Tag Archives: China

Analysis: End of the road for Hong Kong’s democratic dream as China ‘improves’ its voting system

By James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Ever since Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, opposition activists have tried to bring full democracy to the city, believing that China would live up to its promise to one day allow universal suffrage to elect the city’s leader.

On Friday, that campaign was dealt its biggest blow. Chinese parliamentarians in Beijing unveiled details of a plan to revamp the political structure of China’s freest city that critics say has all but killed off the pledge of one person, one vote.

China’s move comes months after a sweeping national security law was imposed on the Asian financial hub, cracking down on dissent, and more than a year after months of sometimes violent anti-China, pro-democracy protests which swept the city.

“There is not much we can do to effectively change what they’re deciding,” the head of the Democratic Party, Lo Kin-hei, told Reuters.

The structural changes will include increasing the city’s legislative seats from 70 to 90, with some of these to now be decided by a committee stacked with Beijing loyalists. Seats likely to be controlled by the democrats will either be scrapped or reduced.

A 1,200-person committee that picks Hong Kong’s leader will be expanded – further “improving” a system controlled by Chinese “patriots,” according to Wang Chen, a vice chairman of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress.

Wang told reporters the moves, that would involve re-drafting parts of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, would consolidate China’s “overall jurisdiction” over the city and fix “deep-seated problems” once and for all.

It was in the Basic Law that Beijing promised universal suffrage as an ultimate goal for Hong Kong.

But Friday’s moves now stand to nip in the bud the risk of any resurgence of the democracy movement, founded after Beijing’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

With many leading democrats now jailed or forced into exile, including Lo’s predecessor, Wu Chi-wai, who was denied bail this week along with dozens of others for an alleged conspiracy to “overthrow” the government, the democrats will try to utilize their grassroots networks to keep their ideals alive.

“The trust towards the system is fading … and it’s not a good sign if we want a more peaceful society to not allow different voices to be in harmony,” Lo told Reuters.

‘MOVING BACKWARDS’

Another veteran democracy campaigner said Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who became head of the Communist Party in 2012, had changed the trajectory of Hong Kong’s moves towards full democracy, going against the oft-cited promise of China’s late leader, Deng Xiaoping, to let Hong Kong people “rule” Hong Kong.

“It’s a great tragedy,” said the source, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the political atmosphere. “They are moving backwards, not forwards, and taking us back in time to a dark, dark place.”

With the opposition now likely to become a permanent minority in a re-modelled legislature, the shift towards China’s one-party model will create openings for new patriotic factions, critics and some pro-Beijing politicians say.

China, given its rise into a global superpower, now has the power and resources to extend its autocratic governance despite criticism and sanctions from the West.

Some see Hong Kong’s British Common Law legal system as the last bastion against China’s tightening authoritarian grip.

More than 50 democratic advocates crammed into a court in the city this week, some of whom face potential life imprisonment on a subversion charge under the national security law promulgated directly by China’s parliament last June.

Two democrats, veteran activist Leung Kwok-hung and former law professor Benny Tai, had to shuttle between two court rooms for concurrent hearings, while others were taken to hospital after falling ill during marathon sessions.

Under the security law, the onus rests on defendants to argue a case for bail – which critics say overturns the common law tradition.

Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula, which guaranteed its way of life, freedoms and independent legal system.

Barrister Martin Lee, 82, dubbed the city’s father of democracy, wrote in a 2014 editorial in the New York Times that universal suffrage was the only way to honor Deng’s “one country, two systems” formula and to “keep his blueprint from becoming a litany of broken promises”.

The current moves could be a final departure from that.

“This is now an over-correction,” a senior Western diplomat told Reuters.

“In trying to wrest control back, there is a danger that they will overdo it and kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

(Additional reporting by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Philippines offers nurses in exchange for vaccines from Britain, Germany

By Neil Jerome Morales

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines will let thousands of its healthcare workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate much-needed coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday.

The Philippines, which has among Asia’s highest number of coronavirus cases, has relaxed a ban on deploying its healthcare workers overseas, but still limits the number of medical professionals leaving the country to 5,000 a year.

