The World Health Organization expressed disappointment with China for delaying the travel of experts to the Asian country to investigate the origin of the virus, in a rare instance of public criticism from the international organization.
Chinese officials have not yet finalized permission to allow WHO-appointed experts to enter the country even as some of them embarked on travel, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a briefing on Tuesday. The delay comes despite months of negotiation and planning between Chinese officials and the 10-member expert team.
“I am very disappointed with this news given that two members had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute,” Tedros said. “We are eager to get the mission underway as soon as possible.”
The delay by Chinese authorities fuels concern that Beijing is obstructing international efforts to trace the origins of a pandemic that has now killed over 1.8 million people worldwide. Stung by criticism that China initially covered up the extent of the crisis, state media and government figures have been pushing the possibility that the pathogen did not emerge solely in the Asian country.
China is still working with the WHO on dates and other details regarding the mission, with hopes that a decision for arrangements will be reached as soon as possible, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a briefing on Wednesday.
“There might be some misunderstanding in this. But there’s no need to read too much into it,” she said.
Members of the WHO expert team appear to have called off their travel for now. “No, luckily wasn’t on the way yet,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said in a Twitter post, in response to a question on whether she was facing travel obstacles.
The WHO has been criticized for being too deferential to China through the course of the pandemic, and has been blamed by other countries for initially downplaying the severity of the crisis. U.S. President Donald Trump said last year that the superpower would terminate its relationship with the WHO unless it “demonstrated independence” from China.
Top Chinese epidemiologist Liang Wannian, who oversaw the country’s virus response until September last year, told Bloomberg News in an interview on Tuesday that the WHO’s investigation would “begin very soon” in China.
The WHO team and experts from China plan to jointly analyze data and samples taken from the Wuhan wet market where many of China’s earliest Covid-19 patients appear to have become infected, he said.
Liang said he has been working with two WHO experts since July to formulate a plan on how to conduct the tracing work in China.
Germany urges patience with covid vaccine rollout under fire
InternationalJan 07. 2021Visitors enter to receive doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Wurzburg, Germany, on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alex Kraus.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Iain Rogers
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government pleaded for patience as it pushed back against criticism that Germany bungled the rollout of a covid-19 vaccine.
A shortage of doses at the start of the campaign was expected and stems from production bottlenecks rather than insufficient procurement, Health Minister Jens Spahn said Wednesday in Berlin.
“We have to ask large parts of the population for patience,” Spahn said. “We’ve ordered enough, more than enough vaccines.”
Like other European Union countries, Germany started its program with a shot jointly developed with Mainz-based BioNTech on Dec. 27. The shortage will be eased by additional production capacity, including the start of a facility in Marburg in February that will lead to a “massive” gain in output, he said.
A similar vaccine from U.S. biotech Moderna Inc., which won backing from the European Medicines Agency on Wednesday, could further ease supplies. Distribution of the shot could start as soon as next week, Spahn said. The EU has locked up as many as 160 million doses, with Germany to get more than 50 million.
A day after Merkel tightened and extended lockdown measures, she gathered top cabinet ministers in an effort to quell tensions within her government over claims the rollout has been too slow.
Senior members of her Social Democrat partners, including Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, questioned Merkel’s strategy of ceding responsibility for procuring vaccines to the European Union. With a national election slated for September, the tension threatens to inject party politics into the country’s pandemic fight.
At an ill-tempered meeting on Tuesday, Merkel and state leaders agreed to controversial limits on movement, sharpened restrictions on private gatherings and prolonged hard lockdown measures until at least Jan. 31. She also defended the vaccination strategy, saying more supply is coming soon.
“In the second quarter, based on all that we know from the manufacturers, we will already have significantly more vaccine doses,” Merkel said Tuesday in Berlin. The EU has ordered “significantly more vaccine than is necessary” to inoculate everyone in the bloc.
Underscoring the pressure facing Merkel’s government, Germany on Wednesday registered more than 1,000 covid-related deaths for only the second time since the pandemic began. Contagion rates remain more than double a government target despite weeks of strict curbs.
Scholz, the SPD’s chancellor candidate who attended the meeting, denied that his criticism was a campaign ploy.
“This is about a very serious issue, whether we can properly protect the citizens of this country,” Scholz said in an interview with ARD television on Wednesday. “The most important thing, not just for today but in the future, is that we do everything to make sure as much vaccine as possible is made in Germany and Europe.”
After a relatively mild outbreak in the spring, infections in Germany have doubled since the end of November to more than 1.8 million and deaths have surged above 36,000.
Scholz said Germany, which is supporting businesses affected by the lockdown, has the financial resources to weather the crisis “for a long time.”
Thanks to years of prudent budget policy, Germany’s debt as a percentage of gross domestic product won’t rise much above 70% and will quickly shrink again once the pandemic has receded, he told ARD.
With hospitals filling up and concerns about a spike from the holidays still coming, authorities are worried about the pace of inoculations. But Germany is ahead of most other European countries.
According to the latest data from the RKI public health institute, over 367,000 people have been immunized in Germany through 11 a.m. on Wednesday, about 0.4% of the population. That compares with around 1.5% in the U.S. and nearly 2% in Britain, which both began vaccinating several weeks earlier, and about 0.3% in Italy.
