VOA Mandarin White House Correspondent Paris Huang speaks with John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, on U.S.-China relations, as well as the latest developments in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Camera – David Krupin, Mino Dargakis
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Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch.

More Than 22,000 Dead in Earthquakes 

Two devastating earthquakes, one a 7.8 magnitude and the other a 7.5 magnitude, struck parts of Turkey and Syria in the early hours of Monday, as many families slept. The tremors were felt in the region and as far away as Greenland. Four days after the earthquakes, hope was fading for finding many survivors. The United Nations was focused on the relief response, particularly to Syria, where millions in the war-torn country were already in need before the disaster. 

First UN Aid Convoy Reaches Quake-hit Northern Syria 

Guterres Bleak on State of World

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday that the world needed to wake up and take urgent action to change the trajectory of conflicts and geopolitical divisions, the climate crisis and economic inequality. He told the General Assembly, “We need a course correction,” as he laid out his priorities for the year. 

UN Chief: World Needs ‘Wake-Up Call’

Somalia Still at Risk of Famine

The U.N. resident coordinator for Somalia said there was still a “strong possibility” of famine in Somalia this year if the spring rains underperformed. The organization appealed for $2.6 billion this year to assist 7.6 million of the most vulnerable Somalis who are facing acute hunger from conflict, high food prices and unprecedented drought.

UN Appeals for $2.6 Billion to Ease Hunger Crisis in Somalia 

US Antisemitism Campaign Comes to UN

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff urged the international community Thursday to speak out against antisemitism and called out those who do not, saying silence is not an option. “This moment requires bold collective action and urgency, not just concepts,” Emhoff, the husband of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, told a gathering at the United Nations.

US Second Gentleman Calls for ‘Bold Collective Action’ to Curb Antisemitism 

In Brief

—  U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said 17.6 million people needed humanitarian assistance in Ukraine — nearly 40% of the population. Griffiths told the Security Council on Monday that the U.N. and its agencies had provided 15.8 million people with assistance, including more than 1.3 million people in areas outside Kyiv’s control. But he called for better and more frequent access, especially to areas under Russia’s military control, where he said it had become increasingly unpredictable and impeded.

— The U.N. children’s agency estimated that 1 million children were out of school in Haiti because of social unrest, insecurity, the high costs of education and lack of educational services. UNICEF said Thursday that armed violence against schools, including shooting, ransacking, looting and kidnappings, was nine times higher than in the past year. Gangs control more than a third of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are terrorizing the population. In October, the government requested that the U.N. Security Council authorize the immediate deployment of an international specialized armed force to help stop the armed groups, but the raising of the troops and leadership for the mission has been slow. Haiti’s gangs are seeking to exploit the political vacuum left by the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

— The World Health Organization said Thursday that Africa was witnessing a rapid rise in cholera as cases surge globally. They noted that cases recorded on the continent in January alone had already risen by more than 30% of the total cases in 2022. WHO said an estimated 26,000 cases and 660 deaths had been reported as of the end of January in 10 countries.

—  On Sunday, a helicopter that was part of the peacekeeping mission in eastern DR Congo was shot down while traveling in North Kivu province. One South African peacekeeper was killed, and another was severely injured. The crew managed to land the helicopter in Goma. The incident was under investigation.

— The U.N. condemned last weekend’s decision by Mali’s junta to declare the U.N. human rights representative, Guillaume Ngefa, persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country within 48 hours. A U.N. spokesperson said the doctrine of “persona non grata” was not applicable to U.N. personnel and Mali’s move violated its obligations under the U.N. Charter regarding the privileges and immunities of the U.N. and its personnel.

Quote of Note

“It’s a crisis on top of a crisis.” – U.N. resident coordinator for Syria El-Mostafa Benlamlih, briefing reporters on Wednesday, speaking of the 10.9 million Syrians affected by Monday’s earthquakes in a country where 15.3 million already needed humanitarian assistance because of more than a decade of civil war.

Next Week

As the devastation from Monday’s earthquakes becomes clearer, the U.N. will be focused on working to gain access to victims in parts of Syria beyond government control. If the Damascus government refuses, the Security Council will likely take up the issue. 
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South Africa hosted the world’s biggest mining investment conference this week, with industry experts in attendance saying the U.S. and China are in a race for the critical minerals — such as cobalt and lithium — that will likely power the projected transition to clean energy.

African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo have some of the largest deposits of these resources, but China currently dominates the supply chain as well as their refinement and the U.S. wants to reduce its reliance on the Asian giant.

In his remarks at the mining conference in Cape Town this week, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jose Fernandez hinted at this saying, “I don’t need to remind you of what happens when the supply chain breaks down or when we depend on a single supplier. We lived it during the COVID pandemic, and this is a vulnerability that we need to solve together.”

Fernandez — who did not mention China by name — noted that electric vehicles are expected to command half the global market by 2030 and that demand for lithium is expected to increase 42-fold by 2040. China is responsible for some 80 percent of the world’s lithium refining.

Tony Carroll, the director of Acorus Capital and an international adviser to the conference known as the Africa Mining Indaba, told VOA the session came at a critical time for the West.

The Chinese made it a “priority to corner the market for critical minerals about two decades ago and supported that strategy with massive public diplomacy and infrastructure investments into Africa — most of which [came] via long-term debt. The West woke up to this strategy too late and have been scrambling ever since,” he said.

Rare earth minerals are essential for electric vehicle production and expanding the production of green technologies. However, their extraction can come at an environmental or social cost to African countries that have big deposits.

Fernandez echoed remarks made by Pope Francis on his recent trip to Congo denouncing “economic colonialism” in Africa, which could be seen as a swipe at Beijing. He also assured African countries the United States would respect “environmental, social, and governance standards.”

“While late to the game, the U.S. has awakened with more ambition in mining and processing and building alliances with like-minded partners,” said Carroll, who is also an adjunct professor in the African studies program at Johns Hopkins University.

A first-time sponsor of the Mining Indaba this year was Chinese company Zijin, one of the largest mining groups in the world with interests in lithium, copper and other metals.

Asked for comment by VOA on whether China is now in a race for rare earth metals with the U.S., as well as other questions about Chinese mining interests in Africa, the PR manager of South Africa Zijin Platinum said the CEO was unable to respond before the deadline for this article.

African governments are now trying to get the best deals for their people. Namibia’s Mines Minister Tom Alweendo told Reuters at the Cape Town conference that his country is insisting that all lithium mined in Namibia has to be processed in the country.

Similarly, DRC President Felix Tshisekedi, who was one of the key speakers at the mining conference, has been demanding better terms from China for several years. China sources the majority of its cobalt from DRC, which produces some 70 percent of the world’s total.

Despite its vast mineral resources, Congo is one of the world’s least developed countries and Tshisekedi said in January it hadn’t benefited from a $6.2 billion minerals-for-infrastructure contract with China signed by his predecessor.

“The Chinese, they’ve made a lot of money and made a lot of profit from this contract,” Tshisekedi told Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The Democratic Republic of Congo has derived no benefit from it. There’s nothing tangible, no positive impact, I’d say, for our population.”

“Now our need is simply to re-balance things in a way that it becomes win-win,” he added.

There are signs Tshisekedi could be moving toward the West.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden organized the Minerals Security Partnership last year as a way of diversifying supply chains. Partners include Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Union. At its first meeting last year, the DRC was one of the non-partner nations in attendance.

Then at Biden’s U.S.-Africa Summit in December, the DRC and Zambia inked a deal with the U.S. to jointly develop the supply chain for electric vehicle batteries.

“Dependency on China for rare earths is viewed with alarm,” said Jay Truesdale, CEO of the risk advisory firm Veracity Worldwide, and a speaker at the Indaba. “Given that Beijing has the means to severely restrict access to these minerals, in the event of a geopolitical crisis it could choose to use its market dominance to cripple non-Chinese manufacturers in such sectors as electronics, automotive manufacturing, aerospace, and renewable energy.”

Besides the rising tensions between China and the West in Africa, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will also force mining companies to make hard decisions, Truesdale said.

“The war in Ukraine has placed greater scrutiny on Russian mining activities across the continent. Russia benefits from a lack of transparency and weak governance where its mining companies operate. African governments are now more closely observing how Moscow trades promises of greater security for deeper access to mineral resources and the state capture that can result,” he told VOA.
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Some American myths go all the way back to the nation’s founding. Like the one where, as a young boy, America’s first president, George Washington, felt compelled to tell the truth about taking a hatchet to his father’s cherry tree because he could not tell a lie.

“There are plenty of lies that are kind of white lies that have a positive spin,” says Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University. “And what’s the harm there? It teaches children the value of honesty.”

The real harm comes, Kruse says, when lies or myths impact U.S. government policy. Kruse and fellow Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer put together a collection of essays for their book, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.”

In the anthology, 20 mainly liberal historians take on what they see as conservative distortions of the history behind hot-button issues like border security, voter fraud, police brutality and the backlash against civil rights protests in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, a Black man.

Glenda Gilmore of Yale University writes that a sanitized, somewhat one-dimensional image of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, leader of “good protests,” obscures his relevance to the Black Lives Matter protesters who took to the streets in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.

“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was much more searing in his denunciations of capitalism [and] militarism,” Kruse says. “King has been shorn of all that controversy and complications, reduced to this non-offensive figure who simply stood up and said, ‘Well, racism is bad and everyone agrees.’

“As a result, that seals him off from any connection to the present. That example of the good civil rights protest is constantly held up in contrast to bad civil rights protests to shame people involved in Black Lives Matter for not being like King when, in fact, they’re actually a lot like King.”

