POLITICO NIGHTLY: China’s one-pandemic policy

By Ryan Heath Presented by BIG SMOTHER — What we used to call a trade war, way back in 2019, has turned into a string of pandemic battles. China isn’t holding back in its latest global diplomatic offensive. After Australia called for an international coronavirus inquiry this week, and for Taiwan to join the WHO’s next global conference in May, Australians were called “chewing gum stuck on the sole of China's shoes” by China’s favorite state-sponsored troll — Hu Xijin, editor of the state-run Global Times. To drive home the point, China’s diplomats in Canberra threatened a Chinese boycott of Australian goods, and Aussies were advised to "cry up wine” if they didn’t enjoy the blackmail. Australians were getting a taste of what China has been serving the isolated island of Taiwan for decades. China isn’t letting up there either: Despite crunching the coronavirus — no new cases for six days, and six deaths total — Taiwan has been excluded from sharing its knowledge at 70 percent of WHO technical meetings, according to its foreign ministry. Australia merely said what President Donald Trump thinks, what the State Department tweets, and what Congress voted unanimously for: that Taiwan deserves a seat at the table of a transparent global discussion about Covid-19. The main difference is that Taiwan and Australia are much smaller than the United States. Even so, China’s insult tour is spreading beyond the Asia-Pacific region. In recent days Chinese diplomats have succeeded in watering down a critical EU report into coronavirus misinformation, and fellow nuclear power France was accused of leaving its elderly for dead during the pandemic. All that was before the EU executive today backed Australia’s call for an international inquiry. Americans have become Chinese targets, too: Trump administration official Peter Navarro is a “habitual liar,” and Hu Zhaoming, another spokesperson, joked that “some people” in America should drink disinfectant. Some of this exaggerated rhetoric may be a ploy by the Chinese foreign ministry to placate Chinese nationalists at home, who are spoiling for a geopolitical fight in the wake of the pandemic. Whatever the case, it shouldn’t blind the United States to the next fight: over how the world will recover economically. Trump has engaged this global political theater of battle, using his press conferences to emphasize America’s belated donations of medical equipment abroad. But those occasional efforts don’t constitute a diplomatic or economic strategy. China does have a strategy: “to rewrite history,” a spokesperson for Taiwan’s de-facto embassy in Washington said. Unencumbered by lockdowns and protests and medical equipment shortages, China is investing its energy in those historical revisions. Unless it’s forced to participate in an international coronavirus inquiry, it may well succeed. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. If you have a moment this weekend, video chat an eel. Reach out with tips: rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America’s biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. We are working with governments and insurers to ensure that when new treatments and vaccines are approved, they will be available and affordable for patients. Explore our efforts.   First In Nightly VOTING FROM HOME — Three states will let some of their voters cast ballots online in the coming weeks — a trend that has gained momentum from the coronavirus pandemic but threatens to introduce new security risks into the nation’s already-vulnerable elections, cybersecurity reporter Eric Geller writes. Delaware said this week that it will allow residents with disabilities to vote online during its June primaries. New Jersey said it would do the same for this month’s nonpartisan municipal elections. West Virginia, whose primary is also in June, previously announced plans to offer internet voting for overseas residents, military service members and voters with disabilities. The modest increase in internet voting is yet another example of how the pandemic has upended priorities across the United States, four years after Russian hacking inspired a nationwide effort to deploy more secure, paper-based voting machines. Now, the virus is turning in-person voting into a health risk — and some election officials are exploring online voting as one alternative, despite extensive warnings from cybersecurity experts that the technology poses dangers no one has been able to solve.   MONDAY - A VIRTUAL PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW WITH HOUSE GOP LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY: How is the minority party in the House planning to navigate the next steps in the response to the coronavirus pandemic? In an election year, is it possible to avoid the anticipated partisan battles over additional relief measures and other legislative priories? Join Playbook co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman on Monday at 10 a.m. EDT for a virtual discussion with House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about his efforts to try to get the House to return to Washington, what's next for economic relief legislation, and how mail-in voting could impact the 2020 election. Have questions? Submit yours by tweeting it to @POLITICOLive using #AskPOLITICO. REGISTER HERE.     From the Health Desk CONTACT FOUL — Some states have begun lifting stay-at-home orders without a robust army of public health workers to quickly identify people who’ve come into contact with coronavirus patients, worrying health experts that they could be at heightened risk for a new wave of infections, health reporters Alice Miranda Ollstein and Dan Goldberg write. Texas will begin reopening restaurants, stores and movie theaters this week with just 1,100 contact tracers, about a quarter of what Republican Gov. Greg Abbott hopes to eventually have in place. Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whose aggressive reopening was criticized by Trump, wants to deploy 1,000 contact tracers across the state and is looking to interns to help fill the ranks . The state health department, acknowledging the tracking program isn’t fully up to speed, said it’s so far enlisted just 300. In Florida, where stores and restaurants will begin reopening Monday, the health department has just 500 contact tracers in a state with about 35,000 reported cases. In some of the most populous counties, the number of tracers is in the single digits. The governors in states with sparser contact tracing programs said dire unemployment numbers have left them little choice but to begin gradually sending people back to work while case counts still grow, even if it means reopening before they can fully bolster public health measures. They say weeks of unprecedented shutdowns have ensured their health care systems won’t be overrun if coronavirus cases creep upward, and they can move swiftly to reimpose lockdown orders should new hot spots emerge. Palace Intrigue SECRETARY OF DEFENSE — Senior media writer Jack Shafer on why new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany replaced Trump in the briefing room today: “The almost daily coronavirus pressers he so happily staged were making him the face of a wild contagion in a campaign year. Like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, whose presidencies became identified with the number of body bags returning from Vietnam, the coronavirus pressers were illustrating his helplessness at containing the plague.”     