Chinese Bank Depositors

A large crowd of angry Chinese bank depositors faced off with police Sunday, some roughed up as they were taken away, in a case that has drawn attention because of earlier attempts to use a COVID-19 tracking app to prevent them from mobilizing.

Hundreds of people held up banners and chanted slogans on the wide steps of the entrance to a branch of China’s central bank in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province, about 620 kilometers (380 miles) southwest of Beijing. Video taken by a protester shows plainclothes security teams being pelted with water bottles and other objects as they charge the crowd.

Read more at “Chinese bank depositors face police in angry protest”

Fake Chinese Covid Vaccines

A man arrives to be inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine at the Chaoyang Museum of Urban Planning in Beijing on January 15, 2021. (Photo by Noel Celis / AFP)

Reports about “fake” COVID-19 vaccines in China have been carried by Chinese media outlets and spread by people on Chinese social media as virus outbreaks continue to “worsen” in parts of the country.

According to the media reports, police in Beijing and the provinces of Jiangsu and Shandong rooted out a “crime ring” that was manufacturing and selling fake COVID-19 vaccines.

Chinese authorities said that the gang of more than 80 suspects was arrested on charges of producing and selling counterfeit vaccines. They had reportedly filled injectors with a “saline solution” which were to be sold as COVID-19 shots. Over 3,000 fake products were confiscated by authorities.

The official reports say the gang had begun its criminal activities in September 2020 and was selling the counterfeits at high prices. It also said that police had been able to identify the places where the counterfeits had been produced and sold.

Chinese citizens expressed their anger online over the exposed scandal.

“We had fake masks,” one netizen said in a post. “Now comes the fake vaccine. Is there anything that cannot be fake in China?”
Another said: “This isn’t manufacturing and selling fake products in an ordinary sense. This is killing.”
A netizen with a username “Lao Zhuang Sun Zi VV” commented this is “more wicked than drug trafficking.”
Another asked: “Isn’t inoculation done in licensed hospitals? How could fake vaccines enter the system? Really terrible.”

In fact, China had its vaccine administration law approved on June 29, 2019. The law went into effect on December 1 the same year. The new law came after multiple “vaccine safety scandals” in China.

In 2004, 6,000 non-qualifying vaccines were found by the Suqian Medical Products Administration of eastern China’s Jiangsu province to have caused injury to about 3,000 children.

In June 2005, the Center for Anti-Epidemic and Health Protection of Dazhuang town in Si county, Anhui province, conducted Hepatitis A vaccines on 25,000 elementary and secondary school students. However, 121 of them suffered adverse effects, including one death and 20 severe cases.

During 2007, there were also several cases of casualties among children administered vaccines in northern China’s Shanxi province. But local authorities strictly controlled any reporting on the health crisis until 2010, when reporter Wang Keqin published his findings in China Economic Times after interviewing 78 households with child victims who received sub-standard shots.

Wang’s coverage sparked nationwide indignation at and distrust in Chinese-made vaccines.

In 2009, “Jingang Andy Biological Products” illegally added nucleic acid material in its rabies vaccines, leading to a marked reduction in virus antigen content and nearly halving the vaccine’s efficacy.

In 2012, an illegal vaccine case worth over 100 million yuan (about $15.5 million) was brought to light by police in Weifang city, Shandong province, involving influenza, hepatitis B, rabies, and chickenpox vaccines.

On July 15, 2018, a local medical products administration of northeastern China’s Jilin province said in a notice that “Changsheng Bio-Technology” falsified production records. Later, the firm was found to have sold more than 250,000 substandard DPT vaccines—designed to protect babies against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus—in Shandong province.

The firm was fined 3.4 million yuan (about $526,000) by a provincial regulator. The following year, it received a much heavier fine of 9.1 billion yuan (about $1.41 billion) for falsifying production data for its rabies vaccine.