Spahn, a leading figure in Merkel’s Christian Democrats, has said he is hopeful everyone who wants a shot in Germany can get one by the summer.
“If you look at some of our neighbors in the European Union, then the structures we’ve put in place are working pretty well,” he said. “I’m not saying everything is perfect, I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but all in all it’s working well.”
Swamped hospitals expose depth of Britain’s unfolding crisis
InternationalJan 07. 2021A pedestrian walks along Regent Street in London on Jan. 5. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hollie Adams.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · James Paton, Emily Ashton, Jill Ward
If the British government’s goal throughout the coronavirus pandemic has been to protect the health service, the next few weeks will be the biggest challenge yet.
After overtaking Italy again as the country with Europe’s highest death toll, the U.K. is at the epicenter of the continent’s struggle to contain covid-19. Daily infections are at a record-one in 50 people in England now have the disease-while Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week shut schools and ordered the population to stay at home.
Medical staff say they may be forced to turn people away from hospitals if the latest lockdown fails to curb quickly enough a new strain of the virus that emerged in southeast England last month.
Winter already stretches health care and the virus means more patients are spilling into corridors and others are having to be treated in parked ambulances. The British Medical Association, which represents doctors, said the National Health Service is facing a crisis as rampant infections combine with staff illness and burnout.
“There are so many thousands of patients coming in,” said Tom Dolphin, 42, a consultant anesthetist at a London hospital. “The worrying thing is we probably haven’t seen the peak yet from the patients coming who got infected over Christmas and the New Year period.”
During 10 months of turmoil over its handling of the pandemic, the U.K. government managed to keep the country’s treasured NHS afloat and then became the first Western country to start immunizing its citizens. That now risks becoming a hollow victory as an accelerated vaccine program races against an out-of-control virus.
Medics had been pressuring Johnson to take nationwide action amid the surge in cases in recent weeks. But even at the weekend, the government was suggesting that schools would remain open.
New treatments mean a greater proportion of covid-19 patients are being kept alive, but many still need to remain in the hospital due to breathing difficulties. That’s also putting pressure on capacity. The health system had already entered the pandemic short of about 40,000 nurses.
For nurse Stuart Tuckwood, the tougher lockdown brings at least some relief as the country desperately waits for the vaccination drive to pay off.
“People know how bad things are and how much worse they’re going to get if cases continue to rise the way they are,” said Tuckwood, who works in a hospital in the south of England and is also national officer for nursing at union Unison. “We can’t rely on the vaccine being the magic solution. There can be no complacency about the ability of the health service and staff to cope.”
Britain’s death toll stood at 76,423, according to Bloomberg’s Coronavirus Tracker, after fatalities outpaced Italy’s in recent days. The number of daily cases on Tuesday rose to almost 61,000-the most since the coronavirus swept into Europe, though also after the U.K. ramped up testing.
Johnson said in a televised address on Monday that the number of covid patients in hospitals in England was 40% higher than the first peak in April. Pressure on intensive care units was already severe over the holidays, with figures published in the Health Service Journal showing they were operating at more than 110% of capacity in London and the southeast of England as of late December. Some patients had to be transported hours away to the southwest or north of England.
The dramatic escalation has prompted Johnson to gamble on multiple fronts. As well as locking down the nation again, the government is trying to rapidly increase the number of people who get their first dose of vaccine by pushing back their second shots.
That’s aimed at stretching supplies of the two vaccines being rolled out: one from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech and the other from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. The move gained support from some health experts but sparked concerns from others, including Pfizer.
The aim is to maximize the number of vulnerable people who will get at least some protection in the shortest possible time. U.K. health authorities have pointed to data showing the vaccines provide considerable defense after a single dose, with the second shot important over the longer term.
Johnson said on Tuesday that 1.3 million people had been immunized, or almost 2% of the population, by far the most in Europe. Germany had vaccinated 317,000 people as of Jan. 5 and France just 2,000, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. The government in London has set a target of vaccinating almost 14 million people by mid-February.
The reality, though, is that Britain has little choice. New infections in the U.K.-720 per 100,000 population over 14 days-were running at more than twice the rate of Italy or France at the end of December, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
There are almost 9,000 more coronavirus patients in hospital beds than there were on Christmas Day-the equivalent of nearly 18 hospitals, according to the group NHS Providers.
The stress on doctors and nurses is increasing, and “that really does trigger a need for a new way of thinking,” said Doug Brown, chief executive of the British Society for Immunology. “The risk of not doing this is much greater.” In a normal world, the country would stick to the dosing tested in the clinical trials, he said. “We’re not in a normal world at the moment.”
Protecting the NHS resonates in Britain. During the first lockdown in spring, people stood on their doorsteps and applauded healthcare workers every Thursday evening and children painted rainbows to stick on the front windows. The government is relying on a fatigued nation to step up again, with the NHS now key to rolling out the vaccines.
