In 165 countries, China's Beidou eclipses American GPS

[xizhimen]

In 165 countries, China's Beidou eclipses American GPS
Beijing extends its data reach into space and sea

TORU TSUNASHIMA, Nikkei staff writer
November 25, 2020 06:26 JST

TOKYO -- In the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a bustling and chaotic city of 4.8 million, the Deliver Addis service has soared in popularity as the app sends food to a customer's location with remarkable accuracy.

The secret behind this precision is Chinese satellite technology originally designed to support the military.

The app's meteoric growth is powered in part by the Beidou satellite navigation system, for which recent advances underscore Beijing's gains in the global fight for data dominance.

Miyuki Koga, the proprietor of a Japanese restaurant in the African metropolis, notes that "smartphone positioning information has improved by leaps and bounds" since Koga moved here 13 years ago. "We can even manage deliveries in the coronavirus pandemic."

The U.S. was in the vanguard of this technology, launching the first satellite that now makes up the Global Positioning System way back in 1978. But GPS, long the only game in town, is being eclipsed by Beidou.

China completed Beidou in June after development began in 1994. Beijing's aims are more than economic.

Data from U.S. satellite receiver company Trimble shows that capital cities for 165 of 195 major countries -- or 85% of those capitals -- are observed more frequently by Beidou satellites than by GPS, Nikkei found.

As many as 30 Beidou satellites transmit continuous signals to Addis Ababa, twice as many as in the U.S. system. Much of this is due to connections with inexpensive smartphones from China.

GPS originally was built for military applications including missile guidance and tracking troop positions. By developing satellite technology that rivals the American system, Beijing can enhance its own military capabilities and pose a threat to Washington.

For most of the half-century since the beginnings of the internet, the U.S. represented the undisputed driving force in cyberspace. But the dynamics of this fast-growing field are shifting rapidly.

And the fight for data dominance is being waged not just in orbit far above the Earth, but also on the oceans.

In May, concerns arose after a Chinese government research vessel, the Xiang Yang Hong 01, appeared suddenly off the northeastern coast of the U.S. territory of Guam deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and began engaging in suspicious behavior.


Though Beijing has repeatedly raised tensions in the South China Sea, where it claims sovereignty over a vast majority of the region, and in East China Sea waters where it has butted heads with Japan, the Guam incident was a new development.

"China's attention has turned to interests in the Pacific Ocean," said Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo.

Nikkei examined the activities of 34 Chinese government ships via the website MarineTraffic, which tracks vessel movements worldwide based on public data from automatic identification systems.

The tracked voyages of the Xiang Yang Hong 01 show journeys near the U.S. holdings of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands made in a systematic pattern. Guam hosts an American military base.

Trips were made to the Indian Ocean via the strategic chokehold of the Strait of Malacca.

"This route overlaps with the Belt and Road economic zone advocated by China," said Koichi Sato, a professor at J.F. Oberlin University.

Thirteen of these ships sailed in the Pacific beyond the "first island chain" -- archipelagos off the East Asian coast encompassing Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines -- in the year through Nov. 4. One Chinese vessel stayed near Antarctica for around three and a half months.

Ships ostensibly tasked with surveying offshore resources may be covertly collecting data for military use, such as mapping out future submarine routes. China's military reportedly is intensifying submarine operations, and information on ocean currents and seafloor geography is key to this goal.

In an era when all technology has been enlisted into information warfare, China is looking a step ahead to new theaters of competition: space, cyber and even what has been called "brain supremacy."

In 165 countries, China's Beidou eclipses American GPS

Beijing extends its data reach into space and sea

asia.nikkei.com

 

[johnq]

https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_government_fabricates_social_media_posts_for_strategic_distraction_not_engaged_argument.pdf

How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument

Here are some things Chinese space program is being used to distract from:
China's 'vocational training centers': Eyewitness reports torture and rape in Xinjiang’s camps
In an eye-witness account of the horrors of China's re-education camps, Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh woman, shares her story how she was imprisoned like other Muslim minorities in camps, China calls "vocational training centers". Her crime - being a Muslim minority in China's north-west. The story of these camps in China's Xinjiang province has become clearer over the course of the last years. Set-up ostensibly, according to the Chinese government, to offer voluntary education and training, they house at least a million Uighur, Kazakh and other ethnic Muslim minorities. All, being 'de-radicalised' as part of China's measures to counter terrorism.
Tibet: China expands labour camps | Mandatory vocational training centres set up
Tibet: China expands labour camps | Mandatory vocational training centres set up China is pushing hundreds and thousands of rural Tibetans into forced labour camps, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region. Watch report.
The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Tibet/Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
Why We Protest: Hong Kong
On June 30, 2020, China imposed a national security law in Hong Kong that criminalizes secession, terrorism, and collusion with foreign powers. The law was seen as a direct threat to freedom of speech and people's right to protect against the Chinese government. VICE was with a group of protesters on June 30th as they prepare for the next day's protest and the impact the new security law might have.