Alice Visperas, director of the labor ministry’s international affairs bureau, said the Philippines was open to lifting the cap in exchange for vaccines from Britain and Germany, which it would use to inoculate outbound workers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino repatriates.

Nurses are among the millions of Filipinos who work overseas, providing in excess of $30 billion a year in remittances vital to the country’s economy.

“We are considering the request to lift the deployment cap, subject to agreement,” Visperas told Reuters.

Britain is grappling with the world’s sixth-highest coronavirus death toll and one of the worst economic hits from the pandemic, while Germany has the 10th most infections globally.

While the two countries have inoculated a combined 23 million people, the Philippines has yet to start its campaign to immunize 70 million adults, or two-thirds of its 108 million people. It expects to receive its first batch of vaccines this week, donated by China.

The Philippines wants to secure 148 million doses of vaccines altogether.

The British embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment while calls to Germany’s mission went unanswered.

In 2019, almost 17,000 Filipino nurses signed overseas work contracts, government data showed.

While Filipino nurses have fought to lift the deployment ban to escape poor working conditions and low pay at home, the workers-for-vaccine plan has not gone down well with some medical workers.

“We are disgusted on how nurses and healthcare workers are being treated by the government as commodities or export products,” Jocelyn Andamo, secretary general of the Filipino Nurses United, told Reuters.

Iran says U.S. move to seize oil shipment is ‘act of piracy’

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran said on Monday that a U.S. move this month to seize a cargo of oil on the grounds that it came from Tehran was an act of piracy, adding that the shipment did not belong to the Iranian government.

Washington filed a lawsuit earlier this month to seize the cargo, alleging that Iran sought to mask the origin of the oil by transferring it to several vessels before it ended up aboard the Liberian-flagged Achilleas tanker destined for China.

Washington said the cargo contravened U.S. terrorism regulations.

“This shipment does not belong to the Iranian government. It belongs to the private sector,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told a weekly news conference.

He did not elaborate on what he meant by the private sector.

The Achilleas last reported its position on Sunday as anchored within the Galveston Offshore Lightering Area, which is outside the U.S. Gulf port of Galveston, Refinitiv ship tracking data showed on Monday.

A U.S. official said last week that Washington had sold more than a million barrels of Iranian fuel seized under its sanctions program last year.

Tensions have mounted between Washington and Tehran since 2018, when former U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six major powers and reimposed sanctions on the country.

U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to revive the nuclear deal if Tehran returns to full compliance with the accord.

“It is very unfortunate that such an act of piracy is happening under the new U.S. administration … a solution should be found to stop such acts of piracy by anyone for any reason,” the spokesman Khatibzadeh added.

(Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul in London; Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Susan Fenton)

WHO says all hypotheses still open in probe into virus origins

By Reuters Staff

GENEVA (Reuters) – – All hypotheses are still open in the World Health Organization’s search for the origins of COVID-19, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing on Friday.

A WHO-led mission in China said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which it considered highly unlikely. The United States has said it will review the mission’s findings.

“Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study,” Tedros said.

“Some of that work may lie outside the remit and scope of this mission. We have always said that this mission would not find all the answers, but it has added important information that takes us closer to understanding the origins of the COVID-19 virus,” he said.

The mission has said its main hypotheses are that the virus originated in a bat, although there are several possible scenarios for how it passed to humans, possibly first by infecting another species of animal.

The former administration of U.S. President Donald Trump said it believed the virus may have escaped from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. China has strongly denied this, and says the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not studying related viruses.

COVID may have taken ‘convoluted path’ to Wuhan, WHO team leader says

By Josh Horwitz and David Stanway

WUHAN, China (Reuters) – The head of a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of COVID-19 said bats remain a likely source and that transmission of the virus via frozen food is a possibility that warrants further investigation, but he ruled out a lab leak.

Peter Ben Embarek, who led the team of independent experts in its nearly month-long visit to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged at a seafood market in late 2019, said the team’s work had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed their picture of the outbreak.

“The possible path from whatever original animal species all the way through to the Huanan market could have taken a very long and convoluted path involving also movements across borders,” Embarek told a nearly three-hour media briefing.

