Does China’s one-party system blind it to why it’s a US

election issue? Claim that coronavirus containment was a

victory for Chinese governance implies a contrast with the
US political system and its response. But some of China’s
actions have been poorly received internationally,
attracting scepticism 引起懷疑 about its credibility 信譽度 as
a leading world power. At a recent ceremony honouring
doctors and nurses who fought the coronavirus in China,
President Xi Jinping was clear about how he said his
country had prevailed: 佔了上風 its political system.“The
advantages of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he
declared, “provide a fundamental guarantee that the
country withstands 國家承受 risks and challenges, and
enhances its governance efficiency.” It is proven, he said,
by Covid-19. Yet while China boasts that its one-party
system allowed it to suppress a deadly virus by any means
necessary, experts say that very system, entailing 要求
authoritarian rule, censorship and an iron grip 鐵夾子 on
the flow of information, has prevented Beijing seizing the
moment to rise from the pandemic as a credible world
leader while Washington struggles. Instead – with the
United States passing 200,000 coronavirus deaths,
President Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis last week,
and less than a month from a potentially tumultuous 潛在
的動盪 presidential election in which both candidates see
China as a threat – some observers say Beijing’s belief in
its own propaganda and blindness to how its actions are
perceived are raising 意識到正在提高 tensions with
Washington and elsewhere to dangerous new heights. “The
Chinese have told themselves a story about why American
attitudes have soured towards 趨向於 China,” said Daniel
Russel, a former assistant secretary of state who advised
the then president Barack Obama on East Asia issues.
“And in the story they tell themselves, it’s a function of
things that have nothing to do with China.” Experts believe
the Chinese leadership grasps that outside public opinion
of China has plummeted in the past year, but not why that
shift in Washington has happened so dramatically, across
party lines. A lurch to the brink of a new cold war has been
a consequence of China’s political system, particularly in
the Xi era, with its control of news and information, and
self-censorship of officials close to the centre of power,
experts said. “Not to the extent we see in North Korea,”
Lynette Ong, a professor at the University of Toronto, said,
but “it’s very distorted”. Ong described information flowing
into China as a ray of light 光射線 shining through a prism
通過棱鏡: whatever people may be saying about China and
Xi, censorship will ensure it comes out looking like a
rainbow. The resulting risk of miscalculation 計算錯誤 was
played out in Hong Kong last year, when Beijing was
reported to have been caught off guard by the number of
people in the city taking part in months of protests sparked
by a since-withdrawn extradition bill that would have
allowed criminal suspects to be transferred to China’s
opaque, 中國不透明， Communist Party-controlled judicial
system.
Covid-19 stokes interest in health and fitness, and
sportswear chains such as Lululemon, Decathlon, and
Sweaty Betty reap 收割 the benefits. The coronavirus
pandemic has got people thinking about their health and
fitness, and that’s benefited retailers selling sports
equipment and apparel. 服飾 In Hong Kong, international
activewear brands have opened new stores as luxury and
beauty chains dependent on shoppers from China move
out and rents fall. When British activewear brand Sweaty
Betty opened its first store in Hong Kong in October 2019 –
a small boutique 小精品店 in the upscale IFC Mall – the
city’s retail industry was in the early stages of what would
become one of its worst slumps 最糟糕的跌落 in history.
Following months of anti-government protests that caused
frequent temporary store closures, especially on weekends,
and a plunge in 暴跌 arrivals of high-spending visitors from
China, Hong Kong’s retail scene 零售現場 had by then been
severely impacted. The start of the coronavirus pandemic
in early 2020 and the ensuing global economic downturn
that shows no signs of abating 減弱的跡象 have dealt yet
another blow to the city’s formerly thriving retail 蓬勃發展的
零售 sector. Since then, luxury labels such as Prada,
Valentino and Chloé, and high-street brands such as
Victoria’s Secret and Gap have shut stores in the city or left
Hong Kong altogether. You would have been forgiven for
thinking that the launch of a new brand in Hong Kong at
such a difficult time would be doomed to fail. Barely a year
after its first foray 第一次嘗試 into the Hong Kong market,
however, Sweaty Betty has expanded its retail footprint
with two more shops: one in Fashion Walk, in the prime
shopping district of Causeway Bay, and the other in the
K11 Musea mall on the Kowloon waterfront. Sweaty Betty
is not the only international brand that has increased its
presence in Hong Kong in recent months. Decathlon, 迪卡儂
the French sporting goods retailer that already operates a
store in Causeway Bay, has just unveiled 揭幕 two new
stores in Hong Kong: one in Central district, in a space that
formerly housed the flagship of leather-goods brand MCM,
and the other in Kowloon Bay. Lululemon, the Canadian
performance wear brand known for selling upmarket
workout gear, opened a store in Hong Kong’s largest mall,
Harbour City, at the height of the pandemic, celebrating
with a collection of very decadent 頹廢 Swarovski-
embellished leggings 綴飾綁腿 that cost HK$6,588 (US$850)
a pair. It’s hard not to notice that all three companies are
in the fitness industry, and their growth reflects a global
trend: amid one of the worst health and economic crises in
recent history, fitness and wellness are booming. 蓬勃發展
Sportswear giants like Nike have been weathering the
pandemic better than most international apparel and
footwear brands.
Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: 反尋找 how John McCain's
spaniel 獵犬 became Trump's poodle. 獅子狗 Sidney
Blumenthal. On Monday, the senator who praised Hillary
and helped get the Steele dossier 斯蒂爾檔案 to the FBI will
preside over 主持 a hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a
nominee to tilt the supreme court right for years to come.
His is a quintessential 典型的 Washington tale.That Lindsey
Graham would become Donald Trump’s poodle was not a
tale (or tail) foretold 預言. But it has landed him in the
dogfight of his life for re-election to his Senate seat in
South Carolina, challenged by a relentless 不懈地 and
capable Democratic candidate, Jaime Harrison, who
methodically 有條不紊 chased Graham around the ring in
their debate, repeatedly 反复刺他 jabbing him as a hypocrite
偽君子, until he struck him with a haymaker 乾草機, ending
the verbal fisticuffs 口頭拳 with a TKO: “Be a man.” Bruised
and battered, Graham retreated to his corner, Sean
Hannity’s show on Fox News, to beg 乞討: “I’m getting
overwhelmed … help me, they’re killing me money-wise.
Help me.” Graham has climbed the greasy pole 油膩的極
within the Senate, to a position that historically has been
rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure 終身製. He
succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48
years before he died at 100. From Graham’s chairmanship
of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the
defense of Trump, to unmask the dastardly conspiracy 陰謀
陰謀 of “Obamagate” and to handle the confirmation of a
justice on the supreme court, to pack it with a conservative
majority for a generation to come. But just at this
consummate moment of his career, events have conspired
共謀 to dissolve his facade 解散他的門面 and expose his
flagrant 明目張膽 hypocrisy. His presumed strength has
turned into his vulnerability. Worse, in Washington, where
the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the
genial star of the comedy club, he has become an object of
ridicule 嘲笑的對象。. In British political discourse 話語, a
figure like Graham would be described with the seemingly
enigmatic phrase 謎語 of “reverse ferret”, applied to a
politician who takes a dramatic and often contorted U-turn.
Graham gave one of the eulogies 頌詞 at the memorial
service at the National Cathedral. Trump did not attend.
On 28 July 2017, John McCain, in his last act of bravery,
strode 大步走 to the well of the Senate and turned his
thumb down to cast the deciding vote against the
Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Graham
voted the other way. He had crusaded 十字軍東征 for years
to repeal Obamacare. Yet the ACA would have offered early
detection and treatment of the kind of cancers that killed
his parents. McCain died a year later. When McCain
announced days before his death he was refusing further
medical help, Trump alone among prominent officials 傑出
官員 in Washington had not sent well wishes. Out in the
audience sat his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump
and Jared Kushner. Graham had arranged to get them
tickets to the funeral.
Amy Coney Barrett went to my all-girls high school. I hope
she's not confirmed. We didn’t have a mascot 吉祥物 at
Dominican, only an emblem 只是一個標誌：: veritas 驗證.
