COVID-19 conspiracy theories that spread fastest focused on evil, secrecy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

PULLMAN, Wash. – In the early pandemic, conspiracy theories that were shared the most on Twitter highlighted malicious purposes and secretive actions of supposed bad actors behind the crisis, according to an analysis of nearly 400,000 posts. 

In the study, researchers identified commonalities in five of the most popular conspiracy theories: those related to Bill Gates, 5G Networks, vaccinations, QAnon and Agenda 21.

While each theory appears to have a different subject, the social media narratives often overlapped, said Porismita Borah, associate professor in Washington State University’s Murrow College of Communications.

“The conspiracy theories might be using different strategies, but the narratives are often connected,” said Borah, the corresponding author on the study published in the journal New Media and Society. “These theories have a lot in common in that they try to make the stories part of a bigger conspiracy so that if people believe in one conspiracy, then they tend to believe in the other.”

To conduct this study, the researchers used Brandwatch, a social media analytics and data library, to collect Twitter posts associated with the five conspiracy theories from the first six months of 2020.  This resulted in a total of 384,592 posts. The researchers then narrowed these down to the top ten most linked to URLs on a weekly basis. This allowed them to conduct a qualitative as well as quantitative study and examine more of the theories’ content beyond Twitter’s character-limited posts.

They found that the most common posts contained statements of belief that a theory was true, but those did not get as much engagement as posts about malicious purposes and secretive actions. The least likely posts to be shared were those that attempted to provide some sort of authentication or sources for these conspiracies.

COVID-19 proved fertile ground for conspiracies, but the authors were surprised by how quickly existing theories adapted the pandemic into their storylines. For instance, prior to the pandemic, there was a relatively minor conspiracy theory that 5G cellular technology could harm human health, but once COVID-19 hit, the theory expanded by falsely claiming that 5G towers were responsible for its spread worldwide.

This quick incorporation of COVID-19 into false narratives was particularly true of the “mega-theories” QAnon and Agenda21. QAnon contains the outlandish idea that the world is run by a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles. Agenda 21 is a twisted take on a real United Nations climate change initiative, claiming it is instead a secret plan to depopulate the world.

“When you have overarching theories as big as QAnon and Agenda21, they can really fit anything into them,” said Ital Himelboim, study first author and an associate professor at University of Georgia. “Immediately, the pandemic fits into the existing conspiratorial way to explain the world -- and of course, there's a villain.”

During this time period, the most popular conspiracy theory villain was Microsoft-founder Bill Gates. Some posts falsely contended Gates was behind the creation of the disease, wanted to depopulate the world, or intended to benefit from a future vaccine – or some combination of the three. The Bill Gates as a villain appeared in the most posts the researchers examined, bleeding over into other theories.

“There are many ways you might to explain the focus on Bill Gates, but when something people can't control is happening, sometimes they need someone to blame, so they look for that villain in a conspiracy theory,” said Himelboim. “Somehow Bill Gates became that invented villain.”

The authors called for further research to understand the psychological attraction of theories that claim malevolent purposes and secretive actions. Also, regardless of similarities and overlaps, the various conspiracy theories had many differences which points to a need to find different strategies to counter each one.

“To combat these conspiracy theories, we have to keep in mind how the content is created, what people believe and what they share,” said Borah. “It's a very complex situation, but it is important to understand the content to be able to counter it. You need to know what you are fighting.”

---

JOURNAL

New Media & Society

DOI

10.1177/1461444822114280 

ARTICLE TITLE

What do 5G networks, Bill Gates, Agenda 21, and QAnon have in common? Sources, distribution, and characteristics

Artificial photosynthesis uses sunlight to make biodegradable plastic

Synthesis of fumaric acid by a new method of artificial photosynthesis, using sunlight

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: USING SUNLIGHT TO POWER THE PHOTOREDOX SYSTEM PYRUVIC ACID AND CO¬2 ARE CONVERTED INTO FUMARIC ACID, BY MALATE DEHYDROGENASE AND FUMARASE. view more 

CREDIT: YUTAKA AMAO, OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Osaka, Japan – In recent years, environmental problems caused by global warming have become more apparent due to greenhouse gases such as CO2. In natural photosynthesis, CO2 is not reduced directly, but is bound to organic compounds which are converted to glucose or starch. Mimicking this, artificial photosynthesis could reduce CO2 by combining it into organic compounds to be used as raw materials, which can be converted into durable forms such as plastic.

A research team led by Professor Yutaka Amao from the Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and graduate student Mika Takeuchi, from the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Science, have succeeded in synthesizing fumaric acid from CO2, a raw material for plastics, powered—for the first time—by sunlight. Their findings were published in Sustainable Energy & Fuels.

Fumaric acid is typically synthesized from petroleum, to be used as a raw material for making biodegradable plastics such as polybutylene succinate, but this discovery shows that fumaric acid can be synthesized from CO2 and biomass-derived compounds using renewable solar energy.

“Toward the practical application of artificial photosynthesis, this research has succeeded in using visible light—renewable energy—as the power source,” explained Professor Amao. “In the future, we aim to collect gaseous CO2 and use it to synthesize fumaric acid directly through artificial photosynthesis.”

###

About OMU
Osaka Metropolitan University is a new public university established by a merger between Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University in April 2022. For more science news, see https://www.omu.ac.jp/en/, and follow @OsakaMetUniv_en, or search #OMUScience. 