Read More: U.K. Hospitals Face Breaking Point as Johnson Prepares Lockdown
Finding and deploying enough staff to carry out around 2 million vaccinations a week is no easy task and will have a big impact on the health service, said Richard Sloggett, a former special adviser to Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
“It certainly feels like we are moving to a point where we are betting the house on a vaccine program,” said Sloggett, a senior fellow at the Policy Exchange think tank.
The hope is that the lockdown will work before hospitals are unable to cope, said Dolphin, the anesthetist, who is also a member of the BMA’s council. The restrictions are due to run in England until at least mid-February, though Johnson signaled in a press conference Tuesday there could be many more months of restrictions ahead.
“It’s getting to the point where the service isn’t what we would normally recognize as fit for the U.K.,” Dolphin said. “Or fit for any country, really.”
WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden will face pressure to send millions of Americans $2,000 stimulus checks and deliver on an aggressive economic agenda as Democrats closed in on unified control of Washington with likely Senate wins in Georgia.
Democrats whose ambitions have been strangled by a GOP Senate and president for the past two years were eyeing a new world with major opportunities for change on Wednesday – even as the coronavirus rages and the economy teeters on the brink.
Democrat Raphael Warnock won his race against Republican David Perdue in Tuesday’s Senate runoff in Georgia, and Democrat Jon Ossoff held a lead over Republican Kelly Loeffler. Winning those races would give Democrats control of the Senate, which along with their House majority and Biden’s presidency would give them a stranglehold on power in the nation’s capital for the first time since Barack Obama’s first term.
It’s unclear how quickly the Democratic wins in Georgia might be certified, especially since Republicans could challenge the outcomes. Nevertheless Democrats were celebrating.
“It feels like a brand new day. For the first time in six years, Democrats will operate a majority in the United States Senate – and that will be very good for the American people,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who would become majority leader if the Democratic wins in Georgia hold.
“America is experiencing one of the greatest crises we have ever faced, and the Senate Democratic majority is committed to delivering the bold change and help Americans need and demand. Senate Democrats know America is hurting – help is on the way,” Schumer said.
The first two years of Obama’s presidency brought the nation the Affordable Care Act. Biden, then vice president, will now have the opportunity to enact an ambitious agenda of his own. First up could be his promise that winning Georgia would bring $2,000 checks to Americans right away.
“Their election will put an end to the block in Washington – that $2000 stimulus check – that money would go out the door immediately, to help people who are in real trouble,” Biden said in Georgia in the closing days of the race. “Think about what it will mean to your lives – putting food on the table, paying rent.”
The $2,000 stimulus payments have gained surprising bipartisan support after President Donald Trump seized on the idea, first floated by liberal lawmakers in Congress in the spring. Biden has over the last several months shifted his position on the stimulus payments, but specifically pledged a $2,000 stimulus payment for voters if Democrats won in Georgia.
Biden’s promise to enact $2,000 checks comes despite a fierce debate among Democratic economists and lawmakers about the merits of the payments, which some critics argue sends too much money to Americans who do not need it. Ossoff and Warnock both pledged while on the campaign trail to enact $2,000 stimulus payments if elected.
“It has been incredible to see the tremendous rush of momentum for $2,000 cash relief,” said Andrew Yang, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and early supporter of direct cash assistance. “People need help, and we have woken up to the fact that our government can deliver real relief if it chooses to do so.”
The $2,000 checks would likely be just the beginning of an ambitious agenda that was already provoking furious debate Wednesday morning as Washington woke to a new realignment of power – presuming Ossoff’s victory holds. Democrats may seek to include the stimulus checks in a broader package with other priorities, such as additional funding for state and local governments and a more substantial expansion in federal unemployment benefits.
Infrastructure spending, climate change legislation, expanding health care benefits, student debt forgiveness and more may also be on the table – although congressional aides cautioned that discussions with the Biden team were in the very early stages. With control of both chambers, Democrats can use special budget rules to push through massive legislation with a simple majority in the Senate, instead of the 60 votes usually required for major bills. That’s how Republicans enacted their $1.5 trillion tax cut bill in the first year of Trump’s presidency with no Democratic votes.
But Democrats’ slim majorities will limit their ambitions and likely exacerbate infighting between liberals and centrists about how far to go. Their 222-211 House majority is the smallest margin of control either party has had for years. The Georgia wins would produce a Senate divided 50-50 between the parties, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote for Democrats.
Liberals wasted no time Wednesday demanding quick action on their priorities.
“Joe Biden and the entire Democratic Party were incredibly clear of the stakes here, starting with the $2,000 checks and massive economic relief policies that put money and resources in the hands of the people,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, a liberal advocacy group. “They’re now going to have to deliver that, starting with the checks on day one.”
Renewed signs of economic deterioration will amplify pressure on Democrats to act. Private payrolls shed about 123,000 jobs in December, a startling drop that marked the worst report by the ADP Research Institute in months. The same report showed the number of jobs increasing by more than 300,000 in November. Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG, warned in a note to investors that the “dark days of the labor market” from the spring have returned.
“America’s great jobs machine ran into a wall of rising coronavirus cases and state lockdowns which puts the entire economic recovery from recession at risk,” Rupkey said. “The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression isn’t over yet. Bet on it.”
