Coronavirus
tightens grip on US as China reports second day with no domestic cases
Forty
million Californians told to remain indoors as US sees cases rise to 14,500 and
deaths to 205
Helen
Davidson
@heldavidson
Email
Fri 20 Mar
2020 06.11 GMTLast modified on Fri 20 Mar 2020 06.19 GMT
The
coronavirus pandemic continued to tighten its grip on the US on Friday, as
China reported the second day in a row of no new domestic cases of the virus.
California’s
Governor, Gavin Newsom, expanded a “take shelter order to cover the entire
state, ordering all residents to remain indoors and limit movements. The
decision affects nearly 40 million people.
At a press
conference on Thursday evening, Newsom acknowledged the severity of the order
and urged Californians to band together. “This is not a permanent state, this
is a moment in time,” he said.
In a letter
to President Donald Trump, Newsom estimated 25.5 million people in California,
more than half the population, were likely to get the virus. The case rate is
doubling every four days in some parts of the state, he said.
The
governor has previously said the state might need about 20,000 hospital beds, a
situation he hopes to address by renting two hospitals at each end of the state
and docking a navy hospital ship near Los Angeles to help meet demand.
In San
Francisco, authorities have spent a week preparing camper vans to isolate
confirmed cases of Covid-19 who do not need hospitalisation but are unable to
find shelter. The vehicles are to be placed around the city as required.
The US has
confirmed more than 14,500 cases of the virus, with 205 deaths. Worldwide,
there have been more than 244,500 people confirmed to have Covid-19, with
10,030 deaths. According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 86,000 people
have recovered.
The developments
in the US came as China’s national health commission said the 39 new cases it
confirmed on Thursday were all imported, with 14 in Guangdong, eight in
Shanghai, six in Beijing, three in Fujian, and one each in Tianjin, Liaoning,
Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangxi, Sichuan and Gansu.
China is
among a number of countries where stringent measures appear to have brought the
virus under control, but where concerns are now mounting of a fresh wave
brought in by travellers.
In other
developments around the world:
In South
America, Peru’s leaders announced on Thursday night the entire country would go
into lockdown until the end of the month, in a bid to stop the spread of the
virus, which has infected at least 128 people, three fatally.
Haiti has also
closed its borders, and Chile has delayed a constitutional referendum.
Australia,
which closed its borders to foreigners on Thursday, advised against
non-essential domestic travel during the Easter holidays.
Chinese
investigators have exonerated Li Wenliang, the 34-year-old doctor who was
reprimanded after trying to raise the alarm about the virus in December. A
report found police acted inappropriately and that Li was not seeking to
disturb social order as he had been accused of. Li died in hospital in January
after contracting the virus.
The head of
the World Health Organization reiterated his warning for Africa to take urgent
steps now while their case numbers are low. “The best advice for Africa is to
prepare for the worst and prepare today,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Infections
continue to appear in passengers on cruise ships, with three people on the Ruby
Princess, currently docked in Sydney, testing positive. Authorities fear the
nearly 2,700 people onboard may not have known Covid-19 was present and have
told all passengers to self-isolate.
In Brazil,
hundreds of British, European, Australian and New Zealand citizens stranded on
a cruise-liner in the port of Recife, will began flying home on Friday.
Passengers
have been confined to their cabins for the past eight days after a 78-year-old
passenger fell ill and later tested positive.
An official
from the Japan Olympic Committee urged a delay of the Tokyo 2020 Games. “It
should be postponed under the current situation where athletes can’t be well
prepared,” Kaori Yamaguchi, a JOC executive board member, told the Nikkei
daily. It comes as the Olympic flame arrives in Japan, where the deputy prime
minister said on Thursday the games are “cursed” by world events every 40
years.
US
Republicans have proposed giving each American $1,200 to help weather the
economic impact of the virus. It is part of a $1tn package introduced by senate
majority leader Mitch McConnell, and would also include relief for small
businesses and their employees, steps to stabilise the economy and new support
for healthcare professionals and coronavirus patients.
The US is
among a number of countries stepping up their stimulus response as the world
braces for a credit crunch which investors warned would make the 2008 global
financial crisis look like “child’s play”. The Bank of England has cut rates to
0.1%, and European governments are rolling out packages worth €1.7tn.
In Europe
the number of deaths in Italy has passed the total in China to make it the
worst-affected country in the world with 3,405 fatalities compared with 3,245.
Southern
and central Italy are braced for a “tsunami” of cases as the outbreak spreads
from the badly hit northern regions. Italy’s Civil Protection Agency said on
Thursday the total number of infections had risen to 41,035 from 35,713 – a
near 15% increase.