---

JOURNAL

Sustainable Energy & Fuels

DOI

10.1039/D2SE01533A 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Visible-light driven fumarate production from CO2 and pyruvate by the photocatalytic system with dual biocatalysts

UK substantially underestimates its methane emissions from oil and gas production – and many other countries probably do too

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PRINCETON SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

A newer, more accurate method for calculating methane emissions from offshore oil and gas production suggests that the United Kingdom severely underestimates its greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers conclude that as much as five times more methane is being leaked from oil and gas production than reported.

Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, contributing about 1 degree Fahrenheit of present-day global warming relative to pre-industrial times. One major source of methane to the atmosphere is the extraction and transport of oil and gas. Countries are obligated to report their greenhouse gas emissions to international bodies such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but recent studies suggest that the current methods for calculating methane emissions rely on outdated and incomplete information and may not accurately represent actual emissions.

A recent study from researchers at Princeton University and Colorado State University finds that the current method for estimating methane emissions from offshore oil and gas production in the United Kingdom systematically and severely underestimates emissions. The study finds that as much as five times more methane is being emitted from oil and gas production in the UK than what the government has reported. The researchers reached this conclusion by critically evaluating the UK’s current method of calculating methane emissions, suggesting alternative, peer-review based methods and generating revised emission estimates.

Since many other countries use similar methodologies to calculate methane emissions from oil and gas production, this severe underestimation is likely not confined to the UK alone.

“It is critical to know when, where and how much methane is emitted from each of its sources in order to prioritize emission reductions,” said Denise Mauzerall, a co-author and core faculty member of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. “We hope our work will facilitate improved emission estimates and reductions not only from the UK but also from other countries producing methane from oil and gas extraction,” Mauzerall said.

Due to its climate and indirect health impacts (methane is a precursor for ozone which is an air pollutant that damages human health and crops), methane mitigation has recently become a global policy priority. Its relatively short lifetime of about 12 years and high heat trapping ability per molecule makes reducing methane emissions among the most effective ways to slow the rate of climate warming. As a result, in 2021 countries signed the Global Methane Pledge, committing to reduce methane emissions by at least 30% of 2020 levels by 2030. To track progress, countries compile national emissions data into inventories, such as the UK’s National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI), which are then reported to international monitoring bodies.

This study focuses on methane leakage associated with discovery, extraction, and production of oil and natural gas. These methane emissions are typically calculated by multiplying the activity level of various processes – namely venting, flaring, processing and combustion activities on production platforms, offshore oil loading, and gas transfer by high-pressure pipelines – by “emission factors,” which are standard estimates of the methane emissions associated with each activity.

The researchers found that the emissions factors used in the UK’s reporting are either outdated, rely on unpublished or publicly unavailable industry research, or use generic values recommended by the IPCC. Furthermore, these emission factors are usually “static,” meaning that they are not sensitive to factors such as environmental conditions and management practices which could affect emissions from various processes. In addition, leakage can occur when the off-shore rigs are idle – an “activity” that does not currently have an associated emission factor.

Noting these shortcomings, the researchers updated and revised estimation techniques for each process, and, wherever possible, used dynamic rather than static emission factor formulations that account for varying environmental conditions. They also incorporated direct boat-based measurements of methane concentrations around offshore gas platforms in the North Sea collected in summer 2017, documented in a study also led by the authors. These updates resulted in a total methane emission estimate more than five times larger than reported emissions.

“Methane emissions from offshore facilities are currently largely uncertain, and because sources on facilities only emit for a short time period, using direct survey methods such as satellite or drones will probably only capture about 25% of the actual emissions,” said Stuart Riddick, lead author and research scientist at Colorado State University. “To generate representative baseline emissions across the sector, we need to work with industry to develop practical, effective, and collaborative measurement strategies,” Riddick said.

Previous research has shown that reducing leakage across the oil and natural gas supply chain can advance climate and air quality goals while also being economically profitable – a win-win opportunity for industry and climate.

This study adds to a growing base of literature finding that current measurements of anthropogenic methane emission inventories are too low. With the world’s first “global stocktake” on progress implementing the Paris Agreement concluding in 2023, the researchers argue that improved measurement of emissions deserves urgent attention.

“We are hopeful that our work will facilitate more accurate emission inventory development and lead to critically important reductions of methane leakage – a win for both industry and the environment,” Mauzerall said.

The article “Likely underestimation of reported methane emissions from United Kingdom upstream oil and gas activities,” was first published in Energy & Environmental Science on Dec 22, 2022. The authors are Stuart Riddick (Colorado State University) and Denise Mauzerall (Princeton University).

---

JOURNAL

Energy & Environmental Science

DOI

10.1039/d2ee03072a 

ARTICLE TITLE

Likely substantial underestimation of reported methane emissions from United Kingdom upstream oil and gas activities

Homeless count in LA shows 18% rise in three high-priority neighborhoods

Number higher than once-a-year count done by region's homeless agency

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RAND CORPORATION

A year-long count of unhoused people in three hot-spot neighborhoods in Los Angeles found that their numbers rose by an average of 18% over the period, despite periodic encampment cleanups and other efforts to address the problem, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

The count of unsheltered people conducted from September 2021 to October 2022 in Hollywood, downtown’s Skid Row and Venice found the rise in the number of unhoused people varied by neighborhood. The increase was 14.5% in Hollywood, 13% on Skid Row and 32% in Venice.