Northwestern University historian Geraldo Cadava writes that Americans who are worried about policing the southern border with Mexico have “displaced anxieties about imperial and national decline, economic fragility, and demographic change.”

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor of history at The New School, challenges the notion that feminism embraces anti-family values by exploring how feminists have historically defended the traditional family.

Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California, Davis, has studied the New Deal, a series of programs, financial reforms and regulations signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to help America recover from the Great Depression. In the book, Rauchway challenges the assertion of some conservative politicians that the New Deal was ineffective.

“If we believe, wrongly, that the New Deal was a failure, that discourages us from any kind of economic action along that line. You constantly see historical tropes trotted out in ways that close off options. Our sense of what happened in the past deepens our understanding of what is possible in the future,” Kruse says.

“If we firmly believe that this kind of approach failed, or this got us nowhere, we’re much less likely to try it again. So we need to understand where we’ve been if we want to understand where we’re going to go.”

The book and its assertions have been dismissed by some conservatives who say the “highly partisan” analyses are hobbled by “leftist myths.”

An essay in the National Review suggests, “The book does not debunk any myths; it merely promulgates different, radically progressive ones.”

Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Michael J. Douma maintains that history is an ongoing discussion that historians often don’t agree on.

“When you see your opponents’ views as all lies, myths, and legends, it might say more about the way you engage your opposition than the content of their arguments,” writes Douma, who is an associate research professor at Georgetown University.

Kruse counters such criticism by asserting that he and his co-contributors are responding to the moment.

“I understand we live in an era in which there’s going to be a kind of a reflexive desire to create an equivalence on both sides right now.” Kruse says. “No. The real challenges to American history are coming from the right and so that’s where we directed our attention.”
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SpaceX is a big step closer to sending its giant Starship spacecraft into orbit, completing an engine-firing test at the launch pad on Thursday.

Thirty-one of the 33 first-stage booster engines ignited simultaneously for about 10 seconds in south Texas. The team turned off one engine before sending the firing command and another engine shut down _ “but still enough engines to reach orbit!” tweeted SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

Musk estimates Starship’s first orbital test flight could occur as soon as March, if the test analyses and remaining preparations go well.

The booster remained anchored to the pad as planned during the test. There were no signs of major damage to the launch tower.

NASA is counting on Starship to ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon in a few years, linking up with its Orion capsule in lunar orbit. Further down the road, Musk wants to use the mammoth Starships to send crowds to Mars.

Only the first-stage Super Heavy booster, standing 230 feet (69 meters) tall, was used for Thursday’s test. The futuristic second stage _ the part that will actually land on the moon and Mars _ was in the hangar being prepped for flight.

Altogether, Starship towers 394 feet (120 meters), making it the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It’s capable of generating 17 million pounds of liftoff thrust, almost double that of NASA’s moon rocket that sent an empty capsule to the moon and back late last year.

SpaceX fired up to 14 Starship engines last fall and completed a fueling test at the pad last month.

Flocks of birds scattered as Starship’s engines came alive and sent thick dark plumes of smoke across the Starship launch complex, dubbed Starbase. It’s located at the southernmost tip of Texas near the village of Boca Chica, close to the Mexican border.
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US President Joe Biden celebrated his economic record this week during the annual State of the Union address. While US unemployment statistics are on the upswing, economists say there are clear economic challenges. Keith Kocinski reports.
Camera: Keith Kocinski and Rendy Wicaksana
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Deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing have done little to disrupt a multimillion-dollar lobbying and influence campaign in the United States by one of China’s biggest companies, Alibaba Group, according to figures provided by a U.S. monitoring organization.

Publicly available information accumulated by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows the Chinese e-commerce giant spent more than $2.5 million on U.S. lobbying last year, down from about $3 million in 2021 and a peak of more than $3.1 million in 2020 – a presidential election year.

The available data show the company also spends millions of dollars on political donations to members of the U.S. Congress and various government departments with responsibilities in the areas of U.S.-China trade, finance and technology.

Alibaba, whose diverse range of business interests includes e-commerce, technology, electronic payment services and cloud computing, is ranked as the world’s 29th-largest corporation with a market capitalization of $281.8 billion.

Ten of the 39 issues Alibaba lobbied on in 2022 were related to trade, while another eight were related to copyrights, patents and trademarks, according to the OpenSecrets analysis.

Mercury lobbyists

Public information shows that Mercury, a lobbying firm, lobbied the White House repeatedly on behalf of Alibaba on technology policy issues, access to U.S. capital markets, issues related to e-commerce, and small- and medium-sized enterprise export promotion.

Each campaign year, Alibaba donates to a large number of candidates through lobbyists, according to OpenSecrets. Since the 2014 midterm elections, Alibaba has generally skewed toward the Democratic Party.

