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China fires parting sanctions at Trump officials; seeks ‘better angels’ in Biden team

InternationalJan 22. 2021

By The Washington Post · Gerry Shih

TAIPEI, Taiwan – China on Thursday fired a parting shot at the Trump administration by announcing unprecedented sanctions against outgoing Cabinet officials and advisers, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, as it extended a rhetorical olive branch to newly installed President Joe Biden.

But whether – or how – Biden would respond and seek to repair relations between the world’s two leading powers remains a key unknown in Beijing, where commentators and state media greeted the new U.S. presidency with tepid optimism and some concern.

Referring to Biden’s inauguration as a “new day” for America, Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, called on the Democratic administration to turn a page from the “particularly difficult” past four years and renounce the all-fronts pressure campaign that defined Trump’s China policy.

“The Trump government, particularly Pompeo, buried too many mines that need to be removed, burned too many bridges that need to be rebuilt,” Hua said in lengthy remarks on Thursday as she appealed for a reset. “With joint hard work from both sides, the better angels of U.S.-China relations can defeat evil forces.”

But China’s first act of the Biden era, announcing sanctions against Republicans while Biden’s inauguration ceremony was in full swing at the U.S. Capitol, immediately fell flat. Minutes after Biden became president, the Foreign Ministry announced sanctions against Pompeo, former national security aides Robert O’Brien and Matthew Pottinger and 25 other Americans and their families who would be prohibited from traveling to China – including Hong Kong and Macao – or conducting business with the country.

The Biden White House criticized the sanctions and called for American unity to compete against China.

“Imposing these sanctions on Inauguration Day is seemingly an attempt to play to partisan divides,” Emily Horne, Biden’s National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement Wednesday. “Americans of both parties should criticize this unproductive and cynical move. President Biden looks forward to working with leaders in both parties to position America to out-compete China.”

The tough response follows high-level appointments and statements in recent days that have raised concerns in Beijing about whether the Biden team would in fact reverse course on China policy, as some have hoped.

At his Senate confirmation hearing this week, Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, said he agreed with Pompeo’s assessment that Chinese government abuses in the Xinjiang region amounted to “genocide” and added that he believed China poses the greatest threat of any foreign nation to the United States. Avril Haines, Biden’s director of national intelligence, said she supported a “more aggressive stance” toward Beijing compared with the period under President Barack Obama.

The Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper noted after the inauguration that Biden did not mention China in his speech, nor did he offer signals about whether and how he would seek a thaw with Beijing. In a commentary, the paper expressed concerns about Blinken’s remarks in his confirmation hearing and pointed out that the Biden team invited Taiwan’s envoy to Washington to attend a presidential inauguration for the first time. China claims Taiwan as its territory and objects strenuously to diplomatic interactions between Washington and Taipei.

“American society’s favorable views toward China have indeed declined in the past four years,” the commentary noted as it asked Biden to not succumb to growing anti-China popular sentiment.

Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization and an adviser to China’s State Council, said “structural challenges” between Beijing and Washington will continue, and Chinese officials were still reeling from Pompeo’s pressure campaign.

“The contradictions will continue to exist, and they will not disappear, but the Biden administration will not be as crazy and irrationally play cards like Trump,” he said. Wang added that it would take time for the distrust to melt away. “If the Biden administration sends more goodwill, then China would also respond more actively.”

Before departing office this month, Pompeo announced a range of measures against China, including the Xinjiang genocide designation and sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in Hong Kong’s national security crackdown. He also lifted State Department restrictions that prevented meetings between U.S. and Taiwanese diplomats.

In its parting shot, China said Thursday its sanctions would also target Peter Navarro, the economic adviser who advocated for Trump’s trade war, as well as three former senior officials who expressed support for Taiwan over the past eight months: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; Keith Krach, an undersecretary of state; and the ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft. Azar and Krach flew to Taiwan on official visits; Craft was scheduled to visit but her flight turned around in midair and she conducted meetings by videoconference instead.

Former president Donald Trump and his family members were not named in the ministry’s statement, but it did name former national security adviser John Bolton, who left the White House amid acrimony in 2019, and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump this week after being charged with defrauding political donors. The Chinese government declined to disclose most of the 28 names.

