国际诸多病毒学专家都对病毒基因增功能研究（GOF）的危险性提出警告，法国巴士德学院的病毒学家 Simon Wain-Hobson早在2015年广岛原子弹爆炸六十周年纪念日时就提出警告，病毒基因增功能研究很可能在未来造成同样的灾难性的后果。他在疫情爆发之后不久接受法广采访时表示，虽然没有任何证据，但是，他不能排除这种可能性。法国国家科研中心的另一位科学家Bruno Canard也就GOF研究担心的表示：“尽管出发点的善意的，但是，这实在太危险了，因为倘若你成功的制造了一个可以感染人类的病毒，不能排除病毒在不知不觉中从实验室泄露，通过科研人员感染他们的家属，及朋友，一场大流行病就这样爆发了……类似的研究，到自然中去寻找病毒，对它基因进行改动，以便搞清楚它的功能，这就如同用打火机来寻找煤气管道的泄露口一样。”
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden took office promising to move quickly to restore and repair America’s relations with the rest of the world, but one major nation has yet to see any U.S. effort to improve ties: China.
From Iran to Russia, Europe to Latin America, Biden has sought to cool tensions that rose during President Donald Trump’s four years in office. Yet, there have been no overtures to China.
Although the Biden administration has halted the ferocious rhetorical attacks and near daily announcements of new sanctions on China that had become commonplace under Trump, it has yet to back down on any of Trump's actions against Beijing.
This persistent state of low-intensity hostility has profound implications. China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies and the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Their power struggle complicates global efforts to deal with climate change and recover from the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden's tough stance has its roots in the competition for global power, but it's also a result of the 2020 presidential election campaign in which Trump and his allies repeatedly sought to portray him as soft on China, particularly during the pandemic that originated there. There's also little appetite from lawmakers in either party to ease pressure on China.
Thus in their first month in office, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have reaffirmed many of the Trump administration’s most significant steps targeting China, including a determination that its crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in western Xinjiang region constitutes a “genocide” and a flat-out rejection of nearly all of China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Nor has the new administration signaled any let-up in Trump's tariffs, restrictions on Chinese diplomats, journalists and academics in the U.S. or criticism of Chinese policies toward Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It's also critical of Beijing's attempts to further its increasing global influence through telecommunications technology, social media and educational and cultural exchanges.
Biden's nominee to head the CIA, William Burns, was explicit about his concerns over many of these issues at his confirmation hearing Wednesday. And, the newly confirmed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made a point of highlighting her unease with the state of affairs and pledged to combat Chinese attempts to exert undue pressure on other countries at the U.N.
The backdrop is clear: The United States is convinced that it and China are engaged in a duel for global dominance. And neither is prepared to back down.
China has sounded at times hopeful that Biden will reverse what foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said were Trump administration actions that “caused immeasurable damage to the relationship between the two countries.”
Those remarks followed a speech in which China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, demanded that Biden’s administration lift restrictions on trade and people-to-people contacts and cease what Beijing considers unwarranted interference in the areas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Wang urged the U.S. to “stop smearing” the reputation of China’s ruling Communist Party. “We hope that the U.S. policy makers will keep pace with the times, see clearly the trend of the world, abandon biases, give up unwarranted suspicions and move to bring the China policy back to reason to ensure a healthy, steady development of China-U.S. relations,” he said.
But the anti-China rhetoric hasn't eased. Top Biden administration officials have vowed to use American power to contain what many Democrats and Republicans see as growing Chinese threats to U.S. interests and values in the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
They have all repeatedly referred to China as a strategic rival or foe, not a partner or potential friend, and have also evinced their belief that America must “outcompete” China.
“Outcompeting China will be key to our national security in the decades ahead,” Burns said at his confirmation hearing. “China is a formidable authoritarian adversary, methodically strengthening its capabilities to steal intellectual property, repress its own people, bully its neighbors, expand its global reach, and build influence in American society.”
“It is hard for me to see a more significant threat or challenge for the United States as far out as I can see into the 21st century than that one. It is the biggest geopolitical test that we face,” he said.
