Wikipedia has suffered an “infiltration” that sought to advance the aims of China, the US non-profit organisation that owns the volunteer-edited encyclopaedia has said.
The Wikimedia Foundation told BBC News the infiltration had threatened the “very foundations of Wikipedia”.
The foundation banned seven editors linked to a mainland China group.
Wikimedians of Mainland China accused the foundation of “baselessly slandering a small group of people”.
It turns out a 2016 edition of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s memoirs was not his family’s first foray into Chinese state-run book publishing.
In 2005, a Communist Party-affiliated company won the family’s approval — and a preface from brother Sacha Trudeau — for a Chinese-language edition of a book their father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, co-authored in the 1960s.
A high-ranking officer in the People’s Liberation Army, recently lauded by President Xi Jinping for developing a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, collaborated on Ebola research with one of the scientists who was later fired from Canada’s high-security infectious disease laboratory in Winnipeg.
The joint research conducted by Major-General Chen Wei and former Canadian government lab scientist Xiangguo Qiu indicates that co-operation between the Chinese military and scientists at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) went much higher than was previously known. The People’s Liberation Army is the military wing of China’s ruling Communist Party.
Maj.-Gen. Chen Wei and Dr. Qiu, who until recently headed the vaccine development and antiviral therapies section at the Winnipeg lab, collaborated on two scientific papers on Ebola, in 2016 and 2020.
Those papers did not identify Maj.-Gen. Chen as a high-ranking officer and the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist and virologist. Instead, she is identified as Wei Chen, who held a PHD and worked at the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, part of the Academy of Military Science.
The United States is starting a new partnership on defence and security issues and Canada is not involved.
The new alliance called AUKUS, a play on the names of the countries involved, will be focused on being a counterbalance to China.
“Through AUKUS, our governments will strengthen the ability of each to support our security and defense interests, building on our longstanding and ongoing bilateral ties,” a joint statement said.
Goodness China is angry, Justin is sad.
Aukus: China denounces ‘irresponsible’ US-UK-Australia pact
China has denounced a historic security pact between the US, UK and Australia, describing the alliance as “extremely irresponsible” and “narrow minded”.
The Aukus pact, which was announced on Wednesday, will see the US and UK provide Australia with the technology to build nuclear-powered submarines.
It is being widely viewed as an effort to counter China’s influence in the contested South China Sea.
The region has been a flashpoint for years and tensions there remain high.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the newly-announced alliance risked “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race”.
A new report, “Underwater: Human Rights Impacts of a China Belt and Road Project in Cambodia,” has found that one of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Cambodia — a hydroelectric dam known as the Lower Sesan 2, completed in 2018 — resulted in severe human rights violations. The project displaced nearly 5,000 mainly indigenous people and ethnic minorities, who had lived in villages along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers for generations, earning a living from fishing and agriculture. The project, the report estimates, negatively affected the lives of tens of thousands of other locals, who depend on fishing in the rivers for food and income. The project compromised locals’ food security, and their losses were either inadequately compensated or not compensated at all. The Lower Sesan 2 is just one out of seven BRI hydroelectric projects in Cambodia.
President Biden is standing by Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, despite accusations he committed treason during the final weeks of the Trump administration by reassuring his Chinese counterpart that then-President Trump would not attack Beijing.
“I have great confidence in Gen. Milley,” Biden responded to reporters on Wednesday, moments after press secretary Jen Psaki appeared to excuse Milley’s alleged conduct as acceptable in the “context of this period and time in history” given that he did so while Trump was in his final days as commander in chief and amid the backdrop of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Beijing on Tuesday vowed to increase oversight of China’s already heavily censored internet as part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s efforts to craft a more “civilized” cyberspace environment based on the “guiding status of Marxism,” Xinhua reported.
Canada’s Conservative Party has China in its election crosshairs amid the worst period of diplomatic relations in recent history – prompting a strong pushback from Beijing’s ambassador and state media, which lambasted the opposition party’s “hostile” platform for catering to “toxic” anti-China sentiment.
SCMP propaganda.
The Trudeau government is advising Canadian business on how to comply with China’s Orwellian social credit system as it applies to companies. A PPC government will not encourage anyone to do business there. https://t.co/GlXxYFpFLu pic.twitter.com/BmFxUonZHV
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) September 13, 2021
“If we cannot resolve our differences, please shut up,” Qin reportedly said in a private Zoom meeting hosted by the National Committee on United States-China Relations, a New York-based nonprofit, late last month.
“… I have believed for some time—and our extraordinarily rapid and ill-conceived evacuation of Afghanistan, leaving behind not only Bagram but enough U.S. weaponry to make the Taliban’s army nearly equivalent to the Italian’s, not to mention putting our advanced military technology in the hands of the Chinese and the Russians, only underscores this—that a large percentage of our Democratic Party leadership as well as a tragically significant percentage of the Republican have long believed the Chinese regime are winning the battle between China and America for global hegemony. They are therefore, overtly or covertly, consciously or subconsciously, throwing in with the Chinese side for their own economic—and to a lesser extent survival, though the two interact—advantage.”
Yup. Same, Same Canada.
The access that communist China’s Confucius Institutes (CIs) have to Canadian student data, as recently highlighted in New Brunswick, has several members of the Chinese dissident community expressing worry over the institutes operating in their own school district and on Canadian soil in general.
Sheng Xue, a Chinese-Canadian democracy activist in Toronto, said she is very concerned because access to CI student data can potentially threaten the safety of Chinese dissidents targeted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have any connection with the CI.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has mocked the US and the chaotic collapse of the Washington-backed Afghan regime they left behind, as he shared footage of Taliban soldiers using captured aircraft as a swing.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a video on his Twitter account, claiming Afghanistan was the “graveyard of EMPIRES and their WAR MACHINES.” As highlighted by the outspoken Foreign Ministry diplomat, the video shows Taliban troops tying a rope to the wing of a captured aircraft and using it as a swing.
New documents reveal how leading scientists manipulated the truth
There are many things we still do not know about the origins of this pandemic — including the central issue of whether it began with natural spillover from animals or some kind of laboratory incident. But we do know one thing now beyond debate: speculative “gain-of-function” experiments on mutant bat viruses were taking place in Wuhan laboratories.