Embarek said work to identify the coronavirus’s origins points to a natural reservoir in bats, but it is unlikely that they were in Wuhan.

Investigators were also looking for Chinese blood samples that could indicate that the virus was circulating earlier than first thought, he said.

“In trying to understand the picture of December 2019 we embarked on a very detailed and profound search for other cases that may have been missed, cases earlier on in 2019,” he said.

“And the conclusion was we did not find evidence of large outbreaks that could be related to cases of COVID-19 prior to December 2019 in Wuhan or elsewhere.”

The possibility the virus leaked from a lab – which has been the subject of conspiracy theories – was extremely unlikely and did not require further study, Embarek said.

Liang Wannian, head of China’s expert panel on the outbreak, said there was evidence of coronavirus infections that could have preceded the first detected case by “several weeks”.

“This suggests that we cannot rule out that it was circulating in other regions and the circulation was unreported,” he told the briefing.

FROZEN ANIMALS?

Embarek said the team had identified market vendors selling frozen animal products including farmed wild animals.

“So there is the potential to continue to follow this lead and further look at the supply chain and animals that were supplied to the market,” he said.

China has pushed the idea that the virus can be transmitted by frozen food and has repeatedly announced findings of coronavirus traces on imported food packaging.

“We know the virus can survive in conditions that are found in these cold, frozen environments, but we don’t really understand if the virus can transmit to humans” or under which conditions, Embarek told the briefing.

The team arrived in Wuhan on Jan. 14 and after two weeks of quarantine, visited key sites including the Huanan seafood market, the location of the first known cluster of infections, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been involved in coronavirus research.

Members of the team sought to rein in expectations for the mission, with infectious disease expert Dominic Dwyer saying it would probably take years to fully understand the origins of COVID-19.

The United States said China needed to be more open when it comes to sharing data and samples as well as allowing access to patients, medical staff and lab workers. Beijing subsequently accused Washington of politicizing a scientific mission.

(Reporting by Josh Horwitz in Wuhan and David Stanway in Shanghai; Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Gareth Jones and Nick Macfie)

Mars ready for its close-up: China releases space probe’s first image

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s maiden space exploration mission to Mars has captured its first image of the red planet, the space agency said on Friday, some six months after the probe left Earth.

The uncrewed Tianwen-1 took the picture at a distance of around 2.2 million km (1.4 million miles) from Mars, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which supplied a black-and-white image.

The probe is now only half that distance away from Mars and around 184 million km from Earth after 197 days of the mission, the CNSA said in a statement, adding that its systems were in good condition.

The Tianwen-1 was launched in July from China’s southern Hainan island and expected to reach the orbit of Mars this month. In May, it will try to land in Utopia Planitia, a plain in the northern hemisphere, and deploy a rover to explore for 90 days.

If successful, the Tianwen-1 will make China the first country to orbit, land and deploy a rover in its inaugural mission to Mars, further boosting China’s space credentials after it last year became the first nation to bring back samples from the moon since the 1970s.

China previously made a Mars bid in 2011 with Russia, but the Russian spacecraft carrying the probe failed to exit Earth’s orbit and disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo; writing by Tom Daly; editing by Nick Macfie)

China’s latest weapon against Taiwan: the sand dredger

By Yimou Lee

ON BOARD THE TAIWAN COAST GUARD SHIP PP-10062, East China Sea (Reuters) – Taiwanese coast guard commander Lin Chie-ming is on the frontline of a new type of warfare that China is waging against Taiwan. China’s weapon? Sand.

On a chilly morning in late January, Lin, clad in an orange uniform, stood on the rolling deck of his boat as it patrolled in choppy waters off the Taiwan-run Matsu Islands. A few kilometers away, the Chinese coast was faintly visible from Lin’s boat. He was on the lookout for Chinese sand-dredging ships encroaching on waters controlled by Taiwan.

The Chinese goal, Taiwanese officials say: pressure Taiwan by tying down the island democracy’s naval defenses and undermining the livelihoods of Matsu residents.

Half an hour into the patrol, Lin’s nine-man crew spotted two 3,000-ton dredgers, dwarfing their 100-ton vessel. Parked just outside Taiwan’s waters, neither of the dredgers clearly displayed their names, making it difficult for a crew member to identify them as he peered through binoculars.