Chinese banks are not as central to the global financial system as U.S. banks, so the effects of the Chinese sanctions are probably not as far-reaching as those levied by Washington against Chinese or Beijing-backed officials over Hong Kong and Xinjiang. But Beijing’s announcement could impose real costs on former officials who return to the business world, and they present travel hurdles if any returned to government service.

Bull Piano, an online column associated with the official Xinhua News Agency, said the sanctions were meant to send a signal to future U.S. politicians who might have business dealings in China.

“Don’t think about playing the China card while in power if you want to eat Chinese food after you step down,” the columnist wrote. “If you mess around, there will be payback.”

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Rare twin suicide bombings rock Baghdad market, killing dozens

InternationalJan 22. 2021

By The Washington Post · Louisa Loveluck, Mustafa Salim

BAGHDAD – Rare twin suicide bombings struck a market Thursday in central Baghdad, killing at least 32 people and injuring 110 more, according to Iraq’s Health Ministry.

The blasts came midmorning as people were shopping for secondhand clothes at a market in Tayaran Square. Video footage showed the second explosion ripping through the air as sirens blared and casualties were raced away in motorized rickshaws. Other images from the scene showed bodies strewn on the ground amid upturned tables and piles of unsold jackets.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Although security forces continue to fight ragtag bands of Islamic State militants in Iraq’s peripheral regions, major security incidents in the capital are rare. Thursday’s attack was the deadliest to strike the capital in years. The last mass-casualty attack, striking the same square, took place in January 2018 and killed 27 people.

Khalid al-Mahna, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the suicide bomber detonated his explosives after attracting a crowd by feigning sickness in the middle of the market.

When shoppers came to help those injured by the first blast, he said, someone else detonated a second bomb.

Thursday’s attack shattered a sense of relative security in the capital, raising questions about the Iraqi security forces’ preparedness in the face of a militant threat that has been diminished but by no means erased. Army units and special forces continue to arrest alleged Islamic State members at their homes in urban centers and say that sleeper cells remain prepared to mount strikes.

In a statement, an Iraqi military spokesman, Yahya Rasool, said the bombers detonated their explosives as they were pursued by security forces. Rasool said his unit had received information suggesting that an attack was coming. No uniformed security forces appeared to be visible in the surveillance video footage that showed the first blast.

Although a security breach in the heart of Baghdad is rare, experts cautioned that Thursday’s attack underscored the challenge of ending militant violence without far-reaching changes to how the country is governed.

“This is not to say that this is the beginning of extreme conflict in Iraq, or violence, but it is a reminder that there is yet to be a sustainable solution to govern the socio-economy and politics of Iraq,” said Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program. “As long as there’s that incoherence, I think we expect, sadly, for these attacks to continue and increase in time because we’re just looking back as to what happened before under a similar context.”

The attack occurred at a time when life for ordinary Iraqis is becoming harder. The coronavirus pandemic has tanked global energy prices, plunging Iraq’s oil-dependent economy into crisis and forcing a devaluation of the currency. Unemployment has increased. The price of basic goods is rising, too.

While street cleaners swept blood from scene, families combed the site for relatives last seen there. Ahmed Qassim, 32, showed street vendors a photograph of his 20-year-old cousin, Abdullah, who was last seen peddling T-shirts. They said he had been taken away in an ambulance.

An elderly man with gray hair and spectacles wandered confused and distraught along a street leading to the marketplace. “Where is my son?” he shouted. “He’s just a kid who sells sunglasses and wants to live. Where is he?”

As he walked, young men were sifting through piles of clothes for body parts. For a moment, a teenager crouched to lay out candles for the dead. “We’re still looking for bodies, man,” a friend chided him. The teenager was stone-faced. “We got used to death,” he replied, as he lit the wicks one by one.

Compounding Iraq’s multiple crises, the country has also emerged again as a stage for geopolitical tensions, with Iran-backed Shiite militias launching rockets at U.S. diplomatic and military-linked targets and U.S. forces responding with airstrikes.

Three Americans and one Briton have been killed in those attacks. But for the most part, the dead and injured have been Iraqis caught in the crossfire.

