Senior US Official “China Connect” Warns Beijing of Fluid Chinese-BBC News

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Senior White House officials in the United States spoke in Chinese, warning that if China continues to control freedom of expression and ignore the real voice of the people, it can lead to a crisis in power. As China and the United States have recently vigorously debated the origin of the new coronavirus, this speech may spur Beijing to respond forcefully.

White House deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger (also translated as Matthew Pottinger) delivered a long speech on the 101st anniversary of the May 4 Movement, reviewing the history of May 4 and looking to the future of relations between the United States and China. This is the first time that American politicians have spoken to Chinese readers at the White House fluently in Chinese.

In his speech, he asked what the final legacy of May 4 will be. “This question can only be answered by the Chinese people. The May 4 Movement belongs to them. Will the democratic aspirations of” May 4 “wait until the next century? Will the central idea of” May 4 “be subject to Official scrutiny every time? Will those who still believe this claim today be called “unpatriotic” and “proversive” “subversive”? We know the Communist Party will try to do it. “

In his speech, Bo Ming called for “less nationalism and more populism.” He said the core force behind the Brexit and Trump victory is exactly the same as that of the May 4 Movement, i.e. populism. Bo Ming said that the translation of populism to populism, rather than the more common translation of “populism”, is to emphasize this force to promote a government that prioritizes people. He also said that the pursuit of democracy comes from traditional Chinese thought, and Taiwan is the living evidence of Chinese social democratic practice.

Bo Ming is considered to be a rare Chinese expert in the White House, and has promoted many Trump administration policies on Chinese hawks. His speech may stimulate Beijing and intensify the recent media battle between the United States and China over the source of the new coronavirus.

On May 4, at an online event hosted by the University of Virginia to discuss relations between the United States and China, Bo Ming delivered a prerecorded speech of about 20 minutes in length and then participated in a live question-and-answer session. Bo Ming revealed that he wrote speeches in English and then collaborated with various friends to translate the manuscripts into Chinese. He said he chose to speak Chinese because China now lacks multiple voices and hopes to start a dialogue with “friends in China.”

This is not the first time that Boming has publicly “baked Chinese”. Attending the Chinese National Embassy Day reception in 2018, Bo Ming quoted Confucius’ famous saying in Chinese: “If the name is not correct, then the words are not good, and if things are not good, then nothing will happen, “which points to the competitive relationship between the United States and China. Since that speech, Bo Ming has no longer attended the activities of the Chinese embassy.

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Bo Ming, 46, studied Chinese and Chinese at the University of Massachusetts during college, and from 1998 to 2005 worked as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in China. Later he joined the army and became an intelligence officer in the US Marine Corps. USA After retiring in 2010, Bo Ming was involved in the business world, worked at a hedge fund in New York, and founded a business research firm that investigates Chinese companies. He joined the National Security Council in 2017 to take over Asian politics and is the only “China Connect” among top White House officials.

In recent months, the US government. USA It has launched a series of policies against China, including the Chinese grounding order at the start of the epidemic, covid-19 on behalf of the “Wuhan virus”, the cessation of funding from the World Health Organization, and even suspension of the Chinese project of the Peace Corps of the EE. USA Official media agencies in the United States cut Chinese employees, etc., Bo Ming is considered a major promoter of previous Hawkish politics.

How did a former reporter stationed in China gradually become Trump’s assistant to China?

The most unusual turning point in Boming’s professional development occurred in 2005. At the time, the 32-year-old resigned as a reporter in China and became a member of the US Marine Corps. USA This is a difficult professional leap. Bo Ming is older and overweight, and enrolling in the military requires a rigorous physical examination. According to the “New York Times” report, Bo Ming met with a US Marine at the embassy in Beijing to run on the Great Wall, and once collapsed in the emergency room.

Bo Ming wrote in an op-ed submitted to the old club “The Wall Street Journal” in 2005 that when asked why he abandoned his pen, he generally replied briefly: “I feel like it’s time to stop reporting and more directly participate in events. news, “but the brewing process is obviously more complicated.

Found “thugs from the Chinese government”

Bo Ming wrote that he was repeatedly harassed while working in China, including the fact that government intelligence personnel recorded him while interviewing sources, he was forced to flush interview notes down the toilet when the police chased him down and They took to a Starbucks coffee shop in Beijing. Government hitters “hit”.

Today, the outside world mainly blames Boming’s harsh view of China for how unpleasant he found while working as a reporter in China.

“Living in China will show you how undemocratic countries can treat their citizens,” Bo Ming wrote at the time.

The atmosphere in which the United States cracked down on terrorism was also infected with Boming living abroad. After accidentally seeing a video of a US citizen decapitated by an Iraqi terrorist, he gradually decided to join the army.

“We often talk about how our policies have polarized young people in the Middle East and become our enemies, but we rarely talk about how their actions have polarized us.” Bo Ming wrote this paragraph in 2005 to describe today’s Washington. Hawks’ views of China are also quite appropriate. They believe that the change in US policy toward China is the result of China’s strengthening of authoritarian rule in recent years. The United States is not the provocative party in relations between the United States and China.

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Affected by military life, they obey higher orders

Bo Ming met many hawkish officers in his military life, which further shaped his knowledge of the international situation. As a Marine Corps intelligence officer, Bo Ming has been stationed in Okinawa, Afghanistan and Iraq, Japan, and then served as Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn (Michael Flynn) befriended and also won the former CIA Director David Peter Appreciation of David H. Petraeus.

After Trump won the election, Boming joined Flynn on Trump’s transition team and officially joined the National Security Council in 2017, becoming one of the few senior White House officials who has experience of field in China.

After joining the National Security Council in 2017, Bo Ming identified China as a strategic competitor to the United States in the national security strategy document that participated in the drafting, and called it a “revisionist country.” According to US media reports, in private exchanges with friends, Bo Ming once pointed out that Chinese President Xi Jinping is leading China into a more dangerous totalitarian society.

If the experience of working as a reporter in China caused Bo Ming to lose his confidence in the Beijing government, it taught him to obey orders and his superiors while living in the military.

Once a lonely journalist who wanted to pursue a disciplined hierarchy of discipline, Bo Ming in 2005 seemed awkward. “This is very attractive to me because it means that I will become part of something bigger than me,” he wrote in that year’s article.

A recent report by The Washington Post stated that he respected his superiors a lot and acted discreetly, being careful not to take away the glory of his boss. In three years, the White House under Trump replaced four national security advisers, some of whom openly broke with Trump.

However, in the White House, Bo Ming stayed longer than his more personality bosses, and he rose steadily, becoming deputy to current national security consultant Robert O’Brien. In the Bomin White House office, a white board was erected, with military terms marked “front”, “strategic objective”, etc., recording in detail China’s ambitious display of influence abroad.

His accommodating personality allowed him to constantly change in the ever-changing White House. But at the same time, some critics believe that he was too obedient to his boss’s wishes and was unable to fully play out his understanding of China and formulate a policy of equal emphasis on China.

SARS reported, family members are virology experts

With accumulated experience and the SARS reporting network, Bo Ming realized early that the new coronavirus epidemic is of great importance.

According to the “New York Times” report, Bo Ming was very vigilant about the epidemic in early January and had spoken to the Hong Kong epidemiologist he met when interviewing SARS.

During SARS, Bo Ming, then a reporter stationed in China, was the first foreign media journalist to call Chinese surgeon Jiang Yanyong. Jiang Yanyong exposed the true situation of China’s SARS epidemic that year, which attracted the attention of world public opinion.

Coincidentally, Bomin’s wife, Yen Pottinger, is an experienced virology expert who worked at the Centers for Disease Control in the United States; his brother Paul Pottinger is also an expert in virology at the University of Washington. The first batch of new crown patients in the United States was treated.

Bo Ming soon realized the danger of the new corona virus and believed that Beijing had not adequately managed the epidemic and misled the true scale of infection. On January 11, China revealed the first case of the new crown’s death, and a small circle of White House staff, including Bo Ming, started daily meetings to discuss the epidemic.

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However, Bo Ming’s epidemic prevention council was not immediately adopted.

In mid and late January, when the first confirmed case of the new crown in the United States was not found and President Trump praised Beijing’s epidemic prevention response, the fight between hawks and Chinese pigeons at the White House it was organized in silence. On the one hand, Navarro, Boming, and other hawks against China, and on the other, Mnuchin, an economic adviser who advocates maintaining Sino-US economic and trade cooperation, his fight delays the United States’ response to the epidemic.

President Trump finally adopted Bo Ming’s suggestion on January 31 and issued a ban on entry to China, which became Trump’s boastful repeated decision.

A year after the SARS epidemic dissipated, Bo Ming reported that there were many more cases of atypical pneumonia in Beijing and Anhui. The source may be that the laboratory leaked the SARS virus for research. This experience obviously affected his analysis of the current situation of the new coronavirus epidemic.

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He suspected in January that the virus could come from the Wuhan Virus Research Institute and asked the United States intelligence agency to collect evidence. The intelligence agency recently announced that the new coronavirus is not artificial, but did not rule out the possibility of laboratory leaks.

The Washington Post quoted a person close to Boming as saying he believes the laboratory leaked the virus is backed by a large amount of indirect evidence.

Obviously, his views also affected President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo. The two have frequently expressed their stance, saying there is “a lot of evidence” that the source of the virus is the Wuhan Virus Research Institute, but no evidence has been released. Chinese official media responded, and US politicians spread “political viruses” with false information.

The source of the virus is still obscure, but there is little suspense that after the new crown epidemic, Bo Ming’s position in the White House will be further consolidated. At least during Trump’s term, he will continue to shape US policy toward China.