US."

Chen Siming, Chinese dissident, Taipei, Taiwan

Chinese dissident Cheng Siming is holed up in the transit lounge at Taiwan’s Taoyuan international airport. Photograph: AP

 

Chinese dissident, Chen Siming who habitually made it a practise to commemorate the1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 in Beijing has fled China, arriving in Taiwan, searching for aid to enable him to seek asylum in the United States or Canada. He posted a video on Twitter, stating that he had arrived to the transit area at Taoyuan International Airport, in a bid to escape political persecution in China.

How he was able to make the trip, travelling to Taiwan remains unclear, but he explained he had left China on July 22. Self-governing Taiwan has its own concerns over persecution by Beijing which considers the island to be part of greater China and has plans to military invade at some point, to claim the sundered territory as its own which has been independent, calling itself the Republic of China since 1949.

Public memorials honouring the protesters who were killed in the 1989 crackdown -- launched by the Chinese Communist Party against Chinese citizens, mostly university students who advocated for democracy -- are forbidden by Beijing. Anyone who persists in recognizing the event attracts the attention of police, risking detention and/or arrest for their troubles.

According to Mr. Chen, in 2017, police took him into detention custody and that has been repeated every year since then in reaction to his annual commemoration of the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the death of thousands of protesters. The shortest length of time he was detained in prison was for week's punishing stay, as opposed to longer stretches of time that tended to 15 days at a time.

 

Chen Siming sits beside a notice that reads ‘Commemorate June 4 on 2021 June 4’ in central China’s Hunan province on that day. Photograph: AP

 

Authorities in Hunan province detained Chen in May, following a posting he made on social media to commemorate the crackdown. State security police harassment over the years during "sensitive periods" around the anniversary date have been relentless. Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese rights group, believes Mr. Chen was held in a detention centre in Zhuzhou, Hunan province.

"If Chen Siming is returned to China he faces an almost certain risk of detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and an unfair trial", stated William Nee, research and advocacy coordinator for the rights group, urging Taiwan to assist Chen in his search for asylum abroad. 

Rahile Dawut   Dui Hua Foundation/Lisa Ross

Rahile Dawut, a Uyghur academic who disappeared six years ago during Beijing's crackdown in Xinjiang, hasn't been merely harassed, her life made miserable. She was given a life sentence in prison, according to Dui Hua, a California-based human rights group that advocates for political prisoners in China.  The 57-year-old professor, a leading scholar on Uyghur folklore, was convicted in 2018 on charges of endangering state security through her promotion of "splittism".

China is devoted to the principle of 'harmony', that all its 1.3 billion residents representing a large population of varied ethnic, social and religious groups from Tibetan Buddhists to Chinese Christians, to Muslim Turkmen and Uyghurs, integrate into Han Chinese society. "Splittism", the movement of Tibetans to have their autonomy restored, or Muslims their homelands carved out of the forced union with China, is viewed as subversive.

Ms. Dawut lost an appeal of her sentence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region High People's Court. She ranks among over 300 intellectuals, artists and writers detained in Xinjiang, a reflection of a government campaign whose aim is to assimilate China's Muslim minority -- to promote ethnic harmony. In other words, erase any vestiges of an alter-culture, -religion, or -society.

Science Pulling Together to Avoid Exposing China's Wuhan Responsibility

"These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons." 

Viscount Ridley, co-author, Viral: the search for the origin of COVID

"He [Prof.Mike Farzan, Scripps Research] is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time [to] explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely."

"I think this becomes a question of how do  you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the laboratory in Wuhan, how much could be in nature -- accidental release or natural event?"

"I am 70:30 or 60:40."

Jeremy Farrar, director, Wellcome Trust

"[The furin cleavage site] strikes me as unusual."

"I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan."

Professor Andrew Rambaut, University of Edinburgh

"Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular."

Dr.Ron Fouchier, U.S. biosecurity expert

"I share  your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony."

Dr.Francis Collins, U.S. National Institutes of Health

 

Wuhan Institute of Virology: Associated Press

Harmony, now that's a word describing a social condition that Beijing is particularly fond of. Harmony means that suspicions are set aside, along with accusations. And that includes an entire range of human social constructs along with state interventions and initiatives, including the co-opting of sovereign nations into a giant grip as China expands its own sovereignty in control and command. It includes penalties and punishment for doubting Beijing's right to exercise its authority within its sovereign ambit so mass re-education and slave labour is China's internal business and no other countries'.

And harmony is best achieved by Beijing's word being taken for what it is not; trustworthy. The pathogen that has proven so deadly to so many millions around the globe is a naturally evolving phenomenon, according to Beijing, a zoonotic pathogen that has roiled the world body like no other such has before it, on a scale to alter human social interaction, take down the world economic order, and re-order the global community on a scale previously unimagined.

Whether or not it is even proven that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 and ultimately all its mutated nuances plaguing the world was a laboratory escapee from a highly secure lab that was not sufficiently secure is one thing; China's response to the original virus in containment within China with little concern for its escape out of China in maintaining open national borders and accusing other countries of racism for closing theirs, stands as a special example of abandonment of responsibility.

And the world's leading scientists in the field of deadly pathogens in the interests of an open scientific community of trust and cooperation where scientists from all over the world can freely exchange between themselves in communicating their latest discoveries is quite wonderful in theory, but in practise may leave something to be desired; allowing the world's leading human-rights suppressor and oppressor to go on denying any role in the mass destruction the world faces.

Elite British and American scientists appear to have more or less agreed that COVID-19 likely was an accidental release from a secure laboratory's explorations in virus attributes and combinations; science is nothing if not curious and unleashing potentially destructive organisms in the conceited belief they are more than capable of restraining the results to a closed laboratory setting does on occasion result in breakaway accidents; unfortunate occurrences at the mild end, catastrophic in this particular instance.

Information has now come to light of the discussions that took place between scientists of great renown and their opinion of the Wuhan virus that speedily took over the world. "A likely explanation", said an email from Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust focused on health research based in London being that COVID had evolved rapidly from a SARS-type virus within human tissue in a low-security laboratory. This was a communication received by Dr.Anthony Fauci and Dr.Francis Collins of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, that such evolution may have "accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans".

A teleconference between a dozen scientists on February 1, 2020 led to a series of emails, Dr.Farrar's one of them, some refuting the theory of an escaped virus, urging caution, and others more convinced of the likelihood of a virus escape. Members of the U.S. House Oversight committee granted access to the documents led to their becoming publicly available. The emails are indication that scientists were actively attempting to close the debate into a laboratory leak theory.

Of particular concern was a part of COVID-19 called the furin cleavage site, representing a section of the spike protein aiding the virus entry into human cells, creating its huge infectiousness capacity. Scientific institutions in possession of these emails repeatedly spurned outside efforts to publish their content. The University of Edinburgh as an example refused a Freedom of Information request to scrutinize Dr.Rambaut's emails that claimed "disclosure would be likely to endanger the physical or mental health and safety of individuals".

Ilustracija/AFP