Among more than 400 unhoused people surveyed by researchers during the first six months of the project, nearly 80% reported being continuously homeless for over a year, and 57% reported being continuously homeless for more than three years. About half of the sample reported a chronic health and/or mental health condition.

Among this group, 90% indicated interest in receiving housing and 29% reported being on a wait list for housing.

“This project provides new insights about the unhoused in these three high-priority neighborhoods and demonstrates that there is a lot to be learned by measuring progress on homelessness more regularly than the once-a-year count of unsheltered people conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority,” said Jason Ward, the report’s lead author and an associate economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

The RAND study, called the Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey (LA LEADS) Project, was conducted by the research organization’s professional survey staff. Counts of unhoused people during the study period were conducted roughly every two weeks in Skid Row and monthly in Hollywood and Venice.

The RAND project is the largest count of unhoused people in Los Angeles outside the annual point-in-time effort managed by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The county-wide count, conducted primarily by teams of trained volunteers over a few days every January, has been the primary data source for the number of unhoused people in the region for more than a decade.

While the RAND study is designed differently than the annual county-wide tally, RAND researchers conducted some analysis of small survey areas that had either exact or highly similar boundaries.

While some of the counts of unhoused people were similar, after totaling up the counts for all the comparison areas, the RAND counts were 15% larger over a similar period of time than the comparable counts compiled during the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s last census in January 2022.

However, RAND researchers noted that the set of comparison areas were an arbitrary subset of the larger neighborhoods that were amenable to exact or very close geographic matching.

“Our findings suggest that in many cases, volunteer-led counts result in accurate estimates of the area’s unsheltered population,” Ward said. “But in other cases, we see evidence of fairly

large discrepancies that suggest possible room for improvements to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority process.”

Such improvement strategies could include providing better guidance to volunteers or using more-specialized teams of enumerators for dense or high-profile areas of the county.

During the year-long count, the RAND team found that the number of unhoused people in the study neighborhoods varied by as much as 24% from month to month. This was likely influenced, at least in part, by activities such as encampment cleanups and other events that prompted people to move. But the numbers rebounded soon after the declines were noted.

Among the unhoused people surveyed by the RAND project, between 83% and 87% said they would accept offers of placement into permanent supportive housing, a hotel or motel, or a private shelter setting. About 29% reported being on a wait list and 40% reported that they had been offered housing since experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles.

The most common reasons that respondents cited for not moving into housing were never being contacted for move-in (44%), lack of privacy (40%), housing safety (35%) and paperwork issues (29%).

About seven out of 10 unsheltered individuals surveyed were men, half were Black, and about six out of 10 were aged 45 years or older. The respondents from Skid Row were more likely to be older than the respondents in Hollywood and Venice, and also were more likely to be Black.

“Our study contributes to a relatively scant body of evidence about the sizes and characteristics of unsheltered people in these three Los Angeles neighborhoods, their experiences and their preferences for housing,” Ward said. “Improving the accuracy and informativeness of data measuring the size and locations of the region’s unhoused residents is critical to forming effective policies and measuring their success.”

The report, “Recent Trends Among the Unsheltered in Three Los Angeles Neighborhoods: An Annual Report from the Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey

(LA LEADS) Project,” is available at www.rand.org.

Support for the project was provided by the Lowy Family Group through its funding of the RAND Center for Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles. Other authors of the report are Rick Garvey and Sarah B. Hunter.

The RAND Social and Economic Well-Being division seeks to actively improve the health, and social and economic well-being of populations and communities throughout the world.

ARTICLE TITLE

Recent trends among the unsheltered in three Los Angeles neighborhoods: An annual report from the Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey (LA LEADS) project

Ignoring Native American data perpetuates misleading white ‘deaths of despair’ narrative, study finds

Native Americans have the highest rates of mortality from deaths of despair, but this data is largely missing from mainstream discussion

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES HEALTH SCIENCES

An increase in mortality among middle-aged Americans – largely attributed to “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease – has been frequently portrayed as a phenomenon affecting white communities. Under a common narrative, these deaths have often been explained by the perceived loss of status felt by many less-educated white Americans as their economic opportunities declined and their social standing diminished.

However, a new analysis in The Lancet led by UCLA researchers shows that Native American people in this midlife age group (45-54 years) actually have had the biggest increases in mortality in recent decades, and are now dying at twice the rate of white people of the same age. Further, Native American communities collectively have the highest rates of mortality from each of the causes of “deaths of despair.”

This tragic toll has been overlooked in mainstream discussion about deaths of despair because health policy data on Native American communities are often ignored or incomplete, the researchers write in The Lancet. That includes an influential 2015 study that coined the term and sparked a national conversation about “deaths of despair,” which did not consider mortality data among Native Americans. Many of the follow-up studies on the topic also did not include data on Native Americans.

“Many people reading about the ‘deaths of despair’ in recent years could easily have thought that white individuals were the most affected by premature mortality and decreases in life expectancy, because the theory focused on the ‘uniqueness’ of this phenomenon for white communities. But a careful read of the data shows that Native individuals have had the biggest increases in premature mortality, and overall Black and Native communities have been the most affected in all years of available data. It’s important that these inequalities be shown and discussed, rather than hidden, so that we can mobilize resources and work to improve them,” said corresponding author Joseph Friedman, PhD, MPH, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Between 1999 and 2013, the final year of data used in the 2015 study, publicly available mortality records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that midlife mortality among white Americans increased 8.9%. During this period, mortality among midlife Native Americans increased 29.3%, or over three times greater than the observed increase among white Americans.

