Cissy Zhou

China has threatened more curbs on US media operating in the country after saying it will expel journalists from three American newspapers. “China called on the US to stop suppressing Chinese media. If the US continues to be on the wrong track, China will be forced to take further countermeasures,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Wednesday.  The Ministry said on Tuesday it was revoking the press credentials for American journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, describing it as a response to the Trump administration’s recent measures against Chinese state media outlets in the United States. Washington last month labeled five Ch

The first shipment of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s donation of 1 million masks and 500,000 coronavirus test kits to the United States arrived in the US on Monday morning. The supplies, which will be distributed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), were purchased in China since its factories have gradually resumed production. The shipment of a second batch will depend on availability, said a spokesman at the Jack Ma Foundation. Ma is the co-founder of Alibaba, which owns Inkstone.  The US is facing a shortage of kits for diagnosing the deadly contagion, which has led to widespread criticism of the federal government for its slowness in preparedness and response.  Publ

At an event in Washington on Friday, Florida senator Rick Scott used the term “Communist China” 25 times in a 10-minute speech. Scott was pushing the idea that the coronavirus outbreak should be used as a wedge to pry apart the US-China relationship. “I think there is going to be more decoupling, as we’re seeing with the coronavirus. I think people are saying to themselves, are we too dependent on a country that acts as an adversary? And I think that is going to cause some people to rethink their supply chains,” Scott told a crowd gathered at the Hudson Institute, a think tank. While Scott has been one of the most strident advocates in the Trump administration for tougher measures against Ch

Retired Wuhan factory worker Wei Junlan had always been in good health, but around two weeks after developing the first signs of a cough and fever, the 63-year-old was dead from what doctors suspect was the new coronavirus. But her death on January 21 will not show up in official statistics about the outbreak – her death certificate listed the cause only as “heavy pneumonia.” Her nephew Jerry Shang said that Wei had not been tested for the disease, but that the doctor said her symptoms – including a lung infection, fever and increasing weakness – closely matched those of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. By the end, she was unable to walk, and the last the family saw of her was when

Two high-level officials in Hubei province – the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak – have been replaced by a central government official as the country continues to battle the crisis which has killed more than 1,000 people on the mainland. Recently, the central government in Beijing has sent more officials, or teams, to Hubei to actively lead coronavirus containment efforts or investigate the province’s handling of the outbreak.  State broadcaster CCTV reported that Zhang Jin, the Communist Party secretary of the Hubei Health Commission, and Liu Yingzi, director of the Health Commission, have both been dismissed. Wang Hesheng, the deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, will a

China has reported an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu in Hunan province, which lies on the southern border of Hubei province, the epicenter of the rapidly spreading coronavirus. The outbreak occurred on a farm in Shaoyang city where 4,500 of 7,850 chickens have died from the contagion, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said on Saturday. 17,828 poultry had since been culled, the ministry said in a statement. No human cases of the Hunan H5N1 virus have been reported. The Hunan H5N1 outbreak comes as the Chinese authorities continue to scramble to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, further stretching the nation’s public health resources. The deadly coronavirus ha

The number of confirmed cases of the rapidly spreading coronavirus infection in mainland China has reached 5,974, health authorities said on Wednesday – a total surpassing the cases that the mainland had in the 2002-03 Sars epidemic that eventually killed almost 800 people worldwide. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) infected 5,327 people in mainland China in nine months and killed 349 people there, according to the World Health Organization. Separately, 299 people died in Hong Kong from the disease. The deaths from the new coronavirus infection have risen to 132, health authorities said on Wednesday. They have all been reported in mainland China, with 125 in Hubei, a landlocked provi

The Chinese government wants to build its own digital currency, but it is unlikely to experience the investment frenzy that launched Bitcoin into the mainstream. The central bank official in charge of the project said the new currency, developed under a project known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment, would not be open to speculation like other cryptocurrencies, disappointing would-be speculators. Mu Changchun, head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, on Saturday said it would be “a digital form of the yuan,” China’s official currency. There would be no speculation on its value and it would not need the backing of a basket of currencies, according t

Mention of China's controversial family planning policy was curiously absent from National Day celebrations in Beijing on Tuesday, sending a clear signal, according to analysts, that the country’s decades-long policy of birth restrictions could be scrapped altogether. China scrapped its one-child policy in 2016 to allow couples to have two children as its birth rate slows and its population ages. This move has so far proved unsuccessful in boosting births. Analysts said the lack of slogans or delegates related to the policy was a signal China could be about to lift restrictions entirely in a bid to encourage births. “Family planning was an achievement for the People’s Republic at its 60th an

The US Treasury Department has officially labeled China a currency manipulator, causing stock markets to plunge around the world. The declaration was made on Monday afternoon, after the Chinese central bank allowed its currency, the yuan, to sink to its weakest level against the US dollar in 11 years. On Monday, the three major US indices ended the trading day about 3% lower. It was the biggest one-day fall of 2019. Asian shares followed suit on Tuesday. Why is this important? The move signals an escalation in the ongoing US-China trade war, which both sides say they’ve been trying to resolve. Last year, Donald Trump imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports. He announced new tariff