Editor’s Note for Wednesday, June 15, 2022

My thoughts today:

The biosecurity state that I predicted at the beginning of the pandemic is here. Here is one sign: China’s bank run victims planned to protest. Then their COVID health codes turned red.

China’s special military operations? “Analysts say China’s leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has set the legal basis for an expansion of the Chinese military’s role in other countries, just weeks after Beijing signed a security pact with Solomon Islands,” reports ABC.

“China’s top diplomat for Sub-Saharan Africa, Wú Péng 吴鹏, arrived in Lilongwe on Tuesday and tried to quell surging anger in the country over revelations in a new BBC documentary that showed how Chinese nationals in Malawi exploited children to produce offensive videos,” reports the China-Global South project.

The issue was no doubt high on the agenda during talks with Foreign Minister Nancy Tembo who said on Monday her compatriots were “disgusted, disrespected and deeply pained” by what was uncovered in the program.

“China has been cracking down on those unlawful online acts in the past years,” Wu posted on Twitter after his meeting with Tembo. “We’ll continue to crack down on such racial discrimination videos in the future,” he added.

But the evidence does not support Wu’s assertions about a crackdown. There is a booming market for these so-called “blessing videos” that feature Africans, Eastern Europeans, and people from other low-income regions often performing demeaning acts on video.

Wu is currently on a seven-nation African tour. Next, he will travel to Zambia.

Our word of the day is motorbike (摩托车 mótuō chē).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief