TaiwanBoard

The Coronavirus Serious Public Health Threat in China

JANUARY 24, 2020
by CESAR CHELALA

The happy expectations for the week-long Chinese New Year holidays has been dampened by a new viral infection that is spreading rapidly in China (cases have been confirmed in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong province) and other countries. Since late 2019, people from Wuhan had been infected with a viral pneumonia whose cause was unknown. Now the virus has been identified as a new type of coronavirus.

Two other types of coronaviruses are SARS and MERS. The new virus is raising concern about the possibility of a new SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)-kind of epidemic, which killed thousands of people in 2002 and 2003. As of now, people infected with this new virus have been found in China, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea. On January 21, 2020, the first case was reported in the United States, in a man who was returning to the U.S. from a trip to Wuhan.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/the-coronavirus-serious-public-health-threat-in-china/

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Major Chinese city in lockdown as novel coronavirus spreads internationally

By Benjamin Mateus
24 January 2020

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is providing health officials around the world with situational updates and guidance on the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Eve.

Coronaviruses were first described in the 1960s and derive their name for their characteristic appearance under electron microscopes, where they resemble a royal crown or solar corona. Coronaviruses cause diseases in mammals and birds, with symptoms of diarrhea in farm animals such as pigs and cows and respiratory symptoms in birds. The lethal infection of humans has been rare historically.

More: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/24/viru-j24.html

China’s Coronavirus Outbreak Reminds Me of the Irish Polio Epidemic I Survived

by PATRICK COCKBURN
JANUARY 28, 2020

China is responding to the spread of the coronavirus in Wuhan much as countries have always reacted to life-threatening epidemics. At every level of society and government, fear of death – or, more accurately, fear of being held responsible for death – drives decision-making, which is consequently often ill-judged.

Officials do not want to cause a panic – but then again, nor do they want to be accused of inaction, or of hiding dire truths about the health crisis (many people have become convinced that more people have been infected, have even died, than the authorities are admitting).

I have been struck in the past few days by the similarity between reactions to two epidemics, though they took place 64 years apart in cities that could not be more different. One is currently taking place in Wuhan in central China, with its population of eleven million; the second struck Cork, an Irish city with a population of 114,000, in 1956.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/28/chinas-coronavirus-outbreak-reminds-me-of-the-irish-po

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Dispatch From China: Flu is Bigger Concern But Wuhan Virus Grabs Headlines

by TOM CLIFFORD
JANUARY 30, 2020

The virus will infect millions across the globe and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It can be easily spread and will especially strike the young and the elderly. But this is not what has been described as the Wuhan virus. The common flu is far deadlier. This is not to downplay the Wuhan coronavirus flu, or to give it its medical name, 2019-nCoV.

The common flu causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness worldwide and kills up to 650,000 people every year, according to the World Health Organization.

Keeping track of Wuhan virus figures is difficult, not least because of the two-week incubation period. The coronavirus outbreak, which is concentrated in Wuhan, a major transport hub in central eastern China, has so far killed 56 and infected almost 2,000. The initial symptoms of coronavirus are typically similar to those of a cold or flu, which means it is hard for people to know if they are infected, especially given that the outbreak has coincided with flu season. The mayor of Wuhan said on Sunday evening that he expected another 1,000 or so new cases. But the National Health Commission in Beijing said the number of people currently under medical observation for the virus is 30,453. This raises immediate questions about how and where they are being observed.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/30/dispatch-from-china-flu-is-bigger-concern-but-wuhan-vi

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Tayata

Om Bekandze Bekandze
Maha Bekandze
Radza Samudgate Soha

May the many sentient beings who are sick, quickly be freed from sickness. And may all the sicknesses of beings never arise again.

Medicine Buddha Mantra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTM2i1uRlAc

Hello

Hello Kuan Yin :) What was the reason for the refounding of this region before?

Tai-oan wrote:

Hello Kuan Yin :) What was the reason for the refounding of this region before?

Serpents wrote:

Absentee founder, and Kuan Yin was concerned about invaders, from what can be remembered.

Hello Tai-oan, Serpents is largely correct.

Without our founder, we were left vulnerable to raiders/invaders who were relentless.

With dwindling numbers, the decision was made to try to refound.

And the rest, as they say, is history. :)

China and the Decline of US Power

AUGUST 26, 2020

by CHANDRA MUZAFFAR

US imposed sanctions against Russia since 2014 following Crimea’s restoration to Russia contributed to this. The US also imposed “tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Chinese goods “ which forced China to de-dollarise.” Moscow and Beijing reinforced their financial relationship in June 2019 through a deal “ to replace the dollar with national currencies for international settlements between them.” Russia has also been accumulating yuan reserves at the expense of the dollar.