Biden will also have to focus on reining in the rampaging coronavirus pandemic, including more money for vaccines and ensuring they go out more quickly.
Congress in March approved more than $2 trillion in emergency economic aid in response to the pandemic and another $900 billion in December. Those aid package have funneled hundreds of billions to small businesses, jobless Americans, and others hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. The first round of stimulus payments included $1,200 per adult, as well as $500 per child, and were within months disbursed to more than 100 million American households.
In late December Trump almost overnight helped generate sizable Republican support for the $2,000 checks even though they stand in stark contrast to long-standing conservative skepticism of government spending and direct cash transfer programs.
The president nearly upended negotiations on economic relief when he ridiculed Congress, as well as his own treasury secretary, for proposing stimulus payments worth $600 per person. Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., raced to demonstrate Democratic support for $2,000 payments as well, aiming to show the bipartisan support for the idea.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., refused to put legislation for the $2,000 checks on the Senate floor, preventing the measure from advancing. But McConnell was undermined by a coalition of about a half-dozen Republican Senators who said they supported the large payments, including both Georgia Republicans up for reelection and possible 2024 GOP presidential candidates including Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The bill passed by the House for $2,000 payments was supported by more than two dozen Republicans as well.
China’s bottled water king is now richer than Warren Buffett
InternationalJan 07. 2021Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., center left, ahead of the company’s annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., on May 4, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Houston Cofield.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Venus Feng, Pei Yi Mak
Zhong Shanshan is setting new wealth records.
The chairman of Nongfu Spring Co., a bottled-water company that’s ubiquitous in China, is now richer than Warren Buffett as his fortune surged $13.5 billion since the start of the year to $91.7 billion on Tuesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zhong, 66, is now the sixth-wealthiest person on the planet. Nongfu shares jumped 18% in the first two trading days of 2021, taking the advance since their September listing to more than 200%. They gained 0.7% on Wednesday.
It’s only the second time a Chinese national has broken into the world’s Top 10 — property tycoon Wang Jianlin hit No. 8 in 2015 — and no one from the mainland has ever ranked this high on Bloomberg’s wealth index since it launched in 2012.
Nicknamed locally as the “Lone Wolf” for avoiding involvement in clubby business groups or politics, Zhong also took vaccine maker Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise Co. public in April. The stock has soared more than 2,800%.
Zhong dethroned India’s Mukesh Ambani as Asia’s wealthiest person last week and is close to entering the rarefied realm of individuals worth more than $100 billion. Buffett is outside that group with an $86.2 billion fortune, but the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. founder has given away more than $37 billion of stock since 2006.
Investors are snapping up Chinese consumer shares as the country demonstrates it’s recovering from covid-19, while analysts have grown increasingly bullish on Nongfu.
Zhong has also helped four relatives become billionaires. His younger sister, Zhong Xiaoxiao, and three of his wife’s siblings each hold a 1.4% stake in Nongfu worth $1.3 billion, based on the ownership listed in the company’s prospectus from last year. The firm has produced dozens of millionaires, including more of Zhong’s relatives and employees.
While covid-19 upended much of the global economy in 2020, it was a good year for the world’s ultra-rich. The 500 wealthiest people added $1.8 trillion to their fortunes and were worth a combined $7.6 trillion by year-end. Zhong, the biggest winner from Asia, amassed more than $71 billion, the most after Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk and Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos.
One notable exception is Jack Ma, until recently Asia’s richest person. He’s not been seen in public since Chinese regulators torpedoed Ant Group Co.’s $35 billion initial public offering. His net worth has dropped about $10 billion since October and he’s now the world’s 25th-richest person.
Hollywood losing ground to Chinese movies in biggest market
InternationalJan 07. 2021A man walks through the foyer of the Grand Theater at the Dalian Wanda Group Co. Oriental Movie Metropolis film production hub in Qingdao, China, on April 17, 2018. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Qilai Shen.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shirley Zhao
Box office collections by foreign films in China more than halved in 2020, posing a tough challenge for Hollywood in one of the few major markets to be recovering from the pandemic.
In the year China took the crown from the U.S. as the world’s No. 1 movie market with a revenue of 20.4 billion yuan ($3.2 billion), overseas films accounted for only 16% of the ticket receipts. That compares with 36% in 2019, according to data from local ticketing platform Maoyan Entertainment.
After China aggressively contained the virus within months, movie theaters on the mainland reopened as early as mid-July, offering a bevy of local fare including the world’s top-grossing movie last year, “The Eight Hundred,” a historical war drama. In contrast, the U.S. and Europe are still struggling to contain the pandemic. Lockdowns are back in many countries as infections and deaths surge, keeping cinema halls shuttered and delaying Hollywood productions and releases.
“China is the fastest to walk out of the pandemic impact and Chinese people are very willing to go out and watch movies in cinemas,” said Wilson Chow, global technology, media and telecommunications industry leader at PwC China. “Hollywood released fewer blockbusters last year, so its level of appeal to Chinese viewers has become lower.”