Upon spotting Lin’s boat, armed with two water cannons and a machine gun, the dredgers quickly pulled up anchor and headed back toward the Chinese coast.

“They think this area is part of China’s territory,” said Lin, referring to Chinese dredgers that have been intruding into Matsu’s waters. “They usually leave after we drive them away, but they come back again after we go away.”

The sand-dredging is one weapon China is using against Taiwan in a campaign of so-called gray-zone warfare, which entails using irregular tactics to exhaust a foe without actually resorting to open combat. Since June last year, Chinese dredgers have been swarming around the Matsu Islands, dropping anchor and scooping up vast amounts of sand from the ocean bed for construction projects in China.

The ploy is taxing for Taiwan’s civilian-run Coast Guard Administration, which is now conducting round-the-clock patrols in an effort to repel the Chinese vessels. Taiwanese officials and Matsu residents say the dredging forays have had other corrosive impacts – disrupting the local economy, damaging undersea communication cables and intimidating residents and tourists to the islands. Local officials also fear that the dredging is destroying marine life nearby.

Besides Matsu, where 13,300 people live, the coast guard says China has also been dredging in the shallow waters near the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which has long served as an unofficial buffer separating China and Taiwan.

Last year, Taiwan expelled nearly 4,000 Chinese sand-dredgers and sand-transporting vessels from waters under its control, most of them in the area close to the median line, according to Taiwan’s coast guard. That’s a 560% jump over the 600 Chinese vessels that were repelled in all of 2019.

In Matsu, there were also many Chinese vessels that sailed close to Taiwanese waters without actually entering, forcing the coast guard to be on constant alert.

The dredging is a “gray-zone strategy with Chinese characteristics,” said Su Tzu-yun, an associate research fellow at Taiwan’s top military think tank, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. “You dredge for sand on the one hand, but if you can also put pressure on Taiwan, then that’s great, too.”

‘PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE’

Sand is just part of the gray-zone campaign. China, which claims democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, has been using other irregular tactics to wear down the island of 23 million. The most dramatic: In recent months, the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, has been dispatching warplanes in menacing forays toward the island. Taiwan has been scrambling military aircraft on an almost daily basis to head off the threat, placing an onerous burden on its air force.

Taiwanese military officials and Western analysts say China’s gray-zone tactics are meant to drain the resources and erode the will of the island’s armed forces – and make such harassment so routine that the world grows inured to it. China’s sand dredging, said one Taiwanese security official investigating the matter, is “part of their psychological warfare against Taiwan, similar to what they are doing in Taiwan’s southwestern airspace,” where the Chinese jets are intruding.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement to Reuters that Taiwan’s claims that Beijing is allowing sand-dredging boats to engage in “illegal operations” near Matsu and the median line are baseless. The office did say it has taken steps to stop illegal sand-dredging, without elaborating.

The office also said Taiwan is “an inseparable part of China.” Taiwanese authorities, it alleged, are using their claims of control over the waters near the islands to “detain mainland boats and even resorting to dangerous and violent means in their treatment of mainland crews.”

Asked about China’s gray-zone actions, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which oversees policy toward China, said the Chinese Communist Party was engaging in “harassment” with the aim of putting pressure on Taiwan. The council said the government had recently increased penalties for illegal dredging in its waters.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense did not respond to questions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has not ruled out the use of force to subdue Taiwan. If he succeeds – by gray-zone tactics or outright war – it would dramatically undermine America’s decades of strategic dominance in the Asia-Pacific region and propel China toward preeminence in the area.

The Matsu Islands are almost an hour by plane from Taipei. They are one of a handful of island groups close to China’s coast that Taiwan has governed since 1949, when the defeated Republic of China government, under Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war. The Matsu, Kinmen and Pratas island groups lie several hundred kilometers from mainland Taiwan. Their isolation, and their much-reduced Taiwanese military presence since the end of the Cold War, would make them highly vulnerable to a Chinese attack.

