Wuhan: The London-sized city where the virus began

Wuhan may not be a well-known Chinese mega-city like Beijing or Shanghai.

But the place where the coronavirus outbreak emerged is, in fact, a crowded metropolis with connections to every part of the globe.

According to UN data from 2018, 8.9 million people live in the central Chinese city - making it slightly smaller than London, but much bigger than Washington DC.

One estimate makes it the 42nd biggest city in the world, and the seventh biggest in China.

And it's the size - and economic clout - of Wuhan that explains why the virus has travelled quickly across Asia, and even to the US.

The Yangtze (brown) and Han rivers (blue) merge in Wuhan

In short, the virus has spread so widely because lots of people visit Wuhan and take the virus home with them.

Wuhan international airport handled 20 million passengers in 2016, and offers direct flights to London, Paris, Dubai, and other cities around the world.

The city is built along the Yangtze river and, according to its website, it is a "foundation of in both hi-tech manufacturing and traditional manufacturing".

It has a series of industrial zones, 52 "institutions of higher learning", and claims more than 700,000 students - including, reportedly, the largest number of undergraduates in the country.

Some 230 of the world's 500 biggest companies (as measured by the Fortune Global list) have invested there.

There is also notable investment from France - which had a foreign concession in Hankou, in today's Wuhan, between 1886 and 1943. More than 100 French firms have invested in the city and Peugeot-Citroen has a Chinese joint-venture plant there.

Wuhan can also serve as a gateway to the Three Gorges - a tourist region and home to a huge hydroelectric dam.

So, although the coronavirus originated in a local seafood market, the flow of people in and out of Wuhan has ensured its spread.

The US patient, for example, had recently visited Wuhan, as had both Japanese patients. The Korean patient lived there. The case in Thailand is a Chinese tourist from Wuhan.

The huge flow of people in and out of Wuhan will only increase as Chinese New Year approaches, and millions of people return home to celebrate.

China's National Health Commission said travellers should avoid Wuhan, and that Wuhan residents should not leave the city.

But Wuhan's status as one of the biggest - and most connected - places in the world means international cases will almost certainly continue to emerge.

(Source: BBC)

Zaha Hadid’s massive ‘starfish’ airport opens in Beijing

Daxing international, said to be world’s largest single-building terminal, to handle 72m passengers

China has opened a vast, multibillion-dollar airport in the country’s capital, in the run-up to a major political anniversary.

 The terminal of the new Beijing Daxing international airport. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Less than five years after construction began, the 450bn yuan (£50bn) Daxing international airport was officially opened on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

China is preparing to celebrate its National Day on 1 October, marking 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, against the backdrop of unrest in Hong Kong and a flagging economy.

 People attending the launch ceremony for the new Beijing Daxing international airport in Beijing. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

The new mega-airport, the second in Beijing, was designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid in the shape of a starfish with five connected concourses. It is said to be the world’s largest single-building airport terminal. At 700,000 sq metres, with four runways, it is expected to be able to handle 72 million passengers a year by 2025. By 2040, the airport is expected to expand to eight runways and accommodate 100 million passengers a year.

Officials have been showing off the sleek new airport for the past year, hosting tours of the space, which is to include customer-service robots to deliver flight information and facial recognition-enabled check-in.

Critics have questioned the need for a second airport in the capital, especially one that is almost twice the distance from the city centre as the existing airport.

 Interior view of Daxing airport in Beijing. Photograph: Zhang Chenlin/Xinhua/Barcroft Media

Officials say Daxing will alleviate traffic pressure on the city’s existing international travel hub, Beijing Capital in the north-east, which had more than 100 million travellers last year, second in the world only to Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, Georgia, in terms of passenger traffic.

China is expected to surpass the US to become the world’s largest market for airport travel by 2022. But the aviation sector has a poor reputation for flight disruptions, the result of frequents delays caused by overcapacity and delays caused by the military, which controls most of the airspace. Officials hope the new airport will lessen those delays.

Domestic and foreign airlines, including China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, Air China as well as British Airways and Finnair, have said they will move all or part of their operations to the new airport.

(Source: The Guardian)

Muslim family missing after Chinese police drag them from Beijing’s Belgian embassy

Belgium, where father has asylum, to secure passports for mother and children and send special envoy to clarify their whereabouts, after official appears to have allowed removal to take place

The last time Abdulhamid Tursun spoke to his wife, she was huddled in a Beijing hotel room with their four children, frightened after being evicted from the Belgian Embassy in the dead of night.

Suddenly, plainclothes police officers burst into the room, cutting off the couple’s video call.

Mr Tursun says he has not heard from her since.