Increasingly
powerful, Xi's China believes it no longer needs Washington – or its foreign
reporters
The ruling
party and its leaders have long wanted to avoid the scrutiny of the foreign
press. The expulsions show Beijing is confident in its growing might
Richard
McGregor
Fri 20 Mar
2020 00.35 GMTLast modified on Fri 20 Mar 2020 04.49 GMT
China on 18
March announced it would expel American journalists from three major US
newspapers in one of the communist government’s biggest crackdowns on the
foreign press
Beijing’s
decision to throw out correspondents from America’s most influential newspapers
is, on one level, just part of a muscular tit-for-tat between the US and China
over how to manage journalists stationed in each country.
In an
announcement that caught the newspapers by surprise, the Foreign Ministry said
US journalists at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the
Washington Post whose press cards ran out this year would be expelled.
Beijing was
retaliating, the ministry said, for Washington’s decision earlier this year to
cut the number of Chinese journalists working for state media outlets in the US
and force them to register as government entities.
But the
expulsions are much more than the tit-for-tat actions that have characterised
the crumbling superpower relationship over the past two years, over everything
from tariffs to military exercises and now the media.
Rather,
they are a sign of an increasingly assertive China, confident that it is
gaining the upper hand in the contest with the US that will define geopolitics in
coming decades.
A month
ago, with hundreds of millions of Chinese in residential lockdown, the opposite
seemed true. The ruling Communist party looked to be on its knees, battling a
wave of internal and foreign criticism over its handling of the outbreak of the
coronavirus in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in central China.
Barely a
few weeks later, with homegrown infections trailing off, Beijing is revelling
in the chaos in the US and the Trump administration’s serial missteps in
handling the spread of the disease.
It has
responded to this reversal of fortunes with alarming speed and a brazenness
that few governments could match, donating masks and other medical equipment to
first-world European countries, accompanied by maximum publicity about China’s
selfless generosity.
Chinese
diplomats have also promoted conspiracy theories on Twitter about the origin of
the virus, suggesting it had been planted by the US military rather than coming
from the live animal markets of Wuhan.
China is happy to use foreign reporters as a
plaything in great power politics
The party’s
messages are all aimed at restoring its battered image in the eyes of its
people. Not only did their brutal lockdown tactics work, they say, but also
foreigners are now drawing on the China playbook on how to beat the virus.
“This is,
of course, a standard framing,” according to the Australia-based Chinese
newsletter, Neican. “Everything in China is going well, people are happy, while
everywhere outside China is chaotic.”
The party
was furious at foreign coverage of the virus lockdown, but that alone does not
explain why the correspondents from the three US papers are being ejected. By
and large, the party has tolerated foreign reporters for decades, as a
necessary evil to allow it to get on with Washington and to sell its economy to
foreign investors.
But Xi
Jinping’s China no longer needs them. The country is rich and powerful compared
to a few decades ago and is happy to use foreign reporters as a plaything in
great power politics instead.
Not only
that, senior leaders bear a deep grudge against the papers, especially the New
York Times, over their detailed exposés of the personal wealth of Politburo
leaders and their families.
The New
York Times chronicled the wealth of former Premier Wen Jiabao’s family in 2012.
Bloomberg reporters in China and Hong Kong followed later with an explosive
report on Xi’s family’s holdings.
The Wall
Street Journal’s writings on Xi and his family have also angered the
leadership, as have their opinion pages.
What has
puzzled many about this controversy is not that the US and China are at
loggerheads over the press. That has long been the case. However, many have
wondered why Washington gave Beijing the opportunity to take their revenge, by
targeting Chinese reporters in the US.
The work of
Chinese state reporters overseas adds little to what is already known about the
countries they are reporting on. Foreign reporters in China however, especially
those at the well-resourced big US dailies, are vital at getting under the skin
of a habitually secretive and opaque regime.
Many of
their journalists have spent decades learning the language and building up
expertise and contacts. In one fell swoop, their vast intellectual capital has
been banished, not just from China, but from Hong Kong as well.
While no
one will notice that there are fewer Chinese state journalists working
overseas, the absence of detailed reporting on China from the three US outlets
will be palpable.
The ruling
party and its leaders have long wanted to avoid the scrutiny of the foreign
press. As they emerged from the worst of Covid-19, Chinese leaders were
confident enough to do something they have long wanted to do, to throw a large
number of reporters out.
The
proximate cause of the expulsions was retaliation, but make no mistake, the
underlying driver is Beijing’s perception of its own growing might.
Richard
McGregor works at the Lowy Institute in Sydney and is the author of numerous
books on Chinese politics and foreign policy.
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