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Dake Kang Profile picture
Dake Kang
@dakekang
中文名：姜大翼｜Journalist @AP Beijing | 伟大时代的记录者 @美联社北京分社. 推特现在不让没有被验证的账户发私信，你可以用微信联系我（dakekang) 或者电报, Signal, WhatsApp (+1 201 937 9797). 邮箱: dakekang@protonmail.com.
Apr 22 • 29 tweets • 9 min read
1/A year ago, Chinese scientists published data from samples collected at a Wuhan market at the heart of the COVID outbreak - startling many, given it happened years ago. Then the data got retracted.

@mylcheng and I tried to find out why. Our findings:
apnews.com/article/china-… 2/It was the start of a long quest, as we unspooled competing factions & personalities within different Chinese government agencies and their interactions with foreign experts & institutions. On the way, we learned about why the search for COVID-19's origins went horribly awry
Mar 8 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
1/The I-Soon leak exposed hacking operations against dozens of countries, showing how they steal data and sell it to Chinese police to help them surveil citizens overseas.

But it also revealed seedy practices prevalent in the hacking industry. A thread:
apnews.com/article/chines… 2/I-Soon boasted about its hacking prowess in slick marketing PowerPoint presentations. But the real business took place at hotpot parties, late night drinking sessions and poaching wars with competitors.
Feb 22 • 30 tweets • 10 min read
1/A few days ago, files from a contractor for Chinese police quietly dumped online went viral. But though analysts thought the files authentic, they weren't 100% confident.

Now, after a visit to the company's offices, I can confirm the leak is real:
apnews.com/article/china-… 2/The files pull back the curtains on Chinese hacking operations, showing how Chinese police rely on companies such as this contractor, I-Soon, to surveil dissidents overseas and squash anti-government sentiment even on non-Chinese platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter. Image
Mar 21, 2023 • 49 tweets • 16 min read
1/When China suddenly scrapped zero-COVID in December, people were bewildered by the country's lack of preparation. Millions of elderly were unvaccinated, they hadn't stockpiled antivirals.

Why? We set out to find the answer. Our findings:
apnews.com/article/zero-c… 2/Many wondered why Beijing didn't plan for the reopening.

Actually, they did.

We discovered that as early as 2021, the State Council, China's cabinet tasked an expert committee with reviewing COVID controls. They submitted a report in March 2022 recommending exit strategies.
Dec 22, 2022 • 30 tweets • 11 min read
I just came back from two harrowing days traveling from emergency ward to emergency ward around Baoding in Hebei, one of the first areas hit by the current wave. The situation is very grim. ICU units totally overwhelmed. 1/China is facing a medical emergency. Two harrowing days in Hebei’s ICUs shows the area’s hospitals are buckling with the spread of COVID. We saw ambulances turned away from hospitals, relatives frantically searching for beds, patients sprawled on floors
apnews.com/article/health…
Dec 17, 2022 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
1/COVID-linked deaths are appearing in Beijing, even as China hasn’t reported a single death from COVID since December 4. The relatives of two people who died at the Dongjiao funeral home said their loved ones had positive for the virus.
apnews.com/article/health… 2/Traffic to the funeral home is way up. One person estimated about 150 people are being cremated a day, far more than the dozens on a normal day.
Dec 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
1/What's going on with China's first-ever wave of mass infections? At the moment, it's too early to tell. Lots of people are infected all over the country, but we haven't yet seen large numbers of critically ill patients flooding hospitals in big cities.
apnews.com/article/politi… 2/Though anecdotal evidence suggest huge numbers are getting infected, there's now no way to track.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai appear to be holding up so far. Some doctors back to work after infection, but hospitals are so far keeping critical non-COVID wards virus-free.
Dec 14, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
1/Today, I went to two more fever clinics in Beijing. This one, a children’s hospital, was considerably more crowded than the ones I went to yesterday. Maybe 50 or 60 people waiting in lines. 2/More from the fever clinic.
Dec 13, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
1/Visited several fever clinics in Beijing. I saw short, orderly lines, and no signs yet of overcrowding. If the medical system here can hold up for the next couple of weeks, Beijing might just make it through without a large number of fatalities, which would be a huge relief. 2/A patient getting checked up at a fever clinic. Hospital guidelines tell patients to get a nucleic acid test and wait for results before being admitted.
Dec 7, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
1/China's National Health Commission just announced 10 measures amounting to what is effectively a switch from containment (stopping the spread of covid altogether) to mitigation (trying to protect the most vulnerable while the virus rips through society)
nhc.gov.cn/xcs/gzzcwj/202… 2/To summarize:
_Risk areas further shrunk, to apartment floors and individual buildings, not districts or neighborhoods
_No more health codes, no more nucleic acid test checking (except for special organizations, like nurseries, elderly care homes, schools)...
Dec 3, 2022 • 46 tweets • 17 min read
1/After what feels like the longest week of my life, here's a breather: @huizhong_wu and I detail how Shanghai's protests unfolded, hour by hour, based on interviews with 11 people who witnessed it.
apnews.com/article/health… 2/The protests started with an Urumqi apartment fire which killed at least 10. Horrifying videos emerged showing how fire engines far from the flames failed to put out the blaze, and audio of trapped residents shrieking
Nov 26, 2022 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
Protests erupting across the country, demanding the end of zero covid restrictions. Really feels like things are getting to a breaking point. The Urumqi apartment fire and protests are crystallizing anger just as large swaths of China seems poised to hurtle into further lockdowns as case counts explode. A volatile combination…
Oct 31, 2022 • 28 tweets • 10 min read
1/My dive into China's "Neican" internal reference system, and how it's been changing under Xi's rule.

