The Coronavirus pandemic has infected over 18 lakh in the United States of America with over one lakh dead already. The pandemic has snowballed into a global catastrophe majorly because China tried to hide the severity of the virus by colluding with the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Coronavirus has singlehandedly brought the world’s superpower, the USA, to a standstill. As a result, President Donald Trump has started coming down heavily on China for its gross negligence. Trump leads the charge against China and has recently undertaken three concrete decisions that have rattled the CCP regime.
The first decision was to terminate the USA’s relationship with the WHO
The WHO under Dr. Tedros has come under the scanner from all quarters for being a China-centric body which helped China cover up the disaster and cause a pandemic. As a result, US President Donald Trump on Friday said that America is terminating its relationship with the WHO. The US is the global health agency’s largest single contributor, providing more than 15 percent of its total funding, that is $450 million.
Trump has openly blamed WHO and China for the deaths and destruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe and even in the press conference yesterday, he was in a no-holds-barred mood. He said, “China had instigated a global pandemic that has cost over 100,000 American lives”.
China, he said, has total control over the WHO despite only paying USD 40 million per year compared to what the US has been paying which is approximately USD 450 million a year.
With America pulling the plug from the funding and all the related activities from WHO, the UN body has a difficult journey ahead, even with China in its corner.
He had labeled WHO a “puppet of China’ and accused it of being too lenient with China in the earliest days of the pandemic.
The second decision was about Hong Kong
President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to increase tariffs on imports from Hong Kong in order to punish China for bringing the highly controversial National security bill. In perhaps the most significant trade action, Trump said his administration would take steps to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential treatment as a separate customs and travel territory apart from the rest of China.
Hong Kong has long enjoyed exemptions from the stiff US tariffs under the 1992 US-Hong Kong Policy Act. With this decision, Hong Kong’s exports will be exposed to Trump’s heavy tariffs on Chinese goods worth $350 billion alone. This can destroy Hong Kong’s status as a global financial hub. This move is intended to cripple China as tries to usurp the security affairs of the former British colony with the controversial national security bill.
The bill is in clear violation of the Sino-Britain Joint Declaration of 1984.
The third and the most concrete decision taken by Trump is to ban certain Chinese students from studying in America.
Trump has pointed out that China is engaged in a wide‑ranging and heavily resourced campaign to acquire sensitive US technologies and intellectual property through the secret agents who masquerade as students and workers and come here to study and work.
The proclamation prohibits Chinese nationals from using F or J non-immigrant visas to enter the US to engage in graduate study or research if they have been associated with entities that support the Chinese government’s military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy.
Earlier, Senator Tom Cotton had suggested that Chinese students be denied a visa to study science in the country. The decision is not without merit.
In 2018, for example, a chemistry professor at Harvard University was arrested over failure to disclose his close ties with Beijing.
Another Chinese Professor who taught at the University of Texas was charged with stealing state of the art technology from a Silicon Valley firm. He had turned out to be a secret agent for Chinese tech major Huawei, which is blacklisted in the United States over security concerns.
The US Department of Justice had launched China Initiative Campaign in the year 2018 to investigate this issue and according to the FBI, the cases of Chinese intellectual property theft have been piling up and currently, the Federal agency is investigating over 1,000 such cases.
Indeed, with a series of back-to-back decisions, Trump has raised the stakes to fight the battle against increasing Chinese hegemony.