The researchers also drilled down further to examine deaths of despair-related causes among this midlife group. In 2013, Native Americans had a 75.9% higher midlife death rate than white Americans. In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, that gap expanded to 102.6%, meaning that Native American midlife mortality from deaths of despair-related causes was over twice the rate for white Americans. The gap may be even much wider due to known difficulties with collecting data on Native American deaths, the researchers write. 

The popular narrative that suggested white working-class people are at greater risk of dying from deaths of despair “was only made possible by the erasure of data describing Native American mortality,” the researchers write. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Native American communities, underscored the dangerous consequences of policymakers having imprecise or incomplete data about these communities.

To ensure these communities aren’t overlooked, the researchers propose that data collection at the national and state levels should specifically enumerate Native American people, rather than exclude them or label them as “other.” The researchers also say it is essential to include Native American leadership on efforts to collect, maintain, and share data, to help build community trust and ensure these efforts do not produce potentially incorrect or stigmatizing data.

Additional authors include Helena Hansen, MD, PhD, interim chair of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s medical school and interim director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior; and Joseph P. Gone, PhD, professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

---

JOURNAL

The Lancet

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02404-7 

ARTICLE TITLE

Deaths of despair and Indigenous data genocide

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

COI STATEMENT

The authors declared no competing interests.

Rapid plant evolution may make coastal regions more susceptible to flooding and sea level rise, study shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Evolution has occurred more rapidly than previously thought in the Chesapeake Bay wetlands, which may decrease the chance that coastal marshes can withstand future sea level rise, researchers at the University of Notre Dame and collaborators demonstrated in a recent publication in Science.

Jason McLachlan, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, evaluated the role evolution plays in ecosystems in the Chesapeake Bay by studying a type of grass-like plant, Schoenoplectus americanus, also called chairmaker’s bulrush. The research team used a combination of historical seeds found in core sediment samples, modern plants, and computational models to demonstrate that “resurrected” plants were allocating more resources in their roots below ground, allowing them to store carbon more quickly than modern plants.

“We think this surprising reduction in below-ground growth might be a response to increased pollution in Chesapeake Bay,” McLachlan said. “Decades of pollution have resulted in higher levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the waters, and since these are plant nutrients, evolution might now favor plants that ‘invest’ less in expensive roots.”

The seeds from the historical plants had remained underground on the property of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the bay, dormant since the mid-1900s. McLachlan and other researchers collected them and allowed them to germinate and grow. Known as resurrection ecology, this type of research provides direct evidence that can support assumptions about evolutionary change.

Computational models had previously established the threat of sea level rise to coastal wetlands, and have incorporated scientists’ understanding of how flooding affects plant growth and how plant growth affects stability. While modern plants and samples from the mid-1900s grew similarly above ground, the modern plants invested less resources into rooting deeper below ground. This created less biomass below ground and could reduce the capacity of wetlands to withstand flooding.

McLachlan and collaborators showed, through computational models, that the modern plants store carbon in soils 15 percent slower than the plants did in the mid-1900s.

McLachlan was astounded by the speed with which evolutionary change occurred in Schoenoplectus americanus.

“The research shows the role evolution plays as ecosystems are increasingly stressed by the impacts of human society,” he said. 

First author Megan Vahsen, a doctoral student at Notre Dame, had discovered the importance of below-ground plant traits as early as 2017 as a first-year graduate student at Notre Dame. Though the researchers cannot specifically say that plants are investing relatively more of their energy above ground and less below ground because of pollution, she believes the combination of techniques used in the current research provides novel predictions about the impact of evolution on ecosystems. She expects the study will motivate researchers to study the causes that drive evolutionary change.

“For reasons of inconvenience, science has often ignored what happens below ground,” she said, noting that she and undergraduates at Notre Dame spent about 500 hours washing and sorting plant roots. “But we have learned so much in this study; there are so many secrets happening below ground.”

McLachlan said the research further demonstrates the role evolution plays as ecosystems are increasingly stressed by the impacts of human society. 

“Evolutionary change over almost a century played a destabilizing role for coastal ecosystems. Other species in other ecosystems might have responded differently to human environmental impact, perhaps providing more resilience to ecosystems, or perhaps having no impact at all,” he said. “Now that we've shown that evolutionary change can be fast enough and large enough to affect ecosystem resilience, we hope other researchers will consider this component of biological response to global environmental change.”

Other collaborators in this research include Michael Blum and Scott Emrich of the University of Tennessee, Jim Holmquist and Patrick Megonigal of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Brady Stiller of the University of Notre Dame and Kathe Todd-Brown of the University of Florida, Gainesville. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the United States Coastal Research Program.

---

JOURNAL

Science

ARTICLE TITLE

Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

Bill Gates says the rise of China is good for everyone and that Beijing needs to ‘play a stronger role in world governance’



Steve Mollman
Thu, January 26, 2023

Bill Gates sees China’s rise as a "huge win for the world.” But he knows that not everyone shares his view.

Speaking this week at the Lowy Institute, a think tank based in Sydney, the Microsoft cofounder gave his perspective on China’s transformation from a developing economy to a major world player.

“China has gone from in 1980 being incredibly impoverished—poorer than India, I mean literally, with starvation, malnutrition—to being the most wealthy middle-income country in the world,” said Gates. “It’s incredible, and it’s great for the world.”