IS COVID-19 AN ‘UNRESTRICTED BIOWEAPON’?
Li-Meng Yan, A Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who worked in a WHO reference lab and fled her position at the University of Hong Kong, has published a second co-authored report, alleging that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was not only created in a Wuhan lab, it’s an “unrestricted bioweapon” which was intentionally released.
BY TYLER DURDEN FOR ZERO HEDGE

“We used biological evidence and in-depth analyses to show that SARS-CoV-2 must be a laboratory product, which was created by using a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government,” reads the paper.

SARS-CoV2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV 2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.
The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health. As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both tot he reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.

The report also claims that the RaTG13 virus which Wuhan “Batwoman” Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues say they obtained in bat feces in 2013 (and which is 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2), is fraudulent and also man made.

Since its publication, the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 must have a natural origin. However, no live virus or an intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been isolated or recovered. Therefore, the only proof for the “existence” of RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank.

The report goes on to say that the RaTG13 genome could easily be fabricated, and that “an entry on GenBank, which in this case is equivalent to the existence of an assembled viral genomic sequence and its associated sequencing reads, is not a definitive proof that this viral genome is correct or real,” and that the process for sequencing DNA itself “leaves room for potential fraud.”

If one intends to fabricate an RNA viral genome on GenBank, he or she could do so by following these steps: create its genomic sequence on a computer, have segments of the genome synthesized based on the sequence, amplify each DNA segment through PCR, and then send the PCR products (may also be mixed with genetic material derived from the alleged host of the virus to mimic an authentic sequencing sample) for sequencing.The resulted raw sequencing reads would be used, together with the created genomic sequence, for establishing an entry on GenBank. Once accomplished, this entry would be accepted as the evidence for the natural existence of the corresponding virus. Clearly, a viral genomic sequence and its GenBank entry can be fabricated if well-planned.



RaTG13 has ‘multiple abnormal features,’ according to the report. For starters, it’s claimed that it was a fecal sample – yet just 1.7% of the raw sequencing reads are bacterial, when fecal swab samples are typically 70-90% bacterial. Second, the genomic sequence for RaTG13 contains segments of non-bat origin, including fox, flying fox, squirrels and other animals.

What’s more, China destroyed all evidence of RaTG13. “No independent verification of the RaTG13 sequence seems possible because, according to Dr. Zhengli Shi,the raw sample has been exhausted and no live virus was ever isolated or recovered. Notably, this information was known to a core circle of virologists early on and apparently accepted by them.”

Meanwhile, another coronavirus which shares a ‘100% nucleotide sequence identity with RaTG13’ – RaBtCoV/4991 – on a ‘short, 440-bp RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene segment.’

RaBtCoV/4991 was allegedly discovered by Shi and colleagues in 2012 and published in 2016, and colleagues have been asking if it’s the same virus as RaTG13.

Given the 100% identity on this short gene segment between RaBtCoV/4991 and RaTG13,the field has demanded clarification of whether or not these two names refer to the same virus. However,Dr. Shi did not respond to the requestor address this question for months. The answer finally came from Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and long-term collaborator of Shi, who claimed that RaBtCoV/4991 was RaTG1327.

Three suspicious facts

First, it makes no sense that ‘Batwoman’ Shi and her team wouldn’t have conducted whole genome sequencing of RaBtCoV/4991 before 2020, as it was suspected in the deaths of miners who suffered from severe pneumonia after clearing out bat droppings in a Chinese mineshaft.

Given the Shi group’s consistent interests in studying SARS-like bat coronaviruses and the fact that RaBtCoV/4991 is a SARS-like coronavirus with a possible connection to the deaths of the miners, it is highly unlikely that the Shi group would be content with sequencing only a 440-bp segment of RdRpand not pursue the sequencing of the receptor-binding motif (RBM)-encoding region of the spike gene. In fact, sequencing of the spike gene is routinely attempted by the Shi group once the presence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus is confirmed by the sequencing of the 440-bp RdRpsegment25,32, although the success of such efforts is often hindered by the poor quality of the sample.

“Clearly, the perceivable motivation of the Shi group to study this RaBtCoV/4991 virus and the fact that no genome sequencing of it was done for a period of seven years (2013-2020) are hard to reconcile and explain.”

Meanwhile, genomic sequencing of RaTG13 was conducted in 2018.

Second, why did Shi delay publication on RaTG13 until 2020 when it’s got a Spike protein that can bind with human ACE2 receptors?

…if the genomic sequence of RaTG13 had been available since 2018, it is unlikely that this virus, which has a possible connection to miners’ deaths in 2012 and has an alarming SARS-like RBM, would be shelfed for two years without publication. Consistent with this analysis, a recent study indeed proved that the RBD of RaTG13(produced via gene synthesis based on its published sequence) was capable of binding hACE2

Third, there has been no follow-up work on RaTG13 by Shi’s group.

Upon obtaining the genomic sequence of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, the Shi group routinely investigate whether or not the virus is capable of infecting human cells. This pattern of research activities has been shown repeatedly. However, such a pattern is not seen here despite that RaTG13 has an interesting RBM and is allegedly the closest match evolutionarily to SARS-CoV-2

Direct genetic evidence proving RaTG13 is fraudulent

Yan’s group closely examined the sequences of specific spike proteins for relevant viruses – specifically comparing mutations, and found that the spike genes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 do not contain evidence of natural evolution when compared to other coronaviruses which naturally evolved.