His wife, Wureyetiguli Abula, 43, had gone to the Belgian Embassy to seek visas so the family — from the Uighur Muslim minority group — could be reunited with Mr Tursun, 51, in Brussels, where he won asylum in 2017.

But instead of finding protection, Ms Abula and her children, ages five to 17, were dragged away after Chinese police were allowed to enter the embassy.

Now the case is raising alarms back in Belgium, where lawmakers are asking how it could have happened and where Mr Tursun’s family has been taken.

It illustrates how, two years after China began detaining Uighurs in a vast network of internment camps, the group has limited protections — even from Western democracies — against persecution by the Chinese government.

Even Uighurs who make it to the West have not always been safe.

Early last year, Germany mistakenly sent back to China a 22-year-old Uighur asylum-seeker, who has not been heard from since.

On Monday, Belgium said it was sending a special envoy to Beijing to clarify the whereabouts of Mr Tursun’s family.

A family of Uighur Muslims are missing after Chinese police forcibly removed them from Belgium's Beijing embassy ( Abdulhamid Tursun via The New York Times )

The Belgian government also said its ambassador in Beijing would try to secure passports for Ms Abula and the children.

In Beijing, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Lu Kang, said at a regularly scheduled news briefing on Tuesday that he had no knowledge of the case.

China has sent around one million Uighurs to internment camps in Xinjiang, the semiautonomous region in western China where most of them live. The figure is equivalent to about one-tenth of the region’s Uighur population.

The government asserts that the Uighurs represent a terrorism threat to China and the world, an argument that is disputed by many Western nations, who see the internment effort as a systematic abuse of human rights.

Some Uighurs who managed to leave the camps have told of being subjected to intense indoctrination under armed guard.

Uighurs outside the camps have seen their cities and homes turned into virtual prisons thanks to surveillance technology and a heavy military presence.

The Belgian Embassy’s handling of the case has come under criticism.

Under international law, governments are obliged not to send people to countries where they are at substantial risk of being tortured, said Sarah H Cleveland, a professor of law at Columbia University.

Given that Ms Abula and her children are Uighur, it was incumbent upon the Belgian Embassy to assess that risk, she said.

Ove Bring, a Swedish expert on human rights law, also said that Belgium appeared to have breached accepted standards of care.

“Belgium could be criticised on grounds of international morality, having refused to offer humanitarian protection,” he said.

Since China intensified its crackdown in Xinjiang, some Western European countries have taken precautions to stop Uighurs who seek asylum from being sent back to China.

Germany and Sweden said last year that they would refrain from deporting Uighurs.

Ms Abula arrived in Beijing at the end of May and on the advice of a non-governmental organisation in Belgium sought visas at the embassy that would allow the family to join Mr Tursun in Brussels, where he works at an electronics company.

He had been granted asylum in Belgium in late 2017 after his brother was arrested and placed in a detention camp.

The family group did not hold Chinese passports.

But Mr Tursun said his wife had been told by CAW, a Belgian group that helps immigrants, that along with the visas she and the children would each be issued a substitute travel document known as a laissez-passer.

At the embassy, Ms Abula was told that the visas would take longer than she expected.

Laissez-passer papers could not be issued because China does not recognise such documents, Matthieu Branders, spokesman for the Belgian foreign ministry, said in response to written questions.

Scared and frustrated, Ms Abula told embassy officials that she planned to remain on the grounds after their offices closed, according to Vanessa Frangville, a professor of Chinese studies in Brussels who has worked on the case.

When Ms Abula settled into the front yard with her children, the staff complained that she was staging a “sit in”, Mr Branders said.

They offered to drive her to her Beijing hotel in a diplomatic vehicle, he said. But Ms Abula had already been harassed there by police and was too afraid to return, Ms Frangville said.

Soon after midnight on 29 May, police arrived at the embassy and disappeared inside, Mr Tursun said, recounting what his wife and eldest daughter told him via the messaging app WeChat as events unfolded.

After about an hour, police drove into the embassy yard, forced Ms Abula and the children into the car and headed for a nearby police station, Mr Tursun said.

It is unclear who called the police to the Belgian Embassy, who authorised them to enter and who asked for Ms Abula and her children to be removed.

Asked on several occasions who let police onto the embassy grounds, Mr Branders declined to answer.

By mid-morning that day, police officers from Xinjiang had taken charge of the family and transferred them back to the hotel, where they were left alone for a day.

Then on 31 May, the plainclothes officers entered the room. “It’s you guys again,” Ms Abula said, in Mr Tursun’s recounting. She recognised them from the ordeal at the embassy, he said. Then her mobile phone went dead.