The Microsoft billionaire, who currently ranks as the fourth richest person in the world, also warned about the negative attitudes toward China in the United States today, and vice versa.

“I do think the current mentality of the U.S. to China, and which is reciprocated, is kind of a lose-lose mentality,” he said. “If you ask U.S. politicians, ‘Hey, would you like the Chinese economy to shrink by 20% or grow by 20%,' I'm afraid they would vote that, ‘Yeah, let’s immiserate those people’—not understanding that for the global economy, the invention of cancer drugs, the solution of climate change, you know, we're all in this together."

The current hawkishness toward China in the U.S. could become “self-fulfilling in a very negative way,” he cautioned. He didn’t give an example. U.S. lawmakers voted overwhelmingly this month to establish a House select committee specifically to address the various threats that China poses to the U.S. GOP Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher described a “coordinated whole-of-society strategy to undermine American leadership and American sovereignty” by the Chinese Communist Party.

Gates also noted China’s economic importance, saying it holds 20% of the world’s people.

“Their portion of the global economy and their portion of the global population match exactly. Countries like Australia, U.S., we have per capita GDPs five times what the Chinese have, so we have a disproportionate share of the world's economy."

But it wasn’t all rosy. Gates also leveled criticism at China. The country is "not a democracy," he acknowledged, and is an "outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as autocratic as they are."

He also knocked China for not acting quickly enough to get its population properly vaccinated early during the COVID pandemic.

China “should have jumped on vaccines, particularly for the elderly, much faster, and that would have allowed them to open up somewhat sooner than they did,” he said.

China recently loosened its strict COVID restrictions and is reporting an uptick in COVID deaths as people circulate more freely, but the official numbers are likely far below reality. “We’ll never know the true death numbers,” Gates said.

Still, Gates said nations like China needed to step up on the world stage.

“The U.S. is politically weaker today, I would say, than it's been, and, you know, that's scary for the world,” he said. “The current world system is designed around U.S. leadership. As other countries have gotten richer, these middle-income countries including China and India need to play a stronger role in world governance."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

China Sure to Hit Back Over Chip Controls, Japan Lawmaker Says

Isabel Reynolds
Thu, January 26, 2023 


(Bloomberg) -- China is “100% sure” to retaliate over Japanese backing for Biden administration restrictions on semiconductor exports, and firms facing the fallout should look for markets elsewhere, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker said.

“China will come back with stronger retaliation and Japanese companies doing business there will probably be damaged,” said Shigeharu Aoyama, who serves on the party’s committee covering trade and industry. He made the comments in a Thursday interview with Bloomberg News after it reported the Netherlands and Japan are close to joining the US-led effort to restrict exports of the technology to China.

Japan and the Netherlands are home to key suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, but it is not yet clear what form their restrictions would take.

“They should take that as a turning point and look for other markets,” he added, saying he backed Japan’s participation in the measures.

US Poised for Dutch, Japanese Help on China Chip Crackdown

China is Japan’s largest trading partner and has said the US effort showed its “selfish hegemonic interest.” The Biden administration issued sweeping new rules in October that include restrictions on the supply of US manufacturers’ most advanced chipmaking equipment to Chinese customers and limits on Americans working for Chinese semiconductor firms, a move aimed at choking off access to certain expertise.

Dutch chip equipment giant ASML told Bloomberg the US-led measures could also push Beijing to develop its own technology in advanced semiconductor-making machinery.

Beijing last month filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization aimed at overturning the US-imposed export controls. It also has a history of deploying economic sanctions amid political disputes with its neighbors.

China Hits Back at South Korea, Japan in Covid Retaliation

Earlier this month, Beijing stopped issuing visas for travelers from Japan and short-term visitors from South Korea in retaliation for the two countries introducing Covid-19 testing and other restrictions on people traveling from mainland China.

In 2017, China also dramatically scaled back trade with South Korea after then-President Moon Jae-in agreed to host a US anti-missile system. And in 2010, China banned exports of rare earths to Japan as tensions rose over East China Sea islands claimed by both countries.

--With assistance from Yuki Hagiwara.

The US Hasn’t Noticed That China-Made Cars Are Taking Over the World (01/25/2023)

Globalization

What the West Gets Wrong About China
Three fundamental misconceptions

 
by Rana Mitter and
Elsbeth Johnson

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
From the Magazine (May–June 2021)

Yukai Du

Summary. Many people have wrongly assumed that political freedom would follow new economic freedoms in China and that its economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as in the West. The authors suggest that those assumptions are rooted in...more

When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend.

One thing hasn’t changed, though: Many Western politicians and business executives still don’t get China. Believing, for example, that political freedom would follow the new economic freedoms, they wrongly assumed that China’s internet would be similar to the freewheeling and often politically disruptive version developed in the West. And believing that China’s economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as those in the West, many failed to envisage the Chinese state’s continuing role as investor, regulator, and intellectual property owner.

Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong? In our work we have come to see that people in both business and politics often cling to three widely shared but essentially false assumptions about modern China. As we’ll argue in the following pages, these assumptions reflect gaps in their knowledge about China’s history, culture, and language that encourage them to draw persuasive but deeply flawed analogies between China and other countries.

[ Myth 1 ]

Economics and Democracy Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Many Westerners assume that China is on the same development trajectory that Japan, Britain, Germany, and France embarked on in the immediate aftermath of World War II—the only difference being that the Chinese started much later than other Asian economies, such as South Korea and Malaysia, after a 40-year Maoist detour. According to this view, economic growth and increasing prosperity will cause China to move toward a more liberal model for both its economy and its politics, as did those countries.