At least some Asia hands in the United States see Biden as moving slowly toward potential reengagement with China in part because he wants to shore up his domestic position and make clear the U.S. is not a victim of Chinese predation.
“They are restraining themselves from the normal syndrome of a new administration running into problem-solving with China,” said Danny Russel, who was assistant secretary of state for Asia during the Obama administration and is now vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Russel said Biden is "sending out messages that have the effect of showing he’s not soft on China, that he’s not a patsy for China, that he isn’t so desperate for a breakthrough on climate change that he’s going to trade away our national security interests.”
Chinese academics see little difference in Biden’s approach.
“Continuity takes precedent over adjustment and change,” said Zhu Feng, professor of international relations at elite Nanjing University.
Biden will have to deal with a China that is far more powerful and influential than under past U.S. administrations, said Yu Wanli, a professor of international relations at Beijing Language and Culture University.
“There has been huge deviation between what they believe China is and what China really is,” Yu said. “Their China polices are based on illusions, which must result in some bad consequences. It takes time for them to come back to reality.”
Apart from its support for Taiwan, the U.S. views China’s policies in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and elsewhere as matters of human rights, whereas China sees them as questions of sovereignty, Yu said. “Frictions will still exist, and the pattern will still be the same.”
No speech from a foreign visitor ever created a greater uproar than that delivered by Winston Churchill at an obscure Midwestern college just months after the end of the Second World War. As it turned out, no speech proved more prophetic about the deadliest assault on human freedom in the history of world civilization.
Many expected Churchill’s talk at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946 — modestly titled “The Sinews of Peace” — to reflect on the defeat of fascism by the three great wartime allies, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a message of foreboding. A new crisis moment for Europe, and for the world, had arrived: a struggle between communism and the democratic West. “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” Churchill warned. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Left-leaning historians blame Churchill’s address as the catalyst for the Cold War. Eleanor Roosevelt, carrying on the political legacy of her dead husband, was aghast, fearing that Churchill’s message would compromise the peacekeeping mission of the newly created United Nations. The liberal press denounced the talk as “poisonous” and Churchill as a “warmonger.”
A truly noxious speech, however, had been delivered by Joseph Stalin just a few weeks earlier to Communist Party apparatchiks in Moscow. Largely forgotten today, it did about as much to expose the unbridgeable divide between East and West as Churchill’s peroration.
“It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally,” Stalin began. “As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.” Thus, Stalin repeated Marx’s assault on capitalism for distributing resources unequally. He parroted Lenin’s claim that greedy capitalist states inevitably went to war with one another. Peace was possible, he suggested, but only after communism had triumphed around the globe. The message was clear: The historic contest between socialism and democratic capitalism was at a high-water mark.
Stalin’s address was a tissue of lies and omissions. He portrayed the Soviet Union as the fierce opponent of fascist rule in Europe. In fact, Stalin made a secret pact with Hitler’s Germany to divide up the continent among themselves. The agreement allowed the Soviet Union to invade and occupy eastern Poland in 1939 as Hitler invaded from the west, triggering the Second World War. For 22 months, in fact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies; Germany sold weapons to the USSR and the USSR sold grain and oil to Germany.
Stalin also assured his audience that the policy of collectivized agriculture was “an exceedingly progressive method” to modernize the Soviet economy. In reality, the forced collectivization of private farms, begun in 1928, created a human catastrophe. Many peasants fought to hold onto their plots of land: five million were deported and never heard from again. The government seized their grain, and the result was a man-made famine. By 1934, upwards of 13 million Soviet citizens died unnatural deaths — from mass murder and starvation — because of Stalin’s communist vision.
Ironically, Stalin spoke the truth when he boasted that “no skeptic now dares to express doubt concerning the viability of the Soviet social system.” At least 700,000 “skeptics” — anyone even mildly critical of Marshal Stalin — were murdered during the “Great Purge” of 1936–38. The secret police, show trials, assassinations, torture, prison camps, ethnic cleansing: Virtually no tool of terror was left untried to silence dissent.