But truth is not monolithic 不是整體的 – it is informed by
our belief systems. Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s
nominee for the US supreme court, went to my all-girls
Catholic high school. We wore the same black-and-white
plaid skirts 格子裙 and saddle oxfords 馬鞍牛津 and roamed
漫遊的 the same halls 相同的大廳, although nearly a decade
apart. As students at St Mary’s Dominican High School,
along with an education rooted in the Catholic faith, we
were encouraged to be strong, independent women, future
leaders of the world. I would be proud to see a fellow alum
明礬 serve on our highest court if that person’s presence
didn’t threaten to irrevocably 不可撤銷地 harm the lives of
millions of Americans. We didn’t have a mascot at
Dominican, only an emblem: Veritas. In Latin, truth. But
the truth is not monolithic 單片 – it is informed by our
belief systems. How we define the truth matters, especially
for someone serving on the supreme court. Barrett’s anti-
abortion views have come to bear in public stances. In
2015, she signed a letter to Catholic bishops affirming 主教
確認 the value of “life from conception” alongside prominent
anti-choice figures such as Marjorie Dannenfeiser,
president of anti-choice fundraising organization 籌款組織
the Susan B Anthony List. As a law professor at Notre
Dame, Barrett was a member of the anti-abortion group
University Faculty for Life, and in 2006, she signed a paid
ad in a South Bend newspaper that called for “an end to
the barbaric legacy 野蠻的遺產 of Roe v Wade. In 2013, she
delivered two talks to anti-abortion student groups at Notre
Dame. Barrett has also been critical of the Affordable Care
Act guarantee that requires employers to provide birth
control to their employees. Like the late Justice Scalia, for
whom she clerked, Barrett is a self-described textualist and
originalist; she interprets the US constitution based on its
plain language and an attempted understanding of the
intent and mindset of the original drafters. Barrett has also
written that, in her view, it is appropriate and legitimate for
judges to overturn precedents 推翻先例 when they conflict
with their personal interpretation of the constitution.
Obedience 服從 to the exact original meaning of the
constitution without current context is problematic. These
laws were made by white, cisgender men 順性人 who
enslaved other human beings and never intended to
include a vast sum 一大筆錢 of Americans – like women and
people of color – in their quest for equal rights. When one
person’s truth, defined by the way they see the world,
impacts the lives and liberties of generations of diverse
Americans, it has tremendous power. When I was in high
school, I often wore a small gold pin in the shape of baby
feet on my shirt collar. My Catholic upbringing taught me
that the lives of the unborn needed protecting. I then
attended the Catholic University of America, the only
American university chartered by a pope. I was devout 虔誠
and sincere in my faith.
The New York Post on Wednesday published an article
based on emails purportedly 據稱電子郵件 obtained from a
laptop that Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, had
supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in
April 2019. Here’s a brief explainer to help readers evaluate
its significance. We will continue to update this article as
more information becomes available What’s new? The key
thrust of the article 文章的主旨 is that an April 2015 email
suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a
Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president
when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “Dear
Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an
opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time
together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email
reads, supposedly by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the
board of Burisma. Why would that be important? Hunter
Biden in 2014 became a board member of Burisma, which
news reports at the time suggested a conflict of interest
given his father’s position. The former vice president has
said he did not discuss Burisma with his son. The email is
not specific about the nature of the meeting and is written
in a way that it could be talking about a possible future
meeting. Nevertheless, Republicans have long sought 渴望已
久 to tie the vice president to his son’s business interests,
even launching a Senate investigation, so any indication 指
示 that the vice president helped his son could be politically
damaging. The New York Post claimed it was a “smoking-
gun email.” How do we know the email is authentic 真實?
We do not. The New York Post posted PDF print-outs of
several emails allegedly 據稱 from the laptop, but for the
“smoking gun” email, it shows only a photo made the day
before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid,
author of Active Measures, a book on disinformation.
“There is no header information, no metadata 沒有元數據.”
The Washington Post has been unable to independently
verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the
laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been
granted. The New York Post said it obtained the material
from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, President
Trump’s lawyer. There also is no indication that Hunter
Biden replied to the email. Moreover, another alleged email
published by the New York Post contradicts 紐約郵報矛盾
the notion 概念 that Hunter Biden could influence his
father. “What he will do and say is out of our hands,"
Hunter Biden wrote in an email that the New York Post
said was sent April 13, 2014. What does the Biden
campaign say? Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign
spokesman, said a review of Biden’s schedules from 2015
finds no record of any such meeting. Officials who worked
for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such
meeting took place. “I was with the vice president in all of
his meetings on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, Biden’s
foreign policy advisor in 2015. “He never met with this guy.
In fact I had never heard of this guy until the New York
Post story broke.” The New York Post article also cites an
email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden saying he was
“going to share this information with the US embassy here
in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the
States.” “I know for a fact he never contacted me or my
office,” said Hochstein, who at the time worked closely with
Biden as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International
Energy Affairs. “I provided every record to the Senate
investigation and no mention of this guy was ever made, no
emails, no correspondence. I know almost every player in
the energy sector in Ukraine. I never met this guy.”