It’s a plausible narrative. As the author Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, liberalism has had few competitors since the end of the Cold War, when both fascism and communism appeared defeated. And the narrative has had some powerful supporters. In a speech in 2000 former U.S. President Bill Clinton declared, “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products, it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. When individuals have the power…to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”

But this argument overlooks some fundamental differences between China and the United States, Japan, Britain, Germany, and France. Those countries have since 1945 been pluralist democracies with independent judiciaries. As a result, economic growth came in tandem with social progress (through, for example, legislation protecting individual choice and minority rights), which made it easy to imagine that they were two sides of a coin. The collapse of the USSR appeared to validate that belief, given that the Soviet regime’s inability to deliver meaningful economic growth for its citizens contributed to its collapse: Russia’s eventual integration into the global economy (perestroika) followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s political reforms (glasnost).

Many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements have actually come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government.

In China, however, growth has come in the context of stable communist rule, suggesting that democracy and growth are not inevitably mutually dependent. In fact, many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements—large-scale poverty reduction, huge infrastructure investment, and development as a world-class tech innovator—have come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government. Its aggressive handling of Covid-19—in sharp contrast to that of many Western countries with higher death rates and later, less-stringent lockdowns—has, if anything, reinforced that view.

China has also defied predictions that its authoritarianism would inhibit its capacity to innovate. It is a global leader in AI, biotech, and space exploration. Some of its technological successes have been driven by market forces: People wanted to buy goods or communicate more easily, and the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have helped them do just that. But much of the technological progress has come from a highly innovative and well-funded military that has invested heavily in China’s burgeoning new industries. This, of course, mirrors the role of U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the development of Silicon Valley. But in China the consumer applications have come faster, making more obvious the link between government investment and products and services that benefit individuals. That’s why ordinary Chinese people see Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, and TikTok as sources of national pride—international vanguards of Chinese success—rather than simply sources of jobs or GDP, as they might be viewed in the West.

Thus July 2020 polling data from the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government revealed 95% satisfaction with the Beijing government among Chinese citizens. Our own experiences on the ground in China confirm this. Most ordinary people we meet don’t feel that the authoritarian state is solely oppressive, although it can be that; for them it also provides opportunity. A cleaner in Chongqing now owns several apartments because the CCP reformed property laws. A Shanghai journalist is paid by her state-controlled magazine to fly around the world for stories on global lifestyle trends. A young student in Nanjing can study propulsion physics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University thanks to social mobility and the party’s significant investment in scientific research.

Many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements have actually come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government.

The past decade has, if anything, strengthened Chinese leaders’ view that economic reform is possible without liberalizing politics. A major turning point was the financial crisis of 2008, which in Chinese eyes revealed the hollowness of the “Washington consensus” that democratization and economic success were linked. In the years since, China has become an economic titan, a global leader in technology innovation, and a military superpower, all while tightening its authoritarian system of government—and reinforcing a belief that the liberal narrative does not apply to China. That, perhaps, is why its current president and (more crucially) party general secretary, Xi Jinping, has let it be known that he considers Gorbachev a traitor to the cause for liberalizing as he did, thereby destroying the Communist Party’s hold on the USSR. And when Xi announced, in 2017, that the “three critical battles” for China’s development would fall in the areas of reducing financial risk, addressing pollution, and alleviating poverty, he also made it clear that the objective of these reforms was to solidify the system rather than to change it. The truth, then, is that China is not an authoritarian state seeking to become more liberal but an authoritarian state seeking to become more successful—politically as well as economically.

In much Western analysis the verb most commonly attached to China’s reforms is “stalled.” The truth is that political reform in China hasn’t stalled. It continues apace. It’s just not liberal reform. One example is the reinvention in the late 2010s of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Empowered by Xi to deal with the corruption that had become so prevalent early in that decade, the commission can arrest and hold suspects for several months; its decisions cannot be overturned by any other entity in China, not even the supreme court. The commission has succeeded in reducing corruption in large part because it is essentially above the law—something unimaginable in a liberal democracy. These are the reforms China is making—and they need to be understood on their own terms, not simply as a distorted or deficient version of a liberal model.

One reason that many people misread China’s trajectory may be that—particularly in the English-language promotional materials the Chinese use overseas—the country tends to portray itself as a variation on a liberal state, and therefore more trustworthy. It often compares itself to brands with which Westerners are familiar. For example, in making the case for why it should be involved in the UK’s 5G infrastructure rollout, Huawei styled itself the “John Lewis of China,” in reference to the well-known British department store that is regularly ranked as one of the UK’s most trusted brands. China is also often at pains to suggest to foreign governments or investors that it is similar to the West in many aspects—consumer lifestyles, leisure travel, and a high demand for tertiary education. These similarities are real, but they are manifestations of the wealth and personal aspirations of China’s newly affluent middle class, and they in no way negate the very real differences between the political systems of China and the West.

Which brings us to the next myth.

[ Myth 2 ]
Authoritarian Political Systems Can’t Be Legitimate

Many Chinese not only don’t believe that democracy is necessary for economic success but do believe that their form of government is legitimate and effective. Westerners’ failure to appreciate this explains why many still expect China to reduce its role as investor, regulator, and, especially, intellectual property owner when that role is in fact seen as essential by the Chinese government.

