Spike in CCP Member Deaths Amid Pneumonia Outbreak | China In Focus

A spike in deaths for Chinese Communist Party members amid China's pneumonia outbreak, plus an 8-year-old patient hit with a brain attack typically seen in patients around 70 years old. Surging pneumonia infections leading U.S. lawmakers to raise concerns over China's transparency. Chinese influence operations uncovered and removed from MEDA. The social media giant says China-linked campaigns are ramping up and fake accounts are targeting Americans. And former diplomat Henry Kissinger dies at 100 years old. After a hundred visits to China during his service, he's known to have pushed the U.S.-China relations opening decades ago. It's a pragmatism. It means we ignore, you know, the ideology of regime or we're in many ways more tolerant. What do you think of his passing? Let us know below and subscribe if you haven't already. Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. An unusual death spike in China's ongoing pneumonia outbreak centered on members of the Chinese Communist Party. Nine professors died in the week ending in November 20th. Eight of them are Chinese Communist Party members. The youngest was 41 years old. None of the obituaries mentioned cause of death. The deaths come as patients suffer from an undiagnosed pneumonia that's overwhelming hospitals across China. And it's not a new trend. Back in October, at least 66 high-level CCP officials passed away. A more recent peak came last December when the CCP virus, which causes COVID-19, swept China. Over 60 high-level party officials died within a single month. Besides the officials, reports of tragedies are coming out of the country. Just days after an eight-year-old boy was diagnosed with mycoplasma pneumonia, he was diagnosed with brain infarction. Chinese media reports say doctors took out large chunks of blood clots during his surgery. Brain infarction typically occurs in patients 70 years or older. As the current pneumonia outbreak rages through China, schools in big cities across the country are urging sick teachers and students to stay home. We spoke to a Beijing resident about the situation. Over half of the school students are infected. The teachers have been infected as well. As for my family, we're all infected. The current outbreak has mostly affected children. But a Chinese medical expert is raising concerns that older adults in China may be the next target. That's as the country approaches New Year's celebrations, a time where families often travel for the holiday. A doctor from Beijing said she saw about 100 patients on Monday alone. Most of them were elderly. China's elderly died in droves after Beijing lifted its pandemic restrictions, overwhelming hospitals and funeral homes at the time. Yet on Wednesday, China's foreign minister played down the outbreak. In a speech to the United Nations, he said the situation is under control and that China welcomes visitors from around the world. The World Health Organization is following up with China about its ongoing outbreak. One issue the agency is seeking to understand is resistance to antibiotics. The drugs are used to treat the infection caused by mycoplasma pneumonia, but doctors are seeing widespread resistance to them. Because of it, the pneumonia outbreak could risk fostering an even bigger threat, the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of a common and potentially deadly bacteria. We'll keep you updated as the situation develops. Lawmakers are raising transparency concerns over China's virus outbreak. Congress is now probing the CDC to find out how the agency is responding. NTD's Melina Wyskup reports from Capitol Hill. Overwhelming many hospitals. Infections of this pneumonia are spreading quickly among children in China and have now even extended to adults, with medications being useless to help. Chinese reports indicate that the request for medical care is so high that Beijing has been forced to reopen makeshift hospitals just to cope. Here's what the CDC director had to say about this testifying before a house committee. the reality of this new outbreak. A whistleblower told our sister media outlet, the Epoch Times, that the CCP leader Xi Jinping has actually ordered officials to downplay reporting of this new respiratory illness and to avoid using the term COVID-19. They're not forthcoming. They don't want to lose face and as a result, people die. And so we've got to keep an eye on it. That being said, I mean, we still have the same problem we had in some sense with COVID, which is like the data coming out of China is so opaque. There's no transparency and that's what makes it hard to analyze what the risk is beyond China's borders. The Energy and Commerce Committee has asked the CDC to be on guard about this new outbreak and to better prepare to provide more transparency into the true nature of the virus. They didn't tell us the truth during COVID. They held back on what was happening probably for weeks, if not months, which resulted in a worldwide pandemic. So I'm skeptical also about what's happening in China and we need to know what it is. Now, the Energy and Commerce Committee is requesting the CDC to answer a long list of questions on the virus by December 13th, including things such as if the CCP has tried to withhold or delay providing information about this virus and what information, if any, has the CDC received from China on the virus. Reporting from Capitol Hill, Melina Wisecup, NTD News. Now on high alert, Taiwan's health ministry has advised the elderly, young children and those with weak immunity to avoid unnecessary travel to mainland China. This notice also covers Hong Kong and Macau. Taiwan has been wary of disease outbreaks in China since the SARS outbreak two decades ago. Foreign influence networks are on the chopping block this year. According to Meta, the social media giant says it took down five distinct Chinese networks in its quarterly report. All five were found to be targeting audiences overseas through fake accounts, and China had more of the operations active than any other nation. Meta pointed out an important shift from the 2020 election cycle to the current lead-up to next year's race. Between 2017 and later 2020, the company removed two Chinese networks. Both had focused on audiences in the Asia-Pacific region. Compared to the more recent five networks, one of which featured nearly 5,000 fake accounts and targeted American audiences. An earlier Meta report noted that one recent campaign was active across every major social media platform and over 50 total websites. The campaigns have surfaced as U.S.-China tensions continue running high and could reflect Beijing's fears that Washington is cutting off its access to cutting-edge technology and markets. Washington accuses China of issues like intellectual property theft, espionage and human rights abuses. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington denied being aware of the campaign on Meta platforms. American diplomat Henry Kissinger died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old. Among the global leaders who sent condolences was Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping. The former secretary of state's death also prompted mourning on Chinese social media. Watch. An adjunct professor of a Chinese university says China wouldn't have become what it is today without Kissinger. More specifically, his efforts to engineer Washington's opening up to Beijing decades ago. I'm not saying that all Chinese recognize this, but I think that intellectuals do know that without a U.S.