Days later, Mr Tursun learned through a friend that four male and three female police officers had guarded the family as they drove for about 30 hours across China back to their home in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

His wife was now under house arrest, and the electronic equipment Mr Tursun had left in the house had been confiscated by police, the friend told him.

Upset that his family’s plans had gone so awry, Mr Tursun, accompanied by Ms Frangville, met with Josef Bockaert, director of consular affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels.

During the meeting, Mr Tursun asked the Belgians to press the Chinese about what happened to his family, he said.

At one point, Mr Bockaert replied that Belgium was a small country and could not risk putting too much pressure on China, Ms Frangville recalled.

“We don’t want to be in conflict with China,” Ms Frangville quoted Mr Bockaert as saying. Asked if Mr Bockaert had made the comment, the spokesman, Mr Branders, declined to answer.

Belgium has cultivated warmer economic and diplomatic relations with China in the past year.

]In December, e-commerce giant Alibaba agreed to invest in logistics infrastructure in the country, a project involving a big lease at the Liège cargo airport and the first of its kind for the Chinese company in Europe.

The roughly 200 Uighurs who live in Belgium are treated well, Ms Frangville said, and asylum is granted to those who request it when they arrive.

But she said it was astonishing that police in Beijing were allowed onto the embassy grounds.

“Someone opened the door,” she said. “The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs won’t say who allowed them in. Why such a mystery?”

(Source: Independent)

A flurry of ideas to reverse China’s declining birthrate, but will Beijing listen?

One proposal would end financial penalties for babies born out of wedlock. Another would lower the legal age of marriage. Others would ban discrimination against mothers and mothers-to-be in the workplace and would expand or extend parental leave to fathers.

China’s annual legislative session — the National People’s Congress — is typically a staid affair to aggrandize Communist Party rule, but this year it has produced a flurry of proposals to address what experts and officials now acknowledge is a looming demographic crisis caused by the country’s sharply declining birthrate.

A mother and a child at the daily flag ceremony at Tiananmen Square,
Beijing, last year. CreditCreditGilles Sabrié for The New York Times

The ideas now being floated by regional officials, businesspeople and others reflect the depth of the concern over the issue but also the fact that there is not yet a clear consensus on what the government should do about it.

One deputy, Huang Xihua, went so far as to propose amending the Constitution to remove all limits on family planning, which until 2016 notoriously forbade most Chinese families from having more than one child.

“The reason so many deputies are putting proposals forward is that the birthrate has declined for two consecutive years,” He Yafu, a demographer and the author of a book on the impact of China’s population controls who helped Ms. Huang write her proposal, said in a telephone interview. “The reasons to limit births no longer exist.”

The government has, so far least, showed no sign of abdicating its heavy-handed approach to social policy — nor the vast bureaucracy that still enforces family planning laws.

For more than three decades, China enforced its “one child” policy harshly, imposing fines and in some cases abortions and sterilizations. The government only relented in 2016 after experts anticipated the demographic issues that the country is now facing.

Virtually all families can now have two children, but the anticipated baby boom did not materialize. In the last two years, births have dropped precipitously, falling by 12 percent in 2018. The trend has prompted increasingly dire warnings that China faces a graying population and a dwindling work force to support it in the decades ahead.

The debate at the congress might signal changes in the months ahead. Some of the proposals could serve as trial balloons to gauge or shape public sentiment, especially on such sensitive issues as marriage and gender equality.

The proposal that has generated the most attention outside the Great Hall of the People, where the congress is being held, would remove legal restrictions on children born out of wedlock. While Chinese law nominally gives children of single mothers the same rights as others, the mothers can face fines or other penalties.

In many provinces, for example, a child can only receive a residence permit — known as a hukou — if their parents’ marriage was registered. Others require single parents to pay a “social maintenance” fee to cover the cost of public services a child receives — essentially a tax. There have been cases where single mothers have been fired from their jobs, the Chinese news outlet Caixin noted last month in a survey of regional policies.

The National People’s Congress is typically a staid affair to aggrandize Communist
Party rule, but this year it has produced a flurry of proposals to address a looming
demographic crisis caused by the country’s sharply declining birthrate.
CreditAndy Wong/Associated Press

In a conservative society like China’s, single mothers remain stigmatized, though perhaps less so than before. A change in the law could also affect single women who choose to have children on their own through artificial insemination — either in China or abroad. Ms. Huang’s proposal would remove all the legal constraints on the practice.

“Giving a hukou to children born out of wedlock is not to encourage unmarried childbearing,” she said in a video interview on a Chinese website, NetEase, “but to provide them with the protection of their rights.”