Matsu is just nine kilometers from the Chinese coastline at the closest point. The island has a total of just nine coast guard ships, ranging from 10 to 100 tons. On some days, government officials said, the coast guard has faced hundreds of Chinese vessels, ranging in size from 1,000 to 3,000 tons, in and around the island’s waters. Taiwan says those waters extend six kilometers out from the coastline here. China doesn’t officially recognize any claims of sovereignty by Taiwan.

At one point last year, more than 200 Chinese sand-dredging and transport boats were spotted operating south of Nangan, the main Matsu islet, three Taiwanese officials told Reuters. Lin, the coast guard commander, recalls a similar scene playing out on the morning of Oct. 25, when he and his colleagues encountered an armada of roughly 100 Chinese boats. That day, he said, his team expelled seven Chinese vessels that breached Matsu waters.

“People were frightened by the scene,” he said, referring to local residents. “They were speculating about the purpose of the mainland boats and whether they would pose a security threat to the Matsu region.”

NEW BOATS

In some stand-offs, Taiwan’s coast guard has sprayed high-power water cannons at the Chinese ships in an attempt to drive them away. Last year, Taiwan impounded four Chinese vessels and detained 37 crew members, according to the coast guard. Ten of those arrested were given sentences of six to seven months in prison. The others are still on trial, the coast guard said.

Taiwan is in the process of beefing up its coast guard, partly in response to the dredging threat. Last year, President Tsai Ing-wen commissioned into service the first of a new class of coast guard vessel, based on the design of an “aircraft-carrier killer,” a missile boat for the navy.

More than 100 new coast guard boats will be built in the next decade, Tsai said in December, vowing to enforce a crackdown with “no mercy” on Chinese dredging in Taiwan waters. In the meantime, larger patrol boats were sent to temporarily reinforce the coast guard in Matsu, whose 117 members are now conducting 24-hour patrols.

The number of sand dredgers off the coast of Matsu dropped significantly at the end of last year, as winter weather brought rougher seas that make dredging difficult. When the seasons change and the seas are calmer, local residents fear that dredgers will be back.

From the late 1950s through to the late 1970s, Chinese forces occasionally bombarded the Matsu Islands with artillery shells. Remnants of that era are still visible across the island group, from old air-raid tunnels to anti-Communist slogans displayed on the rugged cliffs of Nangan island.

Today, Matsu is a popular tourist destination. Its picturesque old-stone homes have been turned into fashionable guest houses.

But locals say China’s dredging tactics are hurting their livelihoods. Chen Kuo-chiang, who runs a seafood restaurant on Nangan, says the dredging has led to a drastic decline in the number of fish he catches off the island. Three years ago, he was hooking a dozen a day with his rod, said Chen, 39, as he stood fishing on some rocks in a Nangan port. Now, he said, he struggles to catch one or two.

The fears of a Chinese invasion are palpable on Nangan. Chen thinks the sand dredging might be a precursor to an attack by Chinese forces. “We don’t want to be ruled by mainland China,” he said. “We have freedom, which is limited over there.”

Tsai Chia-chen, who works at an ocean-front bed and breakfast, said concern was particularly high ahead of the U.S. presidential election in early November. At the time, said Tsai, rumors circulated that China might seize the window of opportunity with the United States distracted by the election to launch an attack on Taiwan. The large number of Chinese dredgers around the islands in late October added to the anxiety, she recalled.

“Our guests were obviously worried,” she said. “There was only one small Taiwan coast guard boat, surrounded by many huge dredgers.”

DAMAGED CABLES

On five occasions last year, the dredgers damaged undersea communication cables between Nangan and Juguang, another isle in the Matsu group, the three Taiwanese officials told Reuters. Mobile phone and internet services for the islanders were disrupted, they said. There were no such incidents in 2019.

State-backed Chunghwa Telecom said it spent T$60 million (about $2 million) to fix the cables last year. It also hired a local fishing boat to conduct daily patrols to ensure the safety of the cables.

The coast guard said most of the fully loaded Chinese vessels around Matsu have been seen heading with their sand in a northerly direction, towards the city of Wenzhou, where the local Chinese government has been touting a massive land reclamation project.