The pandemic also “half-paralyzed Hollywood’s studios,” Chow said. Fewer big releases in China meant a smaller share in the their box office revenue. Films like “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and “Black Widow,” for instance, were pushed to this year.
Foreign films are also at a disadvantage in China as authorities keep a tight control over the number of imported movies. A World Trade Organization memorandum in 2012 expanded the annual target for foreign titles imported into China to 34 from 20. There are also blackout periods for overseas films during peak seasons.
Movie theaters in Asia are generally thriving, according to Imax Corp.’s Chief Executive Officer Rich Gelfond. In Japan, a record number of people watched films in Imax cinemas over the weekend, while December ticket sales in China at the company’s big-screen theaters jumped 28% from a year earlier, Gelfond said on Bloomberg Television.
Local movies accounted for 84% of China’s box office revenue in 2020, bulking up from 64% in 2019. Chinese studios produced four of the 10 biggest titles, including “The Eight Hundred,” according to industry data tracker Box Office Mojo. On the other hand, several of Hollywood’s highly anticipated, big-budget films flopped in China or spent time fire-fighting some public relations fiasco.
Walt Disney Co.’s fantasy-action drama “Mulan” stirred up controversy for its portrayal of Chinese culture and came under fire for filming in China’s Xinjiang region, where Beijing is accused of oppressing Muslim-minority Uighurs.
“Monster Hunter,” directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and backed by Sony Corp., was pulled from some cinemas in China after some viewers criticized a scene for being racist. Its co-producer apologized and edited out the controversial line that, according to some viewers, was similar to a playground taunt against people of Asian descent for supposedly being dirty.
The recovery of the industry in China has also spurred a rally in some of the local film stocks. Wanda Film Holding Co. has advanced 28% since July while Beijing Enlight Media Co. and Huayi Brothers Media Corp. gained 6% and 11%. Each of these three companies saw their shares plunge in the first six months of 2020.
China’s most famous billionaire has suffered months of mounting trouble, with regulators turning the screws on his tech empire. And now social media is abuzz with the darkest speculation yet: Is Jack Ma missing?
The charismatic founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, known for his frequent Davos appearances and Michael Jackson dance moves, hasn’t been seen in public since late October, when he criticized Chinese regulators in a speech.
His absence, combined with regulatory troubles including a recent antitrust probe, have fueled wild speculation on social media about his whereabouts, with some fearing he is under house arrest. In China, it’s not unusual for powerful figures to disappear with little public explanation when they fall afoul of authorities – such as in 2018, when the country’s most prominent movie star, Fan Bingbing, fell off the map for months before reemerging to confess to tax evasion.
A CNBC reporter who has interviewed Ma in the past tamped down some of the wilder speculation Tuesday, reporting that Ma was not missing but merely “being less visible, purposefully.”
Still, the saga has drawn attention to the increasingly uneasy position of China’s tech giants, which may be growing too big and powerful for the ruling Communist Party’s liking.
The increased scrutiny they are receiving has many Chinese characteristics, but it mirrors some of the anti-tech regulation happening in the United States and Europe, where worries have also mounted about the economic and political power of the world’s biggest companies.
“I think it’s relatively similar dynamics at play in all these places. There are lots of winner-take-all network dynamics, which raises some worries about competition and about the societal impacts,” said Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank. “In China, the societal concerns include worries about private entrepreneurs being able to challenge the party-state. In the U.S., it is more about misinformation and alleged political bias.”
In some respects, China’s internet giants are even more powerful than their Western counterparts, with the market more concentrated around a couple of top players.
Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, founded the e-commerce company Alibaba in 1999 and built it into China’s version of Amazon, with annual revenue of $50 billion. Ant Group was spun off from Alibaba in 2014, after a decade as Alibaba’s in-house payment processing arm.
The companies were part of a group of tech start-ups, including Tencent and Baidu, that eventually grew into multinational behemoths, outside the more traditional system of state-owned enterprises. Ma became a business celebrity in China, widely admired for his success and colorful public appearances, including his rock-and-roll performances at annual employee galas.
Under President Xi Jinping, who has tried to reassert state control over the economy, the market might of the tech giants has at times caused tension.
Ant Group, a $16 billion-a-year business, has been chipping away at powerful state banks’ market share and unnerving regulators with investment and lending products that have become so popular that Ant sometimes acts as a lender to government banks – not the other way around.
In October, Ma offended the authorities by telling a technology conference that Chinese financial regulators stifle innovation and that big state banks are like “pawnshops.”
Soon after, regulators summoned Ma to Beijing for urgent meetings, and then quashed Ant Group’s plans to raise more than $34 billion by listing its stock on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.
And late last month, Chinese regulators said they were launching an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, and would question Ant Group executives about the financial platform’s competitive and consumer-protection practices.
Ma, meanwhile, skipped a planned appearance in November on a television show he created, “Africa’s Business Heroes,” the Financial Times reported.
Representatives of Alibaba, Ant Group and the Jack Ma Foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Orville Schell, a longtime China watcher and Ma friend at the Asia Society in New York, said he doesn’t think this is a “fully scheduled voluntary retreat for him.”