After the Islamic State’s battlefield defeat here in 2017, the United States is reducing its troop presence to 2,500, with most of those performing advisory functions as the Iraqi military takes the lead in what remains of the fight.

“ISIS will be trying to make this part of a campaign to disrupt daily life and show it is still relevant and able to carry out extreme violence despite its territorial defeat,” said Sajad Jiyad, an Iraq-based fellow at the Century Foundation.

“Attacks hark back to painful memories when attacks on civilians were common. The government needs to restore confidence quickly and show it will not allow ISIS bombings to become a regular occurrence again.”

As the winter sun set Thursday, the funerals began. In a narrow alleyway by Tayaran Square, shock and anger were palpable. Young men held coffins aloft. Among the dead was a 32-year-old named Maher al-Swerawi, who died in the first explosion. His friend Hani Sabri ran out to reach his body, friends said. Sabri, who was 30, was killed in the second blast.

As the crowd moved along, one voice rang out above the din. It was Sabri’s mother.

“Hani, I told you not to go. Why did you go there?” she cried, her voice breaking.

“Why did you go?”

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EU leaders consider travel bans, faster vaccine rollout to contain coronavirus variants

InternationalJan 22. 2021

Ursula von der Leyen

By The Washington Post · Michael Birnbaum

European leaders, struggling with a slow vaccination effort and fearful that highly contagious coronavirus variants could rapidly overwhelm their medical systems, moved Thursday to begin reimposing border restrictions and to speed the distribution of vaccines – even those not yet been approved for use.

“We are increasingly concerned about different variants of the virus,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters after a virtual summit of European Union leaders, saying that though the bloc intends to keep borders open for trade, it may restrict nonessential travel.

The leaders held back from endorsing a specific plan for borders. But Germany – which as the richest and most populous EU member often drives its discussions – proposed strict, temporary bans on travel to the EU from countries where mutated forms of the coronavirus are already prevalent, including Britain. The proposal would restrict EU citizens from returning to their home countries if they are currently in an affected country, and would therefore be more stringent than previous border measures.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that sharp action was necessary in the face of more transmissible strain first identified in Britain.

“I can’t stress this strongly enough: We need to slow down the spread of this mutant virus, we mustn’t wait until this virus flares up here and is reflected in explosive new numbers,” she told reporters before the EU discussion. “We’d have a stronger wave of the virus, probably stronger than anything we’ve seen so far.”

The leaders also agreed to begin distributing doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine across Europe, so rollout can start as soon as that vaccine is approved, possibly around mid-February. Though Britain is already administering AstraZeneca inoculations, European and U.S. regulators have questioned whether there is enough data to show they are effective among older people.

Until now, the EU has focused on a rapid but by-the-book medical authorization process to build public confidence in the safety of the vaccines. But some countries are pushing the bloc’s medical regulator to move faster.

“We are working with other EU countries for the fastest possible, unbureaucratic approval of @AstraZeneca and other vaccines,” wrote Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, on Twitter, during the leaders’ summit.

The European Commission earlier this week set a goal that 70% of EU residents would be vaccinated by the summer – an ambitious effort that, despite efforts to remain united, may ultimately highlight disparities among member countries.

The pace of vaccinations already has varied sharply among countries, even though they all got access to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines simultaneously. Denmark has administered 3.2 doses for every 100 residents. The Netherlands has only given out 0.6 doses for the same number.

The 70% goal struck some public health experts as overly aspirational.

In France, “we would need to vaccinate at least twice as fast as now,” said Odile Launay, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Paris and a member of the committee advising French authorities on vaccine strategy. “And the other question: will 70 percent of the population want to get vaccinated?”

Hours before Thursday’s meeting, Hungary announced it was breaking with the other 26 members of the EU to authorize both the AstraZeneca and Russian-made Sputnik vaccines within its borders. The country’s national regulator said that it would maintain careful testing of the Sputnik vaccine, but that because the AstraZeneca inoculation was already approved in Britain, no further tests for that one were necessary.