The US also perpetuates its global dominance through an extensive propaganda network which projects the US as the greatest nation on earth. It is a portrayal which has lost its lustre in the last couple of decades. The US led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 which was unjust as it was immoral tarnished the US’s image in the eyes of the world. Increasingly, it has come to be perceived as a rapacious nation which has no scruples about slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/26/china-and-the-decline-of-us-power/

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What’s Driving the Simmering Conflict Between India and China

AUGUST 7, 2020

by CONN HALLINAN

Chinese and Indian forces have pulled back from their confrontation in the Himalayas, but the tensions that set off the deadly encounter this past June—the first on the China/India border since 1975—are not going away. Indeed, a combination of local disputes, regional antagonisms and colonial history have brewed up a poisonous elixir that could pose a serious danger to peace in South Asia.

In part, the problem is Britain’s colonial legacy. The “border” in dispute is an arbitrary line drawn across terrain that doesn’t lend itself to clear boundaries. The architect, Henry McMahon, drew it to maximize British control of a region that was in play during the 19th Century “Great Game” between England and Russia for control of Central Asia. Local concerns were irrelevant.

The treaty was signed between Tibet and Britain in 1914. While India accepts the 550-mile McMahon Line as the border between Indian and China, the Chinese have never recognized the boundary.

Sir Mortimer Durand, Britain’s lead colonial officer in India, drew a similar “border” in 1893 between Pakistan (then India’s “Northern Territories”) and Afghanistan that Kabul has never accepted, and which is still the source of friction between the two countries. Colonialism may be gone, but its effects still linger.

While the target for the McMahon Line was Russia, it has always been a sore spot for China, not only because Beijing’s protests were ignored, but also because the Chinese saw it as a potential security risk for its western provinces.

If England, which had already humiliated China in the two Opium Wars, as well as by seizing Shanghai and Hong Kong, could lop off Tibet—which China sees as part of its empire—so might another country: Like India.

Indeed, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and absorbed Kashmir and Jammu in 2019, the Chinese saw the grab as a threat to the security of Tibet and its restive western province of Xinjiang. The area in which the recent fighting took place, the Galwan Valley, is close to a road linking Tibet with Xinjiang.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/07/whats-driving-the-simmering-conflict-between-india-and-china/

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Trump’s Destruction of America Started With Reagan

SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

by THOM HARTMANN

Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die.

The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they’re denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.

The billionaires who make their money screwing American students with almost $2 trillion in student loans bribed politicians in 2005 to make it illegal to declare bankruptcy on those loans. Across America, students are experiencing depression, despair, and suicide.

The billionaires who own millions of rental properties across the country are actively ignoring both legal requirements and morality-based requests, depending on the state, to prevent evictions and are today throwing people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic.

The billionaires who own Fox News and some of our largest radio networks are facilitating lies about climate change and the coronavirus, both of which are killing people, while these billionaires live in their protected bubbles. They are also stoking racial violence by repeatedly portraying protesters calling for Black equality under the law as terrorists.

Massive tax cuts by Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump) have transferred fully $50 trillion from the homes and pockets of working people into the money bins and foreign bank accounts of the billionaire class since 1975. As a result, fewer than half of all Americans are still in the middle class, and fear and rage increasingly dominate the American political landscape.

Using that despair and anger people are feeling as they watch their lives be wiped out, their homes destroyed, and their jobs vanish, Trump and the Republican Party are fomenting violence and political instability by trying to scapegoat Black and Brown people. The growing QAnon movement, a rebranding of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Nazis weaponized for political purposes in the 1930s, further asserts that “international Jewish bankers” like George Soros are behind it all, stoking anti-Semitism along with their garden-variety racism.

This all began in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution, when Reagan dropped the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and began a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to destroy unions across the country while he and George H.W. Bush authored NAFTA and other free trade agreements.

Reagan even championed the destruction of our public schools and the modern-day Republican rejection of science on everything from the origin of the Earth to climate change. He empowered people like “Christian” billionaire Pat Robertson who argued, at the peak of the AIDS crisis that Reagan refused to acknowledge, that the biggest crisis facing America was homosexuality.

More: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/21/trumps-destruction-of-america-started-with-reagan/

How come we banned Guomindang from our region? Isn't that party affiliated with the island from historical context?

San Te wrote:

Their region has diplomatic relations with those whom in turn we’re not cool with as an anti-fascist region.

Next question?

Nope. I'm not well-versed with the NationStates political spectrum here. :)

新年快乐! Happy Lunar New Year of The Ox!

We are wishing you all great happiness and prosperity, health and your safety and well-being for the forthcoming Lunar New Year.

Instead of releasing sky lanterns which can cause great harm and suffering to living things as we observe this occasion, please consider planting trees and other plants instead, and you will be enlightened from within and will be helping all living beings and the earth, everywhere.

Thank you.

_________/\_________

The ecologist order wrote:

Hello! Glad to have established embassies!

Taiwan’s glad to have embassies with you.

What's the symbol of the flag trying to portray? ;p