Part of the system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese is, again, rooted in history: China has often had to fight off invaders and, as is rarely acknowledged in the West, fought essentially alone against Japan from 1937 until 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II. The resulting victory, which for decades the CCP spun as its solo vanquishing of an external enemy, was reinforced by defeat of an internal one (Chiang Kai-shek in 1949), establishing the legitimacy of the party and its authoritarian system.

Seventy years on, many Chinese believe that their political system is now actually more legitimate and effective than the West’s. This is a belief alien to many Western business executives, especially if they’ve had experience with other authoritarian regimes. The critical distinction is that the Chinese system is not only Marxist, it’s Marxist-Leninist. In our experience, many Westerners don’t understand what that means or why it matters. A Marxist system is concerned primarily with economic outcomes. That has political implications, of course—for example, that the public ownership of assets is necessary to ensure an equal distribution of wealth—but the economic outcomes are the focus. Leninism, however, is essentially a political doctrine; its primary aim is control. So a Marxist-Leninist system is concerned not only with economic outcomes but also with gaining and maintaining control over the system itself.

That has huge implications for people seeking to do business in China. If China were concerned only with economic outcomes, it would welcome foreign businesses and investors and, provided they helped deliver economic growth, would treat them as equal partners, agnostic as to who owned the IP or the majority stake in a joint venture. But because this is also a Leninist system, those issues are of critical importance to Chinese leaders, who won’t change their minds about them, however effective or helpful their foreign partners are economically.

This plays out every time a Western company negotiates access to the Chinese market. We have both sat in meetings where business executives, particularly in the technology and pharmaceutical sectors, expressed surprise at China’s insistence that they transfer ownership of their IP to a Chinese company. Some have expressed optimism that China’s need for control will lessen after they’ve proved their worth as partners. Our response? That’s not likely, precisely because in China’s particular brand of authoritarianism, control is key.

Yukai Du

A Leninist approach to selecting future leaders is also a way the CCP has maintained its legitimacy, because to many ordinary Chinese, this approach produces relatively competent leaders: They are chosen by the CCP and progress through the system by successfully running first a town and then a province; only after that do they serve on the Politburo. You can’t become a senior leader in China without having proved your worth as a manager. China’s leaders argue that its essentially Leninist rule book makes Chinese politics far less arbitrary or nepotistic than those of many other, notably Western, countries (even though the system has its share of back-scratching and opaque decision-making).

Familiarity with Leninist doctrine is still important for getting ahead. Entry to the CCP and to a university involves compulsory courses in Marxist-Leninist thought, which has also become part of popular culture, as evidenced by the 2018 TV talk show Marx Got It Right. And with handy apps such as Xuexi Qiangguo (“Study the powerful nation” and a pun on “Study Xi”) to teach the basics of thinkers including Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Xi Jinping, political education is now a 21st-century business.

The Leninist nature of politics is also evidenced by the language used to discuss it. Political discourse in China remains anchored in Marxist-Leninist ideas of “struggle” (douzheng) and “contradiction” (maodun)—both seen as attributes that force a necessary and even healthy confrontation that can help achieve a victorious outcome. In fact, the Chinese word for the resolution of a conflict (jiejue) can imply a result in which one side overcomes the other, rather than one in which both sides are content. Hence the old joke that China’s definition of a win-win scenario is one in which China wins twice.

China uses its particular authoritarian model—and its presumed legitimacy—to build trust with its population in ways that would be considered highly intrusive in a liberal democracy. The city of Rongcheng, for example, uses big data (available to the government through surveillance and other data-capturing infrastructure) to give people individualized “social credit scores.” These are used to reward or punish citizens according to their political and financial virtues or vices. The benefits are both financial (for example, access to mortgage loans) and social (permission to buy a ticket on one of the new high-speed trains). Those with low social-credit scores may find themselves prevented from buying an airline ticket or getting a date on an app. For liberals (in China and elsewhere), this is an appalling prospect; but for many ordinary people in China, it’s a perfectly reasonable part of the social contract between the individual and the state.

Such ideas may appear very different from the outward-facing, Confucian concepts of “benevolence” and “harmony” that China presents to its international, English-speaking audience. But even those concepts lead to considerable misunderstanding on the part of Westerners, who often reduce Confucianism to cloying ideas about peace and cooperation. For the Chinese, the key to those outcomes is respect for an appropriate hierarchy, itself a means of control. While hierarchy and equality may appear to the post-Enlightenment West to be antithetical concepts, in China they remain inherently complementary.

Recognizing that the authoritarian Marxist-Leninist system is accepted in China as not only legitimate but also effective is crucially important if Westerners are to make more-realistic long-term decisions about how to deal with or invest in the country. But the third assumption can also mislead those seeking to engage with China.

[ Myth 3 ]
The Chinese Live, Work, and Invest Like Westerners

China’s recent history means that Chinese people and the state approach decisions very differently from Westerners—in both the time frames they use and the risks they worry about most. But because human beings tend to believe that other humans make decisions as they do, this may be the most difficult assumption for Westerners to overcome.

Let’s imagine the personal history of a Chinese woman who is 65 today. Born in 1955, she experienced as a child the terrible Great Leap Forward famine in which 20 million Chinese starved to death. She was a Red Guard as a teenager, screaming adoration for Chairman Mao while her parents were being re-educated for being educated. By the 1980s she was in the first generation to go back to university, and even took part in the Tiananmen Square demonstration.

