RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-targets-american-business-11616783268?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

In the weeks that surrounded President Biden’s inauguration, Chinese leaders waged an information campaign aimed at the U.S. Their flurry of speeches, letters and announcements was not, as the press first assumed, addressed mainly to the new administration. It was an effort to target the U.S. business community.

The Communist Party’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, spoke to a virtual audience of American business leaders and former government officials in early February. He painted a rosy picture of investment and trade opportunities in China before warning that Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan are “red lines” that Americans would do well to keep quiet about. Mr. Yang excoriated Trump administration policies toward China and was unsubtle in pressing his audience to lobby the Biden administration to reverse them.

General Secretary Xi Jinping, seated before a mural of the Great Wall of China, beamed himself to business elites in Davos, Switzerland, in late January. He urged them to resist efforts by European and American policy makers to “decouple” segments of their economies from China’s. Mr. Xi also wrote a personal letter to a prominent U.S. businessman exhorting him to “make active efforts to promote China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation.”

To make clear that these were requirements, not suggestions, Beijing announced sanctions on nearly 30 current or former U.S. government officials (me among them). These were in addition to the sanctions Beijing placed on American human-rights activists, pro-democracy foundations and some U.S. senators last year.

Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-covid-bill-is-coming-due-11616795722?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Europe’s leaders have told citizens that they’re all in the Covid-19 crisis together. But in the U.K., roughly 40% of the population has received at least one Covid-19 shot. Across the water, only about 13% of the European Union’s citizens have received a jab. In France, that number is closer to 10%.

In Britain, case rates and hospitalizations are falling, and the rate of excess deaths from Covid has reached zero. But in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned of an “exponential” rise in cases. Ms. Merkel floated an Easter lockdown, which she quickly walked back. Italy, where more than one million people over 80 haven’t been vaccinated, has entered another lockdown.

Paris and other major French cities are shut down. Critical-care hospital beds in the Paris region are full, according to Frederic Valletoux, head of France’s hospital network. Mr. Valletoux has reported “exploding” numbers and says that only lockdowns can prevent an “unprecedented violent shock” to France’s healthcare system.

Europe’s third wave will cost thousands of lives and billions of euros. Summer vacationers, essential to the economies of Southern Europe, may have to stay away for a second year. This will increase the gulf in competitiveness and debt between the eurozone’s rich north and poor south. Southern states could require another bailout, a scenario deeply unpopular with German voters, who go to the polls in national elections in September.

Europe’s elected leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Merkel in particular, are responsible for the tragedy of errors that has caused Europe’s vaccine fiasco. They and their parties are starting to pay the political price.

In mid-March regional elections, Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union had its worst-ever showing in two of its historical strongholds. In the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which the CDU ruled for 58 years until 2011, Ms. Merkel’s party won only 23% of the vote. In Rhineland-Palatinate in the West, once the launchpad for the CDU’s Helmut Kohl, the party finished at 26%, far behind the center-left Social Democrats.