On March 7, 2020, I introduce excerpts from Noriyuki Yamaguchi’s important essay published in the monthly magazine Hanada. Behind the United States’ swift and strict border measures against the new virus, there may have been crucial information known only to Washington. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Xi Jinping’s “Yangtze River Great Protection” mega-project, and the visits to Wuhan by Japanese and American private organizations all raise serious questions about whether the spread of the new virus from Wuhan to all of China was merely a coincidence.

March 7, 2020
Was it merely a coincidence that the new virus spread throughout China from Wuhan, the center of Xi Jinping’s pet mega-project?
The following is an excerpt from the painstaking work by Noriyuki Yamaguchi published in the monthly magazine Hanada, released on the 26th of last month.
The preceding part is omitted.
America is hiding something.
The Trump administration, whose supreme mission was to raise economic indicators ahead of the presidential election in November,
had, since the beginning of this year, continued to emphasize the easing of tensions between the United States and China,
by relaxing retaliatory tariffs against China,
and postponing the implementation of restrictions on the use of Huawei.
Regarding China’s response to the new virus as well,
President Trump posted on Twitter,
“President Xi Jinping is doing well,”
even showing the composure to encourage President Xi, who was busy responding to the crisis.
However, regarding travel between Chinese people and the United States,
while refusing entry to all foreign nationals who had stayed in China,
he also announced that Americans should refrain from travel to all of China.
It was a border-control measure that was faster and stricter than the Japanese government’s response.
President Trump, who dryly pursues practical interests above all else,
would never take excessive measures that cool the economy unless they were necessary.
“Does the Trump administration possess information that we do not know?”
By mid-February, because several other unnatural phenomena and signs had been detected,
among some officials at the core of the government,
the suspicion secretly began to spread that America might be hiding important information about the new virus.
Behind the fact that the core of the Japanese government came to harbor a suspicion that could even create a crack in the seemingly solid Abe-Trump honeymoon between Japan and the United States,
was the special nature of the place called Wuhan.
The true identity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The initial view was that the new coronavirus had a certain type of bat as its host and had spread at the seafood market in Wuhan.
However, because of its infectivity, which enabled it to spread at once beyond Hubei Province, where Wuhan is located, and across all of China,
there was a persistent view that
“it may not be a naturally occurring virus.”
In mid-January, an Indian infectious-disease scholar published a paper stating that the new virus showed
“traces of artificial processing.”
What then drew the attention of people concerned all over the world was the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It is a world-class, P4-level virus research facility operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
China’s highest research institution in the field of science.
In China, this is the only laboratory of that level.
Because the spread of infection followed an excessively rapid and peculiar course,
some suggested that a virus artificially created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
developed as a biological weapon,
may have been spread by mistake,
or deliberately.
Such an “artificial virus theory” originating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology remained, as of mid-February, within the realm of speculation.
However, apart from the origin of the virus itself,
the fact that Hubei Province and its capital city Wuhan had, for General Secretary Xi Jinping, a special meaning entirely different from that of other regions,
made the suspicions at the core of the Japanese government even more serious.
In my possession is a Chinese-language document of sixteen pages titled,
“Prospectus for the Establishment of the Yangtze River Production Technology Industrial Research Institute.”
Under Xi Jinping’s slogan of
“Great Protection of the Yangtze River,”
it explains in detail a grand plan to build a huge research institute in Wuhan
and to make a comprehensive development plan for the Yangtze River basin into a major national project.
The Yangtze Protection Headquarters, which is to serve as the receiving body,
is said to have been guaranteed 2.3 trillion yen in funding by the Chinese government and others,
and to have already raised 1.3 trillion yen.
According to this document, the establishment of the Yangtze River Production Technology Industrial Research Institute is to be led by three organizations:
the aforementioned “Chinese Academy of Sciences,”
the “Changjiang River Scientific Research Institute,”
and the “Shanghai Survey, Design and Research Institute Co., Ltd.”
And the “China Three Gorges Corporation,”
which operates the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam,
is to cooperate with the Wuhan municipal government
to create an intelligent industrial park.
Indeed, in 2012, at the 18th National People’s Congress,
the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party set as its major goals
the ecological protection and scientific development of the Yangtze River basin,
and called for
“high-quality development of the basin.”
In 2013, Xi himself visited Wuhan,
touring each facility and taking command on the front line for the steady implementation of the plan.
And that concept developed into the “Belt and Road” initiative,
which Xi Jinping grandly announced at the APEC, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, held in Beijing in 2014.
The Yangtze River, one of the world’s great rivers, flows across mainland China from west to east.
After meandering northward as if to make a large detour around Wuhan in Hubei Province,
it flows into the East China Sea at Shanghai.
Xi had positioned Wuhan as the largest base of the “Belt and Road,”
through which economic development, previously biased toward coastal areas, would be expanded inland,
and connected by land routes from Central Asia to Europe.
The mystery of Xi Jinping’s project.
What draws the eye in this project is its slogan.
Although its basic aim is the economic development of inland areas,
it puts ecological protection at the forefront under the slogan
“Great Protection of the Yangtze River,”
and Xi himself repeatedly instructed that
“ecological restoration must be made the supreme mission.”
Is the ecosystem of Wuhan contaminated by something so serious that restoration must be made the supreme mission?
It is little known that, from early to mid-December of last year,
three distinctive private organizations from Japan and the United States visited Wuhan.
They were:
an advanced water purification company from South Kanto,
an environmental business trading company from Kansai,
and a group of researchers involved in artificial intelligence based in the American Midwest.
And the three organizations had only one thing in common:
they possessed
“special technologies for virus control and virus