Carpenter said that the vice president wouldn’t have had a
meeting with a company executive. "He was the vice
president of the United States,” he said. “He met with
prime ministers.” This does not exclude the possibility that
Biden briefly shook hands and chatted with Pozharskyi
during a public event. Hunter Biden, for instance, helped
arrange for a potential business partner, Jonathan Li, to
shake hands with his father in the lobby of a Beijing hotel
when the vice president took an official trip to China.
Pozharskyi, in the email, mentions that he spoke to Hunter
“yesterday evening.” At the request of The Fact Checker, a
Biden aide reviewed his schedule for April 16. The vice
president gave remarks at the White House Greek
Independence Day Reception, 接待 between 5 and 6 pm,
and then spoke to the Congressional Fire Services Institute
Gala, 國會消防協會晚會， from 6:30 pm to 8 pm, the aide
said. What does Hunter Biden say? Asked to verify whether
the email is genuine, Hunter Biden’s attorney 拜登的律師
George Mesires told The Fact Checker: “We have no idea
where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything
that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do
know for certain is that this purported meeting never
happened.” Are there errors in the New York Post report? A
separate article, about another email, claims that a public
relations company that worked for Burisma was allowed to
take part in a conference call about an upcoming visit by
Joe Biden to Ukraine. But there was nothing secret about
this call, and the transcript 成績單 was released publicly
and posted on the White House website. More broadly, the
New York Post repeats the falsehood 錯誤, advanced by
President Trump, that the “elder Biden pressured
government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who
was investigating the company.”
Stuck at home, I discovered the joy of identifying trees. My
mother never quite got round to learning the names of the
trees she loved. I’m trying to fulfil the commitment 承諾 she
could never keep. Every few years my mother would buy a
different version of the same book, only to abandon it after
several weeks: How to Identify the Trees of Northeastern
America. With the regularity of a trans-hemispheric
weather 半球天氣 cycle she’d come home, drop what
appeared to be a travel brochure 旅遊手冊 to the Republic of
Trees on the table, and proclaim: “This time I’m going to
learn the names of the goddamn trees.” She never did.
Growing up amid this excess of tree-based literature I at
least learned to distinguish maple 辨別楓木 from oak, beech
from elm 榆樹, spruce from pine. But even long after my
mother died, my taxonomic view 分類學觀點 of trees
remained arrested in something like a primary color filter of
the world: I knew there were thousands of them, but I
could only name six. Until the arrival of a pandemic. This
new cycle of family obsession began 迷戀開始 with the
eastern redbud 東部紫荊花 outside my window, or as I’d
often called it, the “pink flowery one”. In mid-March, along
with much of the world, I found myself stuck at home, no
longer making the 100-mile train trip south to New York
City for work. As infection rates climbed, and we began to
count deaths along with new cases, the eastern redbud
burst into bloom, scandalously pink flowers 醜陋地粉紅色的
花朵 in brash contradiction 殘酷的矛盾 of its name. My nine-
year-old, who has spent endless afternoons tucked 下午塞
into the boy-shaped crook 騙子 of this tree, asked what it
was called. With all the unearned confidence of my mother
I blurted out the first word my glitchy 我的小故障 dial-up of
a mind could locate: “Lilac.” But I knew this wasn’t right,
so I turned to the real internet and typed “looks like a lilac
紫丁香 tree” into the search field. My strategy didn’t get
much more organized than that beyond coming to rely on
predictive search 預測搜索 to help with common mistakes,
typing things like “the difference between spruce 雲杉之間
and …” and letting the algorithm 算法 take care of the rest.
