Covid reopening and growing concerns about lack of transparency; Marcos meets Xi; Propaganda work
Apologies for the newsletter arriving a bit later than usual, had some technical issues.
Summary of the Essential Eight:
Covid reopening - Still no useful data on cases or deaths, the rollout of TCM treatments is underway, and there have been several recent state media attacks on “Western media” coverage of the chaotic reopening. I will guess that as the real death toll increases those attacks will also increase.
Increasing global concerns about PRC outbreak and lack of transparency - The EU is likely to implement testing requirements for travelers from the PRC, and the WHO Director-General expressed concern with the data coming from the PRC. Once again the PRC government is not being transparent about the scale of the outbreak, but it is hard to be fully transparent, as admitting the scale of the outbreak and numbers of deaths would cause domestic challenges.
Philippine President Marcos meets Xi in Beijing - Marcos would appear to be in a good place, if he can skillfully play the PRC an…