“He is keeping his head down at the very least, and I don’t think he is going to rise again in the same dimension we were used to before,” Schell said.
Ma came of age in the 1990s, under then-Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, when “civil society was strong and everybody was setting up environmental organizations and NGOs,” Schell said.
“That’s when he was in Davos. All these new, young entrepreneurs were infiltrating into global society and business,” Schell said. “That was just fine until Xi Jinping did not imagine Chinese society continuing to evolve in a more open and dispersed way.”
Large companies like Alibaba have gone from being “part of a quest for national greatness to being a potential threat to the preeminence of the party,” Schell said.
Aaron Friedberg, a China expert and politics professor at Princeton University, said Xi’s desire to rein in large, independent companies runs counter to his other big goal – boosting China’s technological might.
“The most dynamic companies in China since the beginning of reform and opening up have been nominally private, not state-owned, enterprises,” he said. “And if they really want to become innovative, certainly the view of most Western economists is they are going to have to let the private sector have more space.”
There is a view among China’s leadership, however, that heavy state investment and goal-setting also have boosted China’s technological rise and that the Communist Party can have its cake and eat it, too, Friedberg added.
The theory goes, “We’re going to have a bigger role in driving and directing innovation because it’s so urgent for strategic reasons. And, yes, we’re going to have private companies, but we’re going to keep them under control,” Friedberg said.
By The Washington Post · Simon Denyer, Min Joo Kim · NATIONAL, WORLD, POLITICS, NATIONAL-SECURITY, ASIA-PACIFIC
TOKYO – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un opened a rare ruling-party Congress this week with a frank admission that his country’s economy had “immensely underachieved” in the past five years, and said he had learned “painful lessons” from the experience, state media reported Wednesday.
Since taking power in 2012, Kim has made a habit of admitting failures even as he celebrates the successes of his regime. In October, he made a tearful apology to the North Korean people for failing to always live up to their expectations, under the twin pressures of sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic and after one of the toughest years for the economy in decades.
Kim did not flag any fundamental change in direction, however, nor suggest in the Tuesday remarks that he would approach the West cap-in-hand for sanctions relief. The “quickest and surest solution” to the problems North Korea is facing is the “reinforcement of our very own self-reliant power by all possible means,” he said.
He also celebrated the regime’s “miraculous victories” over the past five years and the “remarkable” achievement of being able to hold the Eighth Congress of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a pandemic, as he addressed about 7,000 delegates who were not wearing masks.
But he stressed the “heavy responsibility of leading Korea to a stronger and richer path in this world full of harsh challenges and instability,” and finding a “shortcut to bring happiness to the people of our nation.”
It was only the second party Congress to take place in the past four decades, with previous gatherings in 2016 and 1980, as Kim appears to move toward a Chinese model of five-yearly meetings to review and chart economic plans.
Kim made no mention of the United States in what was a domestically focused speech, although he said that “reactionary forces” who are hostile toward North Korea “suffered severe damage.”
But unlike in 2016, he also made no mention of nuclear weapons, and his language left the door open to possible engagement with the President-elect Biden, experts said.
“He’s leaving room to deal with the Biden administration,” said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “It’s very hard not to see that as deliberate.”
Some experts have expressed concern that Kim might greet the incoming Biden administration with a missile test, as a way of getting Washington’s attention and raising itself up the diplomatic agenda. So far, at least, there is no sign of that, and Delury said the two sides are “looking to size one another up.”
Lim Eul-chul, an expert on the North Korean economy at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, said he saw hints of possible economic reforms in the next five-year plan that should be announced this week as the Congress continues.
“Kim himself is painfully aware of the problems inside the North Korean society,” he said.
In his speech, Kim said officials had been dispatched to different parts of the country “to sincerely listen to voices of party members, farmers and workers on the ground.”
Lim said that signals Kim’s willingness to “understand public sentiment at the grass-roots level and develop a more realistic and effective solution.”
After closing its borders soon after the coronavirus pandemic emerged in neighboring China, North Korea says it has not recorded any cases of the virus, although experts and South Korea’s government say this is hard to believe.
Control of the U.S. Senate goes down to the wire in Georgia runoff races
InternationalJan 06. 2021Democratic Senate hopeful Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks to canvassers in Georgia on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Kevin D. Liles for The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Reis Thebault, Michael Scherer, Cleve R. Wootson Jr. · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS
ATLANTA – Control of the U.S. Senate hung in the balance Tuesday night as Georgia election officials counted the results of two closely contested runoff races that will determine whether Democrats can enact a sweeping legislative agenda during the first years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
After swapping leads over the course of the night, Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff benefited from late counts in Democratic areas of the state, which gave Warnock a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler with nearly all precincts reporting. Ossoff was essentially tied with David Perdue, a Republican, whose Senate term lapsed Sunday.
A win by either Democrat would represent a historic upset in a longtime Republican bastion, signaling a clear shift in the political makeup of the state that Biden won nine weeks ago. Warnock would be the first African American Democratic senator from a former Confederate state, and Ossoff, 33, would be the youngest newly elected Democratic senator since Biden in 1973.
