Staff: Tokyo & San Francisco: A rumor started circulating in the United States a few days ago claiming that a top-ranking Chinese official, Dong Jingwei, defected to the US in February with his daughter, Dong Yang, via Hong Kong, and in the process handed Washington a dossier of information regarding the purported Wuhan lab leak.
Dong, it is believed also happens to be the vice-minister of State Security in China’s Ministry of State Security, also called Guoanbu, which in effect equates to America’s CIA – basically their spy agency.
If these rumors are true, China will have suffered its most prominent defection ever. And potentially its most crippling.
According to reports, this has prompted the Biden administration to change its stance on the origins of the coronavirus.
Initially, America’s outspoken left-wing media and President Biden’s own Democratic Party discredited the likelihood that the virus originated in a lab, dismissing it as a Donald Trump conspiracy theory.
Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are now abuzz with rumors surrounding Dong and his daughter, Dong Yang, according to SpyTalk, a magazine covering US intelligence, defense, and global affairs.
One tweet by Han Lianchao, a former Chinese Foreign Ministry official, now a pro-democracy activist in the United States, sparked speculation about Dong’s defection.
The topic of Dong’s defection was it seems broached by Chinese officials at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Han, himself a defector following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Recent developments now serve to bolster the possibility that the Wuhan Lab Leak theory isn’t merely a conspiracy theory after all, and that we could all be the victims of a botched lab experiment or, worse, a premeditated bio-war launched from China.
China’s use of its weight inside the Global Health Organization to purposefully propagate misinformation about the severity of the outbreak is not hidden from the rest of the world.
Before the novel coronavirus was formally discovered, China began censoring information about the outbreak in early January 2020.
When the infections spread quickly a few weeks later, the authorities pounced on anything that suggested China’s response was overly “negative.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is Asia’s largest viral bank, is a high-security bio-safety lab.
The lab holds at least 1500 lethal viral strains and is located just six kilometers from the Huanan Seafood Market, which was recently identified by researchers as the Wuhan Virus Ground Zero.
The Wuhan lab published a report in 2018, claiming that peasants living in close vicinity to Yunnan bat caves possessed antibodies to the ‘bat coronavirus’, indicating the possibility of human transmission.
Then, in November 2019, three lab personnel became ill with symptoms that were similar to both COVID-19 and ordinary seasonal diseases.
According to The Wall Street Journal, this information was revealed in an undisclosed US intelligence study.
The novel coronavirus was discovered in two patients at the Wuhan Hospital the following month.
When samples were delivered to Dr. Shi Zhengli, China’s so-called ‘batwoman’ and director of the Wuhan Virology Lab, she determined that the virus circulating in Wuhan (nCOV19) had a genetic structure 96.2% similar to a bat coronavirus being studied at the lab.
Despite all this, China chose to conceal this information from the world.
Furthermore, when the number of patients in China increased dramatically in January 2020, China’s National Health Commission instructed all institutions not to publish any information regarding the illness, and the Chinese government began retaliating harshly against those who did.
Doctor Li Wenliang was the first to raise the alarm about the spread of a new coronavirus in Wuhan.
On February 7th, 2020, he died of COVID-19 after being accused by the nation’s police of circulating false information.
China not only withheld information about the disease, but also waited an eternity to respond.
Beijing took action only after it became difficult to conceal the epidemic; the first acknowledgment was made in late January 2020, despite the virus being discovered in November 2019.
On the 23rd of January 2020, China eventually ordered a lockdown, but five million potentially infected people had already fled Wuhan.
The country took no precautions to prevent its citizens from spreading the deadly illness around the world.
The lab leak hypothesis started gaining steam only 18 months after the Wuhan virus began to spread.
This gave Beijing sufficient time to erase all the evidence.
In July last year there were floods in Wuhan, and Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese activist, claimed that the move to erase records was undertaken intentionally.
Zeng believes that Chinese officials are attempting to obliterate proof of China’s role in the Wuhan virus pandemic.
Be it the Asian flu of 1956, the H5N1 flu of 1997, the SARS epidemic of 2002, or now the coronavirus, China is a country that has served as a breeding ground for a number of deadly diseases.
And, even if the lab leak theory is untrue, it cannot be denied that China not only withheld information from the rest of the globe, but also misled us about the severity of the outbreak.
After all is said and done, there is no disputing that China played a prominent role in spreading the current coronavirus throughout the world; a virus that has turned our lives upside down and has the capacity to halt, if not obliterate, the advancement of the entire human species.
At the very least, China owes the rest of the world an explanation, if not compensation.
East Asia Gazette 