A logical interpretation of this observation is that SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 could not relate to each other through natural evolution and at least one must be artificial.If one is a product of natural evolution, then the other one must be not. It is also possible that neither of them exists naturally. If RaTG13 is a real virus that truly exists in nature, then SARS-CoV-2 must be artificial.

More:

It is highly likely that the sequence of the RaTG13 genome was fabricated by lightly modifying the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to achieve an overall 96.2% sequence identity. During this process, much editing must have been done for the RBM region of the S1/spike because the encoded RBM determines the interaction with ACE2 and therefore would be heavily scrutinized by others.

The paper concludes: All fabricated coronaviruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with ZC45 and ZXC21

Evidence herein clearly indicates that the novel coronaviruses recently published by the CCP-controlled laboratories are all fraudulent and do not exist in nature. One final proof of this conclusion is the fact that all of these viruses share a 100% amino acid sequence identity on the E protein with bat coronaviruses ZC45 and ZXC21, which, as revealed in our earlier report1, should be the template/backbone used for the creation of SARS-CoV-2. Despite its conserved function in the viral replication cycle, the E protein is tolerant and permissive of amino acid mutations. It is therefore impossible for the amino acid sequence of the E protein to remain unchanged when the virus has allegedly crossed species barrier multiple times (between different bat species, from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans). The 100% identity observed here, therefore, further proves that the sequences of these recently published novel coronaviruses have been fabricated.

Unrestricted bioweapon?

Yan notes that while it’s not easy for the public to accept that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon due to its relatively low lethality, it indeed meets the criteria of a bioweapon.

In 2005, Dr. Yang specified the criteria for a pathogen to qualify as a bioweapon:

1. It is significantly virulent and can cause large scale casualty.
2. It is highly contagious and transmits easily, often through respiratory routes in the form of aerosols. The most dangerous scenario would be that it allows human-to-human transmission.
3. It is relatively resistant to environmental changes, can sustain transportation, and is capable of supporting targeted release.

All of the above have been met bySARS-CoV-2: it has taken hundreds of thousands lives, led to numerous hospitalizations, and left many with sequela and various complications; it spreads easily by contact, droplets, and aerosols via respiratory routes and is capable of transmitting from human to human, the latter of which was initially covered up by the CCP government and the WHO and was first revealed by Dr. Li-Meng Yan on January 19th, 2020 on Lude Press; it is temperature-insensitive (unlike seasonal flu) and remains viable for a long period of time on many surfaces and at 4°C (e.g. the ice/water mixture).



What’s more, COVID-19 spreads asymptomatically, which “renders the control of SARS-CoV-2 extremely challenging.”

“In addition, the transmissibility, morbidity, and mortality of SARS-CoV-2 also resulted in panic in the global community, disruption of social orders, and decimation of the world’s economy. The range and destructive power of SARS-CoV-2 are both unprecedented.”

“Clearly,SARS-CoV-2 not only meets but also surpasses the standards of a traditional bioweapon. Therefore, it should be defined as an Unrestricted Bioweapon.”

From: https://changingtimes.media/2020/10/12/sars-cov-2-lab-origin-hypothesis-gains-traction/
SARS-CoV-2: lab-origin hypothesis gains traction

“On January 21, President Xi Jinping asked the director-general of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, to withhold information about person-to-person transmission of the virus, as well as pandemic classification. Likely as a consequence, pandemic classification of the virus was delayed four to six weeks.”

The scientific evidence shown in this and previous posted articles is further proof that Covid-19 virus is a result of lab modification by Wuhan Institute of Virology of viruses owned by the Chinese Communist Party funded People's Liberation Army (PLA) laboratories. The fact that Xi Jinping hid person-to-person transmission of the virus from the world for six weeks while allowing international travel from Wuhan is proof that Xi Jinping and Chinese Communist Party intentionally spread the Covid-19 virus to other countries. The Covid-19 virus was created as a bioweapon through modification/combination of viruses in Chinese Communist Party funded PLA laboratories, and then intentionally leaked from Wuhan Virology Institute in Wuhan as a bio-weapon. The knowledge about the virus was then suppressed as it was allowed to spread to the rest of the world intentionally using the Chinese people as carriers. This should not be surprising as the Chinese leadership does not care about common Chinese people. The Chinese leadership also stocked up on PPE (masks, etc) and antiviral medications ahead of time, so they were well-prepared. And since they were the ones who spread the virus, they knew where to lock down (Wuhan) as well as where to trace the cases within China. Yet they intentionally allowed the virus to spread throughout the world. At the behest of the CCP, the WHO gave the advise not to wear a mask to other countries, even as the Chinese people were required to wear masks to stop the outbreak; masks which the Chinese government had stocked up on while lying to the world that there is no person to person transmission. This also eventually led to shortages of masks around the world, helping the virus to spread. Chinese Covid-19 virus detection tests sold to other countries also did not work, and this also contributed to the pandemic increase.