-China detente, better relations until the end of the 80s, China wouldn't have the international space to grow as it did. Kissinger was at the height of his career in the 1970s when he served as secretary of state. He had a hand in many global events at the time. His policy with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, with the Middle East, and the Vietnam War reshaped the global political map. On top of that, he was also the architect for the establishment of U.S.-China diplomatic ties. Since then, he visited China a hundred times. The final trip was a sudden visit to Beijing earlier this year. He met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Despite high tensions between the U.S. and China, Kissinger was called an old friend of Chinese people by Beijing. His realism is very important. It's a pragmatism. It means we ignore the ideology of regime. We're in many ways more tolerant, and we try to establish collaboration on that basis. That's in light of what Kissinger once said, a country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. As the saying goes, a friend in need is a friend in deed. That's how the U.S. ambassador to Japan addressed a fatal U.S. military aircraft crash when he met with Japan's foreign minister on Thursday. The fact that you have both the Coast Guard, all three branches of the self-defense forces, but also local fishermen out in the waters searching for U.S. servicemen says that we are not just treaty allies, but we are friends, and we have a good friend in Japan. At least one crew member was killed when a U.S. Air Force Osprey plane crashed off the coast of western Japan on Wednesday. The Japan Coast Guard is still searching for the other seven crew members. Japan is also asking the U.S. to suspend all non-emergency V-22 Osprey flights in the country after it has suspended its own Osprey flights. About 54,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, many of them in the strategically important southern island chain that says China becomes more assertive in the South China Sea. The U.S.-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of regional security in the Indo-Pacific region. Updates from Taiwan. The island reported more Chinese military activities around the island on Thursday. That's including by helicopters, warships and fighter jets. Eleven of those aircraft crossed the Taiwan Strait's median line, an unofficial barrier between the two sides. The drills come as Taiwan's January election nears. Relations with China are a major point of contention. On top of military concerns, Google is now warning that Beijing is waging a number of cyberattacks on Taiwan. A senior engineering manager in Google's threat analysis division says that the tech giant has seen a quote massive increase in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the past six months. Just out of China alone, over a hundred groups are targeting everything including Taiwan's defense sector, government and private industry. Given the situation, that enemy label may be translating to the West. A new U.S. poll finds over half of Americans see China as the greatest threat to the country. That's over Russia and Iran, despite the wars in Israel and Ukraine. Nearly 80 percent of Americans view China as an enemy, up by more than 20 percent compared to 2018 before the pandemic. Most of them also support building up the American military to counter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. So is an invasion imminent? What do leaders in Taiwan think? In an interview with the New York Times, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen said China is too overwhelmed to consider an invasion. She said that Chinese leadership is currently dealing with internal challenges and so she doesn't think Beijing is planning a major invasion of Taiwan right now. She pointed to China's internal economic, financial and political challenges as well as international pressure. America's largest bank says it would leave China if the U.S. government orders it to. Here's what JPMorgan Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this week. If some of those people are doing things that we think are truly bad, we would not bank them. And I think it's good for an American bank to be there to help American multinationals around the world and China with their own development if it makes sense. If for some reason the American government says nope, can't do that anymore, then so be it. If the American government makes me leave China, I'm leaving China. He made the comment while talking about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Chinese regime claims the island as its own despite never having ruled it. Dimon noted that if there's a war in Taiwan, you would take all bets off. And he said that it would be really bad for the world and the people in China. JPMorgan, which says on its website that it has been active in China for a century, does investment, corporate banking, payments and asset management there. Like TikTok's parent company, ByteDance and fast-fashioned Shein. The U.S. isn't exporting as much agricultural product to China as it used to. Trade data shows U.S. exports to China dropped nearly 20 percent compared to last year. It's the slowest pace in three years. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack said China took advantage of lower prices for corn and soya from Brazil. China has taken the opportunity, as they often do, to take advantage of low cost. Now I would indicate that I think over time we'll continue to see a righting and balancing of that. At the same time, I think it's important for the United States to take this opportunity to understand the importance of diversifying its market opportunities away from an over-reliance on one or two markets. Oil seeds used to make edible oils are the top U.S. export to China, along with grains, together accounting for over 25 billion dollars last year, far ahead of other goods like semiconductors. In light of the export drop, the Secretary urged American exporters not to over-rely on the Chinese market. That's all for today's China In Focus on YouTube. We're now sharing a shortened version of our program here, after being demonetized for more than two years. If you'd like to support us, subscribe to our partner platform, Epic TV, where you can watch our full episodes. Or consider donating, find us at donorbox.org slash china dash in dash focus. Here's what to look out for in our second half. TikTok could cause absolute chaos in the 2020 election. Those words come from Congressman Mike Gallagher, Chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. He called TikTok a public discourse tool of the CCP. What's the extent of the threat the Chinese regime poses? And how is Beijing riding on the U.S. election outcome? To discuss, we sat down with Andrew Thornbrook, National Security Correspondent for the Epoch Times. Thanks for watching China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. See you tomorrow.