All these facts informed Churchill’s assessment of the Soviet Union. But the most alarming truth about Stalin’s Russia was its forcible absorption of Eastern Europe into the communist fold. For months, Churchill had watched with growing apprehension as Stalin violated the agreements he made with the Allies at their 1945 Yalta Conference, promising free and democratic elections in Eastern Europe. Communist fifth columns were now at work, wholly obedient to Moscow.
“The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control,” Churchill said. “Whatever conclusion may be drawn from these facts — and facts they are — this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up.”
Every description Churchill offered of Soviet designs over Europe proved entirely accurate. His judgment of communism as “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” was being validated in every state that fell under its malign influence.
Indeed, America’s most important diplomat in Moscow had reached the same conclusions at almost precisely the same moment. George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” arguing for a policy of “firm containment” against the Soviet Union, arrived at the State Department just days before Churchill arrived in Fulton. “It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime,” Kennan wrote. “It must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s delusional portrait of Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” a cheerful partner in building a global democratic community, was dead in the water. Nevertheless, it is difficult, from our historical distance, to grasp the feeling of dread that Churchill’s words must have caused in a war-weary population. He clearly sensed the enormous task he was asking his American audience to embrace: to engage its economic, military, and moral resources to check Soviet ambitions in Europe and beyond. “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war,” he said. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.”
The United States, he suggested, must not make the mistake it made after the First World War, when it abandoned the League of Nations and left Europe to its fate. It must help ensure that the United Nations will become an effective force for peace and security, “and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” Most importantly, though, Churchill called for a “special relationship” between America and Great Britain: the sharing of military intelligence, mutual-defense agreements, and strategic cooperation to support and promote democracy.
Their common democratic ideals, he explained, were the basis for a unique partnership to thwart the despotic aims of Soviet communism:
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. . . . Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind.
Critics denounced this language as rank chauvinism and cultural imperialism. Legendary columnist Walter Lippmann called the speech an “almost catastrophic blunder.” In an interview with Pravda, dutifully transcribed in the New York Times, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler: “Mr. Churchill, too, has begun the task of unleashing war with a racial theory, stating that only nations that speak the English language are . . . called upon to rule the destinies of the whole world.”
Any frank assessment of how the Cold War ended, however, would admit the decisive role played by the United States and the United Kingdom, over the course of four decades, in resisting Soviet aggression. The Berlin airlift, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the defense of Western Europe, the support for the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet empire — in each case the “special relationship” between America and Great Britain tipped the scales toward freedom.
In a remarkable moment of candor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, endorsed the central message of Churchill’s speech in his farewell address on Christmas Day, 1991. The Cold War, “the totalitarian system,” “the mad militarization” that “crippled our economy, public attitudes and morals” — it all had come to an end, and there was no turning back. “I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements which have been attained in the last few years,” he said. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned, whatever the circumstances, and whatever the pretexts.”
Seventy-five years ago, Churchill dared to imagine such an outcome. But it depended upon these two great democratic allies, Great Britain and the United States, sharing a “faith in each other’s purpose, hope in each other’s future, and charity towards each other’s shortcomings.” And, with history as a guide, such an outcome would not arrive without a supreme effort of national will. “If all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association,” he said, “the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.”
Joseph Loconte is the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and is working on a book about Winston Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Nile Gardiner is the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
Jamie Metzl : 我建议调查可以以以下三种方式进行：明确制定一个科学的病毒源头调查所必须遵循的步骤，这完全又可能在世卫组织的框架之下进行。倘若真如 Peter Ben Embarek 所言世卫组织无力负责调查工作，那就必须组建一个民主国家的联合调查，不仅对病毒的源头进行调查，而且还必须对应对疫情等多个方面的情况展开调查。最后，美国民主与共和应该效仿当年911事件之后组建两党调查委员会，其目的并不是追究某一个人的责任，而是为了使未来更加安全。
Jérémie André: 您对Peter Ben Embarek 提出的将案件递交给联合国处理的建议有何评论？