Most of the recipients of Alibaba’s political donations during the 2020 election, which totaled more than $1.2 million, were Democrats. A total of $14,000 went to then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

During the 2022 midterm elections, Alibaba’s lobbyists donated $130,000 to the Democratic National Committee Service Corp., described by Bloomberg as “a nonprofit organization … coordinating party organizational activities including civil rights, health care and Social Security.” The individual candidate, however, who received the most in donations was former Republican Representative Liz Cheney.

As of the end of 2022, 19 of the 30 professional lobbyists hired by Alibaba had worked for the U.S. federal government and Congress, including four former federal lawmakers, according to public information compiled by OpenSecrets. Among them were David Vitter, who was a senator from 2005 to 2017; Toby Moffett, who was a member of Congress from 1975 to 1983, and Bryan Lanza, who was communications director for former President Donald Trump’s transition team from 2016 to 2017.

Through them, Alibaba had access to the White House and several other federal agencies, as well as to both chambers of Congress.

Lawmakers’ former advisers, aides

Many former advisers and aides to members of Congress are also lobbying for Alibaba, according to public information on LinkedIn, an employment-focused social media platform. Brian McGuire, former chief of staff of current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is one of them. Eric Pelletier, Alibaba’s head of international government affairs, was deputy assistant for legislative affairs under former President George W. Bush. Brian Wild, deputy assistant to former Vice President Dick Cheney, was also hired by Alibaba.

It is not uncommon for former government officials to work as lobbyists when their party is out of power and return to government when their party returns to office. The practice, sometimes referred to as a “revolving door,” is the subject of occasional ethics concerns, particularly regarding matters of foreign influence and national security.

“When we’re talking about the revolving doors like this, we’re actually talking about a national security issue or at least the potential for a national security issue,” said Ben Freeman, a researcher at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in an interview with VOA Mandarin.

“And that alone should give pause to folks when they’re hearing about a former member of Congress working on behalf of a foreign company, which we know does have partial ownership by a foreign government, specifically the Communist Party of China.”

Although Alibaba is not a state-owned enterprise, in recent years the Chinese government’s tightening oversight of Alibaba has raised concerns about the company’s operational independence.

Last December, a sub-entity under the Cyberspace Administration of China bought a stake in an Alibaba subsidiary and stationed an official there, according to the Reuters news agency.

Reuters also reported that last September, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Radio and Television Group, a Chinese government-backed company, took a 1% stake in the Youku Film and Television unit owned by Alibaba and assigned a government official to Youku’s board of directors.

Separately, Alibaba has been accused of developing facial recognition tools to identify Uyghurs, an ethnic group in northwest China that has been subject to repressive government policies described by the U.S. government as genocide.

News outlet involvement

Alibaba is not only active in the political arena, but also in expanding its influence in U.S. news outlets.

China expert Bill Bishop noticed that a newsletter from Semafor, an online news media outlet established last year, had the words “supported by Alibaba” written in the title. Not long ago, another online news outlet, Axios, published a newsletter that was sponsored by Alibaba, according to the conservative media outlet Daily Caller.

Bishop tweeted on January 30, “Axios, semafor…Alibaba sponsoring key DC email newsletters, makes sense.”

 

According to Daily Caller and verified by VOA, Alibaba has also sponsored The Hill, Punchbowl News and Politico in the past few years.

In response to VOA’s inquiries, both Semafor and Axios said sponsors do not affect their journalistic independence.

Semafor’s spokesman said in an email, “Advertisers have no bearing on our editorial coverage and we maintain a strict separation between news and third-party advertisement.”

Axios also replied, “Like any serious, trusted media source, advertisers have no input or involvement with editorial content at Axios.”

On January 31, Alibaba sponsored another event held by Semafor in which two members of Congress were invited to discuss e-commerce and the future of the U.S. economy.

Pelletier, Alibaba’s head of international government affairs, took the stage before the discussion began and said, “Alibaba every day gets up to help U.S. companies, small and medium enterprises as well as multinational companies, to sell their products to other consumers around the world.”

 

Also participating in the Semafor event was U.S. Representative Darin LaHood who, public records show, received a $500 campaign donation from Pelletier during the 2022 midterm elections.

Freeman, the Quincy Institute researcher, said he found it troubling that neither Semafor nor Pelletier disclosed that contribution prior to or during the event.

“It’s very problematic when you have events like this, where there’s a campaign funding tie behind it or any sort of other financial tie behind events like this that aren’t disclosed,” Freeman said, “because then the viewers of these events think they’re looking at just objective comments of the speakers, which may or may not be the case.”

The same public record shows that Pelletier made another 40 campaign contributions ranging from $500 to $2,500 to mainly Republican candidates and organizations since March 2020.

VOA reached out to Alibaba for comment but the company declined to comment for publication.

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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