Then, in the 1990s, she took advantage of the new economic freedoms, becoming a 30-something entrepreneur in one of the new Special Economic Zones. She bought a flat—the first time anyone in her family’s history had owned property. Eager for experience, she took a job as an investment analyst with a Shanghai-based foreign asset manager, but despite a long-term career plan mapped out by her employer, she left that company for a small short-term pay raise from a competitor. By 2008 she was making the most of the rise in disposable incomes by buying new consumer goods that her parents could only have dreamt about. In the early 2010s she started moderating her previously outspoken political comments on Weibo as censorship tightened up. By 2020 she was intent on seeing her seven-year-old grandson and infant granddaughter (a second child had only recently become legal) do well.

Had she been born in 1955 in almost any other major economy in the world, her life would have been much, much more predictable. But looking back over her life story, one can see why even many young Chinese today may feel a reduced sense of predictability or trust in what the future holds—or in what their government might do next.

When life is (or has been within living memory) unpredictable, people tend to apply a higher discount rate to potential long-term outcomes than to short-term ones—and a rate materially higher than the one applied by people living in more-stable societies. That means not that these people are unconcerned with long-term outcomes but, rather, that their risk aversion increases significantly as the time frame lengthens. This shapes the way they make long-term commitments, especially those that entail short-term trade-offs or losses.

Thus many Chinese consumers prefer the short-term gains of the stock market to locking their money away in long-term savings vehicles. As market research consistently tells us, the majority of individual Chinese investors behave more like traders. For example, a 2015 survey found that 81% of them trade at least once a month, even though frequent trading is invariably a way to destroy rather than create long-term fund value. That figure is higher than in all Western countries (for example, only 53% of U.S. individual investors trade this frequently); it’s also even higher than in neighboring Hong Kong—another Han Chinese society with a predilection for gambling and a similar, capital-gains-tax-free regime. This suggests that something distinctive to mainland China influences this behavior: long-term unpredictability that’s sufficiently recent to have been experienced by or passed on to those now buying stocks.

That focus on securing short-term gain is why the young asset manager in Shanghai left a good long-term job for a relatively small but immediate pay raise—behavior that still plagues many businesses trying to retain talent and manage succession pipelines in China. People who do take long-term career risks often do so only after fulfilling their primary need for short-term security. For example, we’ve interviewed couples in which the wife “jumps into the sea” of starting her own business—becoming one of China’s many female entrepreneurs—because her husband’s stable but lower-paid state-sector job will provide the family with security. The one long-term asset class in which increasing numbers of Chinese are invested—that is, residential property, ownership of which grew from 14% of 25-to-69-year-olds in 1988 to 93% by 2008—is driven also by the need for security: Unlike all other assets, property ensures a roof over one’s head if things go wrong, in a system with limited social welfare and a history of sudden policy changes.

China’s rulers see foreign engagement as a source less of opportunity than of threat, uncertainty, and even humiliation.

In contrast, the government’s discount rate on the future is lower—in part because of its Leninist emphasis on control—and explicitly focused on long-term returns. The vehicles for much of this investment are still the CCP’s Soviet-style five-year plans, which include the development of what Xi has termed an “eco-civilization” built around solar energy technology, “smart cities,” and high-density, energy-efficient housing. Ambition like that can’t be realized without state intervention—relatively fast and easy but often brutal in China. By comparison, progress on these issues is for Western economies extremely slow.

Decisions—by both individuals and the state—about how to invest all serve one purpose: to provide security and stability in an unpredictable world. Although many in the West may believe that China sees only opportunity in its 21st-century global plans, its motivation is very different. For much of its turbulent modern history, China has been under threat from foreign powers, both within Asia (notably Japan) and outside it (the UK and France in the mid 19th century). China’s rulers, therefore, see foreign engagement as a source less of opportunity than of threat, uncertainty, and even humiliation. They still blame foreign interference for many of their misfortunes, even if it occurred more than a century ago. For example, the British role in the Opium Wars of the 1840s kicked off a 100-year period that the Chinese still refer to as the Century of Humiliation. China’s history continues to color its view of international relations—and in large part explains its current obsession with the inviolability of its sovereignty.

That history also explains the paradox that the rulers and the ruled in China operate on very different time frames. For individuals, who’ve lived through harsh times they could not control, the reaction is to make some key choices in a much more short-term way than Westerners do. Policy makers, in contrast, looking for ways to gain more control and sovereignty over the future, now play a much longer game than the West does. This shared quest for predictability explains the continuing attractiveness of an authoritarian system in which control is the central tenet.

. . .

Many in the West accept the version of China that it has presented to the world: The period of “reform and opening” begun in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, which stressed the need to avoid the radical and often violent politics of the Cultural Revolution, means that ideology in China no longer matters. The reality is quite different. At every point since 1949 the Chinese Communist Party has been central to the institutions, society, and daily experiences that shape the Chinese people. And the party has always believed in and emphasized the importance of Chinese history and of Marxist-Leninist thought, with all they imply. Until Western companies and politicians accept this reality, they will continue to get China wrong.

A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Rana Mitter is a professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford. His most recent book is China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Elsbeth Johnson, formerly the strategy director for Prudential PLC’s Asian business, is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the founder of SystemShift, a consulting firm.

Next In
Understanding China

The Strategic Challenges of Decoupling

Spotlight Series / Understanding China 01

What the West Gets Wrong About China02

The Strategic Challenges of Decoupling03

China’s New Innovation Advantage04

“Americans Don’t Know How Capitalist China Is”