And here is where I can claim no particular talent or virtue
for moving beyond my mother’s facility 母親的設施 for
naming trees: she never had instant access to millions of
images of leaves, nor to three-minute explanatory videos
walking through the difference between a London plane
tree and an American sycamore. 美國梧桐 The common
names of trees are like little stories, dense descriptive 密集
的描述 metaphors packed with history and life. In some
non-western spiritual frameworks, to name something, to
classify it, is to pin it to the page like a dead specimen 死標
本, an act of desiccation 乾燥行為 – if not quite desecration
褻瀆– committed upon a live and vibrant thing. But the
common names of trees, I quickly discovered, are like little
stories, dense descriptive metaphors packed 隱喻包裝 with
history and life: the generosity of “pig-nut hickory 豬胡桃木
的慷慨” and its evocation of rough bounty;
I lent my mother 我借給我媽媽 my old phone. Now she’s read
my text messages – and discovered untold secrets. After a
fall, my mother went to stay in a care home, and she was
lonely at first. Then she discovered three years’ of text
messages between me and my sister. If you could call
anywhere the canary 金絲雀 in the coalmine 煤礦 of
incompetence 無能 and chaos, it would be care homes. At
the start of the coronavirus crisis, it was the health
secretary, Matt Hancock, and his “protective ring 保護環”,
which, in reality, meant insufficient testing, inadequate 測
試不足 PPE and mass do-not-resuscitate 不要復蘇 orders
because, come on, if you don’t try to save people’s lives,
who can truthfully say you failed? By mid-June, care
homes were the high-water mark of the tragedy, with more
than 16,000 dead in that one setting. Recently, the
appalling cost of mismanagement on a human level has
been apparent in these homes: patients with dementia 癡呆
症患者 losing the will to live without family visits, a
government unable to muster 無法召集 a response to Covid
and also blinded by it, apparently devoid 顯然沒有 of feeling
for anyone with anything other than coronavirus. In the
midst of it all, my mother ended up in a care home,
following an event that we would normally call falling over
but, for reasons of endemic ageism 地方年齡主義 (in my
view), we now call “having a fall”. The two days she spent in
hospital were worse in terms of visiting, since not only
could my sister and I not see her, but we could feel the hot
anxiety of the nursing staff as we hovered outside the door
trying to pass her a power bank 充電寶 for her phone. Set
against that, although by any normal measure, the care-
home “window visit” is incalculably bad 不可估量的壞, it is
also unimaginably good. When I open the window, my
mother can hear me, but it is also freezing, so it always
ends with one or both of us going: “I’m sorry, I’m just too
cold.” The window opens to the exact width of my head
minus three millimetres; I keep my head outside the
window for this reason, but then a doctor will come in
wearing a mask, and I really can’t hear her, so I have to
wedge 楔 my head through, like a resourceful pig that has
found a loophole 漏洞 in the pen system. It is really hard to
sound like a plausible 像一個合理的 and responsible family
member in this position. “Ideally, she’d like to be home as
soon as possible and what we need is a clinical view 臨床觀
點 on how much care she needs … Oh, and there is a
problem with the timing of her medication,” is what comes
out of my mouth, but I can see from the doctor’s face that
what she is hearing is more of an oinking noise 下沉的噪音.
One time I got stuck, but I don’t think anyone noticed. My
sister has a tiny head, which, for some reason, our dad was
extremely proud of, and spent the entire 70s and 80s
going: “Look at that head! It’s two denominations 兩個教派
below the national mean.” The one time my sister and I
visited together (window crowds are frowned on 皺眉), I
watched her pop effortlessly 輕鬆彈出 in and out of the gap
and thought: “Huh. This tiny head has really come into its
own.” Often, my visits coincide 碰巧 with a guy at the next
window, visiting his mother. My mum always has a
problem with her phone, and his mum always has a
problem with her bank statement, and I can hear him
shouting: “What payment do you think is missing?”, but
only when I’m not shouting: “I don’t think it goes any
louder.” It occurred to me that we should come to a
Strangers on a Train arrangement 火車上的陌生人 and swap
mothers 調換母親– not in order to kill them, just for
variety, really. I would love to be worrying about a bank
statement for a change. As miserable 慘 as it is being
outside the care home, that is nothing compared with how
miserable it is being inside – frustrating and dehumanising
非人性化 and also very boring. It is not in my mother’s
nature to moan about unalterable circumstances, so she
complains about her phone instead, until finally on day 10,
I took her an old phone of mine and swapped the sim
cards, changed the phone ID, made the font as big as it
would go, hopped on my bike and went home. Four or five
hours passed. That seemed to me to be a good sign that
maybe the phone was working. In fact, it was because my
mother was reading all the messages between me and my
sister from 2016 to 2019. “You never told me P and M had
split up,” was only the beginning. “Why didn’t you just say
you didn’t want to wear a moustache 鬍子 over Christmas
dinner?” (It’s a long story.) “I can’t believe you still call me
the old trout 鱒魚!” I came out of the tube to three inches of
texts from my sister, all variations on a set of instructions
to make my phone self-destruct 自我毀滅 from a distance, or
failing that, to break into the home and steal it. Well, I
couldn’t do the first, because I’m not Bill Gates, and in an
age when you are not even allowed into a care home, the
idea of burgling one 盜賊 at 10.45pm is a world away. But
to look on the bright side, at least for that short breath of
time, it must have felt as if we were in the room.