China's Communist Party has long used a powerful internal reporting system to learn about issues considered too sensitive for the public to know.
apnews.com/article/health… 2/Chinese reporters file secret bulletins to officials, ensuring they get the information needed to govern, even if censored. "The investigative journalists of China", one person called it.

But this internal system is struggling to give frank assessments as Xi consolidates power
Oct 31, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
As others have pointed out, there's serious factual issues with this piece, including misleading translations of key quotes.

I want to point out one more issue: The contents of the WIV biosafety notice was written in *August*, NOT November. That overturns the narrative... The Wuhan Institute of Virology notice cited in the @VanityFair/@propublica is actually a repost of a piece published Aug 30 in 科苑党建, a publication by the party-building group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (which is in charge of the WIV).
kydj.sciencenet.cn/content.aspx?i… Image
Oct 22, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
One more interesting tidbit in the Hu Jintao affair today: The man helping up Hu is Kong Shaoxun (孔绍逊), the deputy director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee. His boss is Ding Xuexiang, widely expected to be on the next Standing Committee. In video we captured, we can see Kong returning back and chatting with Xi at 11:53, about half an hour after Hu was escorted off the stage at 11:19.

It appears that Kong comes and is asking something of Xi. Xi says something, Kong nods twice, then walks off.
Oct 20, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1/As China holds its 20th Party Congress, one of the country's top investigative journalists is reporting on it - from the outside.

In Xi's China, he says, he has no other choice. 2/A decade ago, Wang Zhi'an was an on-air reporter for state broadcaster CCTV. It was, in retrospect, the dying days of the "golden age" of Chinese media, and there was still space for sharp, critical reporting inside the system.

But with Xi's rise to power, that's all changed.
Feb 17, 2022 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
1/I spent the past week in Sichuan, interviewing Tibetans about their hopes, lives, and identities on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau.

Together with @stmcneil, this is the story we wrote. It reveals glimpses of a Tibet in transition:
apnews.com/article/winter… 2/First off: When I arrived in Garze, all seemed fine. We flew into a new airport built in 2019. A man on our (very empty) flight was coming in from Hangzhou and had a yellow health code, so the police came and made him sit on the back of the bus, away from everyone else. ImageImage
Jul 22, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
1/We were given extraordinary access to the largest detention center in Xinjiang - a behemoth that holds 10,000++. Officials said it's a pre-trial detention center that has nothing to do with the "training centers", which they insist are closed. BUT - we looked into it, and... 2/...in fact, this Dabancheng facility was actually once the "Urumqi City Vocational Skills Training Center". There's hard photographic evidence. In 2018, Reuters went. The nameplate was 乌鲁木齐市职业技能教育培训中心. When we went in April, it changed - to 乌鲁木齐市第三看守所
Jun 23, 2021 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
@macroliter Well, it’s messy and complicated. As far as we can tell, there was an initial period when there was definitely surpression of info and warnings on signs of h2h transmission at the Wuhan govt level, and by mid Jan, at the central level as well... @macroliter for the samples, there was an order Jan 3 to destroy them or send them to certified govt labs. I think this included at least three: China CDC, China Academy of Medical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences
Feb 23, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/ It's official. The Associated Press is now using the spelling "Uyghur", not "Uighur".

This is because "Uyghur" is closer to the native pronunciation of the word: OOEE’-ger. The pronunciation WEE’-ger, common in Anglophone media, is slightly off.

A bit of history... 2/ In the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government banned use of the Uyghur script, based on Arabic letters, and instead forced Uyghurs to use a Romanized form based on the Pinyin system.
Dec 30, 2020 • 20 tweets • 10 min read
NEW: After Beijing announced the virus was spreading in Jan, Chinese scientists rushed to publish papers. Then, the tide slowed to a trickle.

Now, documents obtained by @AP show this happened b/c President Xi ordered new restrictions on COVID-19 research.
apnews.com/article/united… 2/The docs, retyped here without identifying marks, show authorities tightened research controls in Feb. and March - soon after a paper by Chinese scientists suggested the virus could have escaped from a Wuhan lab, kicking off an international blame game
web.archive.org/web/2020021414… ImageImage