Known as the Ou Fei project, the area has been reclaimed for a new economic zone. It encompasses about 66 square kilometers – more than double the area of all the Matsu Islands. On its website, the Wenzhou local government describes the project as a “major strategic development for the future” of the city.

The Wenzhou city government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Following contact on the local level between the two sides, China detained several dredging boats last month, according to Taiwan’s coast guard. But a Taiwan-initiated meeting with authorities in the port city of Fuzhou to discuss the dredging was “postponed indefinitely” and without explanation in late December, said Wang Chien-hua, who oversees economic development in the local government that administers Matsu.

Taiwan had been planning to use the online meeting to urge Chinese authorities to enforce mandatory registration for dredgers and punish those who go out to sea without reporting to the authorities, according to an internal government note reviewed by Reuters.

The Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing said the local authorities on both sides maintained “necessary communication and collaboration” to ensure order on the seas.

Aboard his patrol vessel, Taiwanese commander Lin sounded defiant. The coast guard, he said, “will use force to drive away” Chinese ships that enter Taiwan’s waters.

“That way we can reassure the people in Matsu. At the moment, we are capable of doing this job.”

(Reporting by Yimou Lee. Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Taipei. Edited by Peter Hirschberg.)

WHO team probing COVID-19 visits Wuhan lab, meets ‘Bat Woman’

By Martin Quin Pollard and Thomas Peter

WUHAN, China (Reuters) -A team of investigators led by the World Health Organization visited a virus research laboratory in China’s central city of Wuhan and met with a prominent virologist there in its search for clues to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The experts spent about 3-1/2 hours at the heavily-guarded Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been at the center of some conspiracy theories that claim a laboratory leak caused the city’s first coronavirus outbreak at the end of 2019.

“Extremely important meeting today with staff at WIV including Dr. Shi Zhengli. Frank, open discussion. Key questions asked & answered,” team member Peter Daszak said on Twitter.

Shi, a well-known virus hunter who has long focused on bat coronaviruses – earning her the nickname “Bat Woman” – was among the first last year to isolate the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Most scientists, including Shi, reject the hypothesis of a lab leak. However, some experts speculate that a virus captured from the wild could have figured in lab experiments to test the risks of a human spillover and then escaped via an infected staff member.

“Very interesting. Many questions,” Thea Fischer, a Danish member of the team, called from her car as it sped away from the lab following Wednesday’s visit, in response to a question whether the team had found anything.

Some scientists have called for China to release details of all coronavirus samples studied at the lab, to see which most closely resembles SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the respiratory disease.

The WHO, which has sought to manage expectations for the Wuhan mission, has said its members would be limited to visits organized by their Chinese hosts and have no contact with community members, because of health restrictions.

While the novel coronavirus that sparked the pandemic was first identified in Wuhan, Beijing has sought to cast doubt on the notion that it originated in China, pointing to imported frozen food as a possible conduit.

The team will spend two weeks conducting field work after having completed two weeks in hotel quarantine after arrival in Wuhan.

(Reporting by Thomas Peter and Martin Quin in Wuhan; Writing by David Stanway and Tony Munroe; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Pravin Char)

UK offers Hong Kong residents route to citizenship, angering China

By Yew Lun Tian and William James

BEIJING/LONDON (Reuters) – Hong Kong residents can apply from Sunday for a new visa giving them the chance to become British citizens following China’s crackdown in the former colony, but Beijing said it will no longer recognize the special British passport already in use.

UK government forecasts say the new visa could attract more than 300,000 people and their dependents to Britain. Beijing said it would make them second-class citizens.

Britain and China have been arguing for months about what London and Washington say is an attempt to silence dissent in Hong Kong after huge pro-democracy protests in 2019 and 2020.

Britain says it is fulfilling a historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong after Beijing imposed a new security law on the semi-autonomous city that Britain says breaches the terms of agreements under which the colony was handed back to China in 1997.

“I am immensely proud that we have brought in this new route for Hong Kong BN(O)s to live, work and make their home in our country,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, referring to a special British National Overseas (BNO) passport holders.

But China and the Hong Kong government hit back by saying they would no longer recognize the BNO passport as a valid travel document from Sunday, Jan. 31.