Around the Nation MASKS ON, GLOVES OFF — For progressives, it's a sign of taking coronavirus seriously. On the right, it's a symbol of overreaction. In the latest edition of POLITICO Dispatch , chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza breaks down the divide over wearing a mask — and how it gives a glimpse into the future politics of the pandemic. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast Ask The Audience NIGHTLY ASKED YOU — Seeing any interesting, fun or meaningful signs related to the coronavirus? We asked you to snap a photo sometime this week and send it to Renuka Rayasam . Below are some of our favorites. Photo illustration by Kamran Rahman Nightly Interview BIG SURF — Tom Leighton is an MIT mathematician and the CEO of the multibillion-dollar tech company Akamai, which keeps websites like WhiteHouse.gov up and running. Leighton talked to senior technology reporter Nancy Scola about how the internet is surviving the pandemic so far. NANCY SCOLA: Back in the early 2000s, I got the chance to visit Akamai headquarters, and one of the things I remember most was this giant digital map on the wall showing the flow of internet traffic all over the world. It made the internet very real in a way that has stuck with me since. Is that map still on the wall, and if so, how is it looking right now? TOM LEIGHTON: Yeah, it's a spinning globe. And each of the thousands of cities where we have servers, there is a big shining light out of that spot. The color depends on how busy those servers are and brightness depends on what the capacity is in those cities. You can actually check on every single server, what they’re doing, and how much traffic they’re pumping. We are very busy right now and so the colors are very bright. Traffic is strong. Just in March alone it grew over 30 percent on the Akamai platform, which is pretty remarkable. Pretty much however you might define traffic, it’s grown 30 or 40 percent. You could measure it by bits per second or gigabytes delivered, and by those measures, it would be dominated by streaming video and software updates, because they’re very traffic intensive. The typical gaming software update is the same traffic as 30,000 web pages. But even if you look at transactions — things bought online, checking your bank balance, or anything like that — those also went up about 40 percent. Pretty much everything is double what we were seeing at this time last year. If you’d been told a year ago that next year the world was going into lockdown, would you have predicted the usage patterns you’re seeing? We in fact built out a lot of capacity towards the end of last year, not for the pandemic, but for all the big sporting events that take place in 2020 — the Olympics, World Cup, [Indian Premier League]. Ironically, those sporting events aren’t taking place, but instead of doing that, we’re using all that capacity for daily activities, normal stuff, just at a much higher rate. If we were in a drought, we’d tell Americans to conserve water. Do we have a personal responsibility to use less internet? I don't think so. I think it's too hard for the user at home to really understand it. It’s more the big software suppliers. It’s easier for them to control it. Another thing I think I remember from that long ago visit to Akamai HQ was learning that when the president of the United States traveled throughout the world, Akamai would do something to strengthen internet capacity. So if George W. Bush went to Poland, the internet would be made more robust while he was there. Am I making that up? Just speaking for 20 years ago, when the president traveled you’d want to make sure he or she had the best possible communications connectivity by every single measure, and one measure is the internet. Think of an environment where you would have mobile servers that would go as part of some kind of a deployment. So you did it back then but we’re not going to talk about whether you still do it today? Right.   NEXT WEDNESDAY - A VIRTUAL INTERVIEW WITH FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR: Join Global Translations author Ryan Heath next Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. EDT for a virtual discussion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair about what partnerships are needed around the world to minimize the health and economic impacts of coronavirus, how to handle deepening inequalities, and what the global architecture of a new and more resilient “normal” should look like. Have questions? Submit yours by tweeting it to @POLITICOLive using #AskPOLITICO. REGISTER HERE TO PARTICIPATE.     Nightly Number 60 The number of arson attacks on 5G towers in the last couple of weeks in the U.K. Conspiracy theories that 5G radiation causes health problems has been bubbling away on the internet ever since the technology became viable, fueling the attacks. (h/t Laurens Cerulus) PUNCHLINES BROADER BRUSHSTROKES — In the latest episode of Punchlines , Matt Wuerker talks to 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner Darrin Bell about diversity in the ranks of cartoonists, drawing on complex issues and visceral reactions to caricatures. “I’m trying to change the world for my son, through pictures,” Bell says. Parting Words WORKING FROM HOLE 18 — Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator, is golfing his way to notoriety — or perhaps the president’s good graces. His political opponents called the Republican out today for attending a video committee hearing from his latest round of golf. Noise from Jensen’s golf cart at one point drowned out the committee’s discussion. Minnesota reopened its courses April 18. He did not immediately return a call for comment.   A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America’s biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. The investments we’ve made have prepared us to act swiftly: · Working with governments and insurers to ensure that when new treatments and vaccines are approved, they will be available and affordable for patients · Coordinating with governments and diagnostic partners to increase COVID-19 testing capability and capacity · Protecting the integrity of the pharmaceutical supply chain and keeping our plants open to maintain a steady supply of medicines for patients Explore our efforts.   Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   Follow us

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