An enthusiastic supporter is Zou Xiaoqi, an accountant in Shanghai who gave birth two years ago to a son. She was 41, unmarried and not previously inclined to have a child when she became pregnant. “I didn’t used to particularly like children,” she said, “but I felt I couldn’t give him up.”

While pregnant, she discovered that the local authorities would not provide her maternity benefits, which included the cost of prenatal care and her salary during six months of leave. She sued the local family planning council and the social services department, but ultimately lost.

“Stigmatization is still quite powerful, especially in some smaller cities or rural areas,” she said. “These mothers do not have the courage to fight for their own rights,” she said, referring to unwed mothers.

While the largely ceremonial legislature ultimately ratifies new laws, the government ministries themselves draft them and submit them to the deputies for approval, often after months or years of consideration. It remains to be seen which, if any, of the proposals the government will take up. Ms. Huang, for example, has raised her proposals before without success.

Other proposals have focused on offering incentives to families with children — through tax breaks, subsidies or greater government spending on schools and services.

Yao Jinbo, the chief executive officer of 58.com, an online consumer retail site, proposed increasing living allowances for families that choose to have a second child.

Another executive, Ding Lieming of Betta Pharmaceuticals, proposed lowering the legal age for marriage to 20 for men and 18 for women, from 22 and 20 today. At least two delegates suggested laws to expand paternity leave — “to encourage fathers to share family responsibilities,” as one of them, Ke Jianhua, put it.

Premier Li Keqiang, who opened the congress with a lengthy work report, pledged that the government would “move faster” to develop child-care services and early education, though he made no specific proposals.

He also pledged to end discrimination in the workplace, especially that facing mothers, who can lose their jobs when pregnant or on maternity leave. His remarks echoed a directive issued in February by nine government ministries and agencies prohibiting employers from asking job applicants about their marital or childbearing status.

“We will resolutely protect against and stop gender and identity discrimination in employment,” he said.

(Source: NYT)

Chinese database detailing ‘breedready’ status of millions of women discovered by researcher

Public cache of information includes phone numbers, addresses and ages of millions of women

A Chinese database listing the name, phone numbers and addresses of 1.8 million women including those with a “breedready” status has been uncovered by a Dutch researcher.

Victor Gevers, an internet expert from the non-profit group GDI Foundation, found the insecure data cache while searching for open databases in China.

As well as indicating whether the women were of child-bearing age, the database also included information labelled in English for sex, age, education, marital status.

The average age of women in the database was 32, with the youngest being 15, he said. Nearly 90 per cent of included entries were described single and 82 per cent were listed as living in Beijing.

A pregnant woman speaks on the phone in Beijing (file photo) ( Getty )

Sharing a series of screenshots of the public database on Twitter, Mr Gevers suggested it could be could be linked to China’s falling birth rate. Many couples are reluctant to have children due to high property prices and soaring healthcare and education costs.

He expressed his concerns about how far the government is willing to go to influence women to reproduce.

Mr Gevers told The Guardian: “More than this, we don’t have at the moment. Our primary concern is that it gets secured asap.”

The investigator said he had started contacting some of those whose profile pages were linked to shed light on some of the information.

In China, they have a shortage of women. So an organization started to build a database to start registering over 1,8 million women with all kinds of details like phone numbers, addresses, education, location, ID number, marital status, and a ”BreedReady" status? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/fbRKsbNHPJ

— Victor Gevers (@0xDUDE) 9 March 2019

The youngest girl in this database is 15y old. The youngest woman with BreedReady:"1" status is 18y. The average age is a bit above 32y, and the most aged woman with a BR:1 is 39 and with a BR:0 is 95y. All are single [89%], divorced [10%] or widow[1%]. About 82% lives in 北京市. pic.twitter.com/qCP7FvFMB7

— Victor Gevers (@0xDUDE) 9 March 2019

However, some people have suggested the cache could be a database for an online dating site.

“All single ... Must be a dating site like Jiayuan.com,” one person noted.

His discovery comes weeks after China's statistics bureau revealed that China’s birth rate had fallen to its lowest level in decades.

It stood at 10.94 per thousand in 2018, compared to 12.43 per thousand in 2017, meaning 2 million fewer babies were born in China last year. This was the lowest it has been since records began.

With life expectancy increasing, almost a quarter of the country’s population is expected to be over the age of 65 by 2040. Experts warned the population could “fall drastically” in the future without efforts to increase fertility.

“The year 2018 will be remembered as a historical turning point for Chinese population,”  a new paper by researcher Dr Yi and Peking University economist Su Jian said.

“The Chinese population has started to fall, the ageing problems have accelerated, and economic vitality has weakened,” they said.

(Source: Independent)