“Britain is trying to turn large numbers of Hong Kong people into second-class British citizens. This has completely changed the original nature of BNO,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a briefing.

Beijing’s imposition of a national security law in Hong Kong in June last year prompted Britain to offer refuge to almost 3 million Hong Kong residents eligible for the BNO passport from Jan. 31.

The scheme, first announced last year, opens on Sunday and allows those with British National (Overseas) status to live, study and work in Britain for five years and eventually apply for citizenship.

BN(O) is a special status created under British law in 1987 that specifically relates to Hong Kong.

Britain’s foreign ministry said it was disappointed but not surprised by Beijing’s decision not to recognize the BNO passport. China’s move is largely symbolic as Hong Kong residents would not normally use their BNO passports to travel to the mainland. A BNO passport holder in Hong Kong could still use their Hong Kong passport or identity card.

The 250 pound ($340) visa could attract more than 300,000 people and their dependents to Britain and generate up to 2.9 billion pounds of net benefit to the British economy over the next five years, according to government forecasts.

It is still highly uncertain how many people will actually take up the offer.

China says the West’s views on its actions over Hong Kong are clouded by misinformation and an imperial hangover.

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian and William James; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

WHO team in Wuhan visits hospital that treated early COVID cases

By Gabriel Crossley

WUHAN, China (Reuters) – A World Health Organization-led team of experts investigating the origins of COVID-19 on Friday visited a hospital in the Chinese city of Wuhan that was one of the first to treat patients in the early days of the outbreak.

The hospital visit was the team’s first in the field after two weeks in quarantine, and a WHO spokeswoman said the group’s contacts in Wuhan will be limited to visits organized by their Chinese hosts due to health restrictions.

“The team will go out but they will be bussed to wherever, so they won’t have any contact with the community. They will only have contact with various individuals that are being organized as part of the study,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a briefing in Geneva on Friday.

After meeting with Chinese scientists earlier in the day, the team went to the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine.

Zhang Jixian, director of the hospital’s department of respiratory and critical care, has been cited by state media as the first to report the novel coronavirus, after treating an elderly couple in late 2019 whose CT scans showed differences from typical pneumonia.

“Extremely important 1st site visit. We are in the hospital that treated some of the first known cases of COVID-19, meeting with the actual clinicians & staff who did this work, having open discussion about the details of their work,” Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO-led team, wrote on Twitter.

The team plans to visit labs, markets and hospitals during its remaining two weeks in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first identified in late 2019.

While an exact itinerary has not been announced, the WHO has said the team plans to visit the seafood market at the center of the early outbreak as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One hypothesis, rejected by China, is that the outbreak was caused by a leak at the government lab.

The WHO-led probe in Wuhan has been plagued by delays, concern over access and bickering between China and the United States, which accused China of hiding the extent of the initial outbreak and criticized the terms of the visit, under which Chinese experts conducted the first phase of research.

The WHO has sought to manage expectations. “There are no guarantees of answers,” its emergency chief, Mike Ryan, said this month.

The investigating team had been set to arrive in Wuhan earlier in January, and China’s delay of their visit drew rare public criticism from the head of the WHO, which former U.S. President Donald Trump accused of being “China-centric”.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said on Friday that WHO and Chinese experts were working together to trace the origin of the virus, but stressed that the mission was not a probe.

“It is part of a global research, not an investigation,” Zhao told a regular news conference in Beijing.

China has pushed the idea that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in Wuhan, with state media citing the presence of the virus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers saying it had been circulating in Europe in 2019.

China’s foreign ministry has also hinted that the sudden closure of a U.S. army laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland in July 2019 was linked to the pandemic.

“At the early stage in China, it was a burden particularly for Wuhan people when everyone was calling it a Wuhan virus, which was humiliating,” said Yang You, a 30-year-old Wuhan resident. “If it could be traced to the source clearly, in my opinion, it could clear either China’s or Wuhan’s name.”

(Reporting by Gabriel Crossley and Martin Quin Pollard; Additional reporting by Yew Lun Tian in Beijing and Stepahnie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Michael Perry, Nick Macfie & Simon Cameron-Moore)