The EU approves vaccines as a bloc, but individual countries can offer emergency authorizations. The Hungarian move may create pressure on other countries to follow suit, although many EU leaders have said that a unified strategy will be the most effective, because it will build the most confidence across the union of 450 million people.

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Twitter locks out Chinese Embassy in U.S. over post on Uighurs

InternationalJan 22. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Kurt Wagner, Peter Martin

Twitter has locked the official account for the Chinese Embassy to the U.S. after a post that defended the Beijing government’s policies in the western region of Xinjiang, where critics say China is engaged in the forced sterilization of minority Uighur women.

The tweet, which said Uighur women were no longer “baby-making machines,” was originally shared on Jan. 7, but wasn’t removed by Twitter until more than 24 hours later. It has been replaced by a label saying, “This tweet is no longer available.” Even though Twitter hides tweets that violate its rules, it still requires the account owner to manually delete the post in order to regain access to the account.

The account is still locked, a Twitter spokesman confirmed, meaning the Chinese Embassy has not deleted the tweet. The Chinese Embassy account, @ChineseEmbinUS, has not posted since Jan. 8, having published at least a dozen more tweets after the one breaking Twitter’s rules.

“We have taken action on this Tweet for violating our policy against dehumanization,” a Twitter spokesman said in a statement. Twitter prohibits the “dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, or ethnicity.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Thursday said authorities were “puzzled” about why Twitter restricted the account, calling it the embassy’s responsibility to correct “fake reports and information related to Xinjiang.”

“We hope Twitter can adhere to objective and fair principles and not display double standards on this issue,” she said at a briefing in Beijing.

The move is the latest in a series of escalating steps Twitter has taken in recent weeks to enforce its policies. The suspension of the Chinese Embassy account came shortly after Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump’s account for repeated rules violations, and potentially complicates Beijing’s efforts to reset relations with the U.S. under President Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, then-acting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that China’s actions against Uighur minorities amounted to “genocide,” a label that his successor Antony Blinken agreed with during his confirmation hearings this week. China has maintained that it is fighting separatism and extremism in the region, where the United Nations has estimated up to 1 million Uighurs may be held in camps.

The decision to suspend the Chinese Embassy account also adds to an already complicated relationship between U.S. tech companies and China. Large social platforms like Twitter, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and YouTube are all banned in China, which has some of the world’s strictest controls on the internet. Trump, meanwhile, had previously demanded that Chinese startup ByteDance Ltd. spin off its successful video service TikTok in the U.S.

China’s embassy in Washington joined Twitter in 2019 in the midst of heated trade talks between the countries, as more Chinese officials started using the platform to aggressively defend Beijing across the world in what has become known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. Chinese officials and state-run media have used Twitter to accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy, particularly after a deadly riot at the Capitol earlier this month.

After the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka’s account was suspended last year, it argued its “freedom of speech” must be honored, even though Twitter posts are blocked in the mainland.

Last month, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology after Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted a fake photo depicting one of his nation’s troops holding a bloody knife to an Afghan child’s throat. Chinese social media platform WeChat subsequently deleted a post by Morrison after he made a direct appeal to the Chinese community promoting Australia as a “free, democratic, liberal country.”

In recent months China has moved to rein its own big tech companies, proposing antitrust policies in November that would give the Communist Party sweeping powers over some of the country’s most biggest corporations.

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Biden order seeks stronger workplace safety rules, signaling a more worker-friendly approach

InternationalJan 22. 2021

Jimena Peterson waves a sign during a protest outside the offices of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in downtown Denver in September. The protest was staged by the union representing employees at a Colorado meatpacking plant where six workers died of covid-19 and hundreds more were infected this past spring. (David Zalubowski/ AP)

By The Washington Post · Eli Rosenberg

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden signed an executive order Thursday to direct federal regulators to issue stronger safety guidance for workplaces operating in the midst of the pandemic.

The executive order on “Protecting Worker Health and Safety” seeks to reorient worker safety guidelines and enforcement at the Labor Department’s workplace safety division – the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

It directs OSHA to update covid safety recommendations for businesses within the next two weeks, review its enforcement efforts, which have been sharply criticized during the pandemic, and study whether an emergency temporary standard, which businesses would have to comply with under the threat of penalties, is necessary. The agency must issued the emergency standard by mid-March, if so.