At stake was the governing coalition Biden will enjoy in his first years in office. If both Democrats win, they would flip control of the Senate, with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, opening the door for potential passage of legislation Democrats campaigned on over the past two years, including an expansion of federal health-care subsidies, a tax increase on the wealthy and a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
President Donald Trump had supported both Republicans in the race, most recently on Monday, calling Loeffler and Perdue close allies who were essential to holding back Democratic priorities.
But his efforts were complicated by his simultaneous decision to attack Republican officials in the state, his proposal to increase stimulus payments to $2,000, which was opposed by GOP Senate leadership and embraced by Democrats, and his false allegations that the 2020 elections in the state were rigged.
Loeffler and Perdue closed out the campaign warning that unified Democratic control of the House, Senate and presidency would be catastrophic for the nation. Because of possible exposure to the coronavirus, Perdue had to finish the campaign with remote appearances.
“We have to STOP socialism. We have to PROTECT the American Dream,” Loeffler tweeted after polling places opened. “We have to SAVE our country!”
Ossoff and Warnock, who reject the “socialist” label, closed the campaign promising dramatic changes in Washington, including a $1,400 increase to the $600 stimulus checks Congress approved last month, a surge in vaccine distribution, new civil rights legislation and an ambitious jobs and infrastructure bill. The Republican Senate had tabled the larger stimulus checks, holding to the lower level despite pressure from Democrats and President Trump.
“This is history unfolding in Georgia right now,” Ossoff said in a Tuesday morning appearance at a polling site in Atlanta. “Georgia voters have never had more power than you have today. That is the reason the whole world is watching us.”
Republicans have a historical advantage in the traditionally lower-turnout runoffs in the state, and the Democratic Senate candidates ran behind both the victorious Biden and the combined votes of their Republican opponents in the first round of voting in November. They were given another chance because multicandidate fields prevented anyone from breaching the 50% threshold.
Both parties immediately repurposed their presidential campaign ground operations and flooded resources to the state, embracing the all-or-nothing stakes of the final two contests of the election season. The four candidates and their supportive outside groups spent nearly $500 million on television and radio advertising on the runoff races, with the Republicans attacking their opponents as radical liberals with untested biographies and the Democrats labeling the incumbents as representatives of the status quo who profited from private stock trades after receiving official briefings about covid-19.
To win their race, Democratic strategists said, they needed to repeat the strong November turnout among Black, Asian and Hispanic voters in the state while maintaining the anti-Trump margins they had received in college-educated suburban Atlanta communities. Republicans were counting on winning back some of the White, college-educated vote, with Trump off the ballot, while maintaining the high turnout that Trump had attracted in more rural parts of the state.
That effort has been complicated by the president, who offered passionate endorsements for both Republicans in the runoffs, while pursuing his own sometimes contradictory agenda to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere, prompting concerns among Republican strategists that he would dissuade their voters from casting ballots. He also told Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call Saturday that if Biden’s win in the state was not overturned, Republicans might stay home from the polls this week.
Trump’s focus on the last election was an animating force for Republicans who traveled to campaign events in the closing weeks, with voters frequently repeating disproved conspiracy theories of a rigged November contest. Concerned that the misinformation would reduce turnout, Raffensperger’s office staged a news conference Monday to plead with Georgians to disregard Trump’s false arguments and vote in the runoff elections.
In a final Georgia rally Monday night, Trump showed no sign of giving up on his crusade against state Republicans, whom he blamed for not overturning Biden’s win.
“I’m going to be here in a year and a half, and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state,” Trump said in Dalton, where he endorsed Loeffler and Perdue as the “last line of defense” against Democratic control.
Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election also became a rallying cry for Democrats, who hoped the president’s continued involvement would drive their own turnout higher. When Biden traveled to the state Monday to campaign for the Democrats, he argued that Trump’s effort to reverse the election result was a reason for voters to go to the polls.
“Politicians cannot assert, seize or take power,” Biden said. “Power is granted by the American people, and we cannot give that up.”
Preliminary exit polls found roughly 7 in 10 Georgia voters were confident that votes in Tuesday’s runoff elections would be accurately counted. But there were sharp partisan differences, with about 3 in 4 Republican voters saying the presidential election in the state was not conducted fairly, compared with more than 9 in 10 Democrats who said the election was fair.
The Republican skepticism of the vote count marked a shift since Biden narrowly won the state in November. Then, network exit polling found that 92% of Republicans believed votes would be counted accurately, slightly higher than 79% of Democrats.
Before election sites opened Tuesday, Democrats had racked up a significant lead among absentee votes that gave hope to party strategists that they could win the state if GOP Election Day turnout disappointed. Polls in the state since the last election have consistently shown a tight race in both contests.
If Warnock and Ossoff are victorious, it will be just the second time in nearly three decades that two Democrats represent Georgia in the Senate.
Strategists and experts have attributed part of the escalating success of Georgia Democrats to a foundation of political organization powered by Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 gubernatorial race to now-Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, and the legion of activists who have since joined her cause. In 2016, Trump won Georgia by five points. Two years later, Kemp beat Abrams by about a point and a half.
Biden won the state in November by fewer than 12,000 votes, or about 0.2 percentage points, becoming the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to carry Georgia.
In the case of a close contest, extended litigation could also delay a final result. Republicans filed a lawsuit this week requesting greater transparency in the counting of absentee ballots in Fulton County, a Democratic bastion that includes much of the Atlanta metropolitan area.
A victory for the Republicans would cement the third consecutive cycle, with Donald Trump leading the party, when Democrats have been unable to take back control of the upper legislative chamber despite high initial hopes. It would also underscore the challenges that Democrats had in state legislative and U.S. House races, in which they struggled to overcome Republican attacks about socialism and defunding the police, positions that most in the party do not support.
The result will also give an early clue about the staying power of Trump, who has indicated that he will attempt to continue to be a major force in American politics after his long-shot bid to overturn November’s presidential election results is over.
“The one thing I know, if they win, I’ll get no credit, and if they lose, they’re going to blame Trump,” he said Monday about his role in the race.
Long lines formed early at polling places across the state Tuesday but dwindled throughout the day, and the secretary of state’s office reported average wait times of just a couple of minutes by the afternoon. Officials said it was unclear whether short wait times reflected low turnout or an efficient process.
Bobby Caro, a 25-year-old first-time voter in Kennesaw, an Atlanta suburb, cast his ballot for Warnock and Ossoff on Tuesday morning. He described himself as “very new to politics” and said the drumbeat of advertisements about the runoffs convinced him he needed to register – that and the razor-thin margin in November.
“In the presidential election, I didn’t vote; it got close, and I said, ‘I almost didn’t get what I want,’ so I decided to do something now,” Caro said.
This time around, he saw more enthusiasm from young people like him, and he voted for Democrats because he felt they had a more positive outlook on the country and its future.
At the same precinct, Jim Earwood, a 67-year-old retiree, said he appreciated Trump’s ceaseless commentary on the Georgia election, from his early and uncorroborated claims of fraud to his weekend call to the secretary of state.
“I’m glad he’s involved,” Earwood said. “Everybody says he’s not presidential, and that’s what I like about him.”
As he left the Christian church that served as a polling place, Earwood said he voted all Republican.
“I wouldn’t vote for a Dem here lately unless they let Jesus on the ticket,” he said.
Republican concerns about turnout were evident up to the final hours of voting, with Perdue and Loeffler releasing a joint statement Tuesday afternoon asking people to keep going to the polls, saying the election “could come down to the difference of just a few votes in a few precincts across the state.”
Actress Tanya Roberts died Monday night due to complications from a urinary tract infection, according to her publicist, Mike Pingel. She was 65. Roberts had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles since late December, leading to the false news of her death on Sunday. Pingel clarified earlier Monday that she had not died over the weekend.
In a statement issued Tuesday, Pingel stated that Roberts’s longtime partner, Lance O’Brien, had received a call from the hospital confirming her death late the previous night. The infection had spread to Roberts’s kidney, gallbladder, liver and bloodstream.
Widespread confusion over the status of Roberts’s health stemmed from Pingel confirming her death to members of the media on Sunday. He told The Washington Post on Monday – before her actual passing – that he had mistakenly announced it because of a “miscommunication” involving hospital staff and Roberts’s longtime partner, Lance O’Brien.
“He was called to go because she was passing away, they thought, and so he went and saw her – that is how it happened,” Pingel said Monday. “The phone rang at 10 a.m. (Monday) morning, and it was the hospital saying that, yes, she was still alive and in the ICU, and she had not passed away.”
Pingel added that O’Brien – Roberts’s partner of 18 years who had been “very distraught” – was the one who originally informed the publicist of her supposed death. The Associated Press wrote an obituary based on the information relayed by Pingel, who said Roberts had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai after collapsing in her home. Earlier Monday, The Washington Post published that same story online, supplemented with additional biographical detail.
Roberts, the daughter of a fountain-pen salesman, was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx on Oct. 15, 1955. She modeled and landed minor stage roles in New York before making it to Hollywood in the late 1970s. She replaced Shelley Hack in the final season of the “Charlie’s Angels” television series and went on to appear in several fantasy adventure films.
Among Roberts’s most high-profile roles was geologist Stacey Sutton, love interest to Roger Moore’s James Bond in the 1985 film “A View to a Kill.” Starting in the late 1990s, she appeared on “That ’70s Show” as Midge Pinciotti, the mother of Laura Prepon’s character, Donna.
“That ’70s Show” actor Ashton Kutcher informed several co-stars before Roberts’s confirmed death on Monday that, despite initial reports, she was still alive: “yo bro she’s not dead,” he tweeted to Topher Grace, who, in mourning Roberts, remembered her as “delightful.”
“I had never acted before and, to be honest, a little nervous around her,” Grace had written. “But she couldn’t have been kinder. We’ll miss you Midge.”
Visitors enter to receive doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Wurzburg, Germany, on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alex Kraus.
A pedestrian walks along Regent Street in London on Jan. 5. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hollie Adams.
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Kim Jong Un
Democratic Senate hopeful Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks to canvassers in Georgia on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Kevin D. Liles for The Washington Post