The Changsheng Bio-Technology vaccine scandal led to the downfall of more than 80 officials, Chinese authorities said. The company’s chairwoman Gao Junfang and 14 other employees were placed under criminal detention as well.

So far, no details have come out regarding specific penalties against Gao and her staff.

Syringes of the potential COVID-19 vaccine CoronaVac on a table at Sinovac Biotech at a press conference in Beijing on Sept. 24, 2020. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Sinovacs inactivated vaccine candidate, called “CoronaVac”, is among a number of companies in the global race to control the coronavirus pandemic. The company is running Phase 3 human trials in four countries and ramping up production to 300 million doses per year at a new manufacturing facility south of Beijing.

A lack of domestic coronavirus cases in China has meant that companies developing vaccines have shifted their focus overseas to conduct trials to gather the volume of data necessary to win regulatory approvals. When China’s government launched an emergency use program in July to vaccinate groups of essential workers, Sinovacs chief executive says the company supplied tens of thousands of doses, even as trials are still underway.

About 90% of Sinovacs employees have chosen to receive injections of CoronaVac, which is one of eight Chinese vaccine candidates in human trials. The company is also seeking approval to begin clinical trials with teenagers and children as young as age 3.

Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, China. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

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Chinese Taiwan Incursions

Chinese military aircraft made a record 380 trespasses into the island’s “defense zone” during 2020, a spokesperson for the Taiwanese Defense Ministry revealed.

Defense Ministry’s Shih Shun-wen said the Chinese incursions, which were conducted by bombers, jets and surveillance aircraft, happened in the southwest of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over at least 110 days.

Analysts believe the main objective of these incursions was to conduct “real-life” military scenarios in preparation for actual “combat” against Taiwan.

Shih agrees, adding that the Chinese aircraft aimed “to test our military’s response, to exert pressure on our aerial defense, and to squeeze the aerial space for our activities.”

China has conducted such incursions in Taiwanese airspace in previous years, but not nearly so many. In 2016, for example, it held six long-distance training missions around Taiwan, and 20 in 2017. The surge this year suggests an intensified desire by the Chinese to “antagonize” the Taiwanese.

Beyond airspace violations, China’s navy has also been skirting dangerously close to Taiwan’s waters. Few weeks ago, China deployed its newest aircraft carrier, the Shandong, accompanied by four warships, through the sensitive Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese Navy had to conduct 1,223 missions to intercept Chinese vessels in 2020. That’s 400 more than the previous year.

China has said such trips are “routine.” But their timing often indicates otherwise. Last year, for example, some incursions came during Taiwan visits by high-level United States officials. Taiwan split from China in 1949 after a civil war saw the defeated nationalist forces driven from the mainland by the brutal Communist regime of Mao Zedong.

Ever since, China has considered Taiwan a “breakaway” province and has vowed to put it under Beijing’s power by any means necessary. But U.S. political support of Taiwan, as well as weapons sales and security assurances, has so far prevented China from using “force” to conquer the island.

The Chinese are incensed by U.S. officials’ visits to Taiwan, and they are demonstrating their ire with these maritime incursions.

Examining both the sea and air trespasses, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a military think tank, said tensions between Taiwan and China are “now at their highest since the mid-1990s.”

Taiwan has lived under the “threat of invasion” by mainland China for decades. It still relies on the U.S. to keep from being assimilated into China, but in recent decades, America’s commitment to the cause has come into question.

In 1998, at the urging of Chinese officials, former U.S. President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to publicly “oppose” Taiwanese independence. China has been boldly applying more and more pressure ever since—especially in recent times.

The people of Taiwan fear for their future. They feel betrayed. China has dramatically increased its “aggression” toward Taiwan. No one should “fail to see that Taiwan is destined to become a part of mainland China.”

Perhaps the U.S. will make another weapons deal with Taiwan as it did late last year. It might even send more officials on high-level visits.

But it is clear that Beijing has an unwavering “determination” to reclaim Taiwan.

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