Such a standard could mandate mask-wearing and other requirements, including social distancing, hand-washing breaks and communication with workers during outbreaks.

The order marks an abrupt shift from the Trump administration’s more business and industry friendly approach, and signals a new emphasis on the plight of workers, including a focus on issues of race and equity, in the Biden administration.

“Ensuring the health and safety of workers is a national priority and a moral imperative,” Biden wrote in the order. “Healthcare workers and other essential workers, many of whom are people of color and immigrants, have put their lives on the line during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic….The Federal Government must take swift action to reduce the risk that workers may contract COVID-19 in the workplace.”

Worker advocates hailed the executive order, saying it was the first step in reorienting OSHA toward more stringent safety protections.

“It will precipitate a 180,” said Debbie Berkowitz, an OSHA official during the Obama years who has been pushing for the agency to more actively monitor workplaces for coronavirus-related safety issues during the pandemic.

Under President Donald Trump, OSHA’s relatively lax enforcement of workplace safety guidance during the pandemic was a constant source of frustration for unions and worker advocates, as workplaces proved to be a significant source of outbreaks.

The agency declined to issue an enforceable standard for workplaces, and instead issued guidance weakened by phrases including “if feasible” and “when possible.” OSHA was slow to issue penalties for violations under its existing statutes – and when it did, some of those penalties amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.

JBS, a multibillion-dollar meatpacking company, was given a $15,600 fine in September after 290 workers tested positive for the virus and six died at a plant in Colorado, for example. Smithfield, another large meat processing company, was given a $13,500 fine after 1,294 workers at a plant in Sioux Falls, S.D., tested positive for the coronavirus and four died.

Biden’s executive order also calls for OSHA to train its enforcement apparatus on outbreaks like those – calling for a “national program to focus OSHA enforcement efforts related to COVID-19 on violations that put the largest number of workers at serious risk or are contrary to anti-retaliation principles.” It also directs the Department of Labor to conduct a multilingual outreach program about the efforts, to better publicize them, seeking to address another long-standing complaint about the Trump administration’s response.

Labor law experts had expected the Biden administration to move forward with an emergency temporary standard for workplaces during the pandemic as part of its work combating the public health crisis, while using the executive branch to give workers more power.

During his campaign, Biden called for worker protections ranging from a $15 minimum wage, more leeway to organize and collectively bargain, and the classification of gig workers as employees.

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Jobless claims remained at historic highs last week, as Biden inherits the worst job market of any modern president

InternationalJan 22. 2021

A “now hiring” sign hangs on the front wall of a Harbor Freight Tools store in Manchester, N.H., in December. (Charles Krupa/ AP)

By The Washington Post · Eli Rosenberg

Another 900,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, President Donald Trump’s last in office, a snapshot of the significant labor market challenges facing President Joe Biden.

An additional 423,000 people in 47 states filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program created to help gig and self-employed workers.

Altogether, nearly 16 million people were claiming benefits as of Jan. 2, the last week available for that measurement. That number is expected to increase in the coming weeks as people who were dropped from the unemployment rolls after their benefits expired file new claims to take advantage of the extension passed by Congress at the last minute in December.

The number of new unemployment claims filed each week has remained above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 since coronavirus cases starting rising in March. Jobless claims have also risen in recent weeks.

Economists have cautioned about reading too deeply into the weekly fluctuations of the statistic, noting that issues with data processing and duplicate claims have at times inflated the numbers.

Still, the benchmark paints a dire portrait. Weekly jobless claims are now near what they were at the beginning of September. It’s the 44th straight week that initial claims remain higher than the worst week of the Great Recession.

Biden inherits one of the worst job markets of any modern president, with the country’s unemployment rate at 6.7 percent and nearly 10 million fewer people with jobs than at the beginning of last year, as the pandemic has wreaked havoc on industries like tourism, hospitality and food service.

Biden is calling for a $1.9 trillion stimulus measure that would extend unemployment payments and benefits beyond March, give out $1,400 checks and provide hundreds of millions of dollars to small businesses as well as state and local governments that are struggling.