Russia’s ‘internal affair’ and fentanyl charges

Here’s what else you need to know about China today:

Top story: The U.S. filed the first prosecutions against China-based actors for selling key chemicals used to make fentanyl, the highly addictive painkiller that has driven an opioid crisis in the country. China’s Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the charge.

Russia’s aborted coup is an “internal affair,” China’s Foreign Ministry stated in response to the attempted insurrection by the Wagner Group of heavily armed mercenaries just one day earlier on June 24. “China supports Russia in maintaining national stability and achieving development and prosperity,” according to the statement released on June 25, after a meeting (readout from Beijing, Moscow) between Chinese Foreign Minister Qín Gāng 秦刚 and Russian counterpart Andrei Rudenko.

The U.S. found no direct evidence that COVID originated at a Wuhan lab, according to a declassified intelligence report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released on Friday. The four-page report, which summarized the findings by major U.S. intelligence agencies, stated that its spy agencies still were not able to discover the origins of the pandemic. “Both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection,” the report stated.

There continues to be “no indication” that China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) “pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic,” the report added.

Related on The China Project: Why is it so hard to get a straight answer about where COVID came from? Q&A with John Sudworth.

A Cathay Pacific flight sent 11 people to the hospital for injuries sustained during the evacuation of a Los Angeles–bound flight, CX880, which aborted its takeoff at 12:58 a.m. at the Hong Kong airport on Saturday. The flight was carrying 283 passengers when it experienced a “technical issue,” with local media reporting that one of the plane’s tires had overheated and burst, leading to an evacuation through emergency slides.

China recorded 106 million domestic tourist trips over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, according to China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, up 32.3% from 2022. Tourism revenue hit 37.31 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) during the holiday, which lasted from Thursday to Saturday, up 44.5% year-on-year.

Entry and exit trips to and from the country reached 3.96 million, an increase of 2.3 times the same period last year, the National Immigration Administration (NIA) reported on Sunday per state media. However, that was still only 64.6% of the number of trips recorded before the pandemic in 2019.

Chinese state media today is oblivious to various world events, at least when it comes to the top stories on the two top central information platforms: the Xinhua News Agency and the Party’s house paper, the People’s Daily. Xinhua’s big piece today is about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 telling the new leadership of the Communist Youth League of China — the little league of communist organizations in China — “to earnestly shoulder their missions and tasks entrusted by the CCP in the new era.” (Xinhua’s English website has a 71-word summary, which is also its top story today.)

The People’s Daily print edition’s top story today is about the great success of the “Thousand Village Demonstration and Ten Thousand Village Renovation” project, which “General Secretary Xi Jinping personally planned, personally deployed, and personally promoted when he was working in Zhejiang,” starting 20 years ago, in June 2003. The front page also features a photo and story about China’s No. 2 official premier, Lǐ Qiáng 李强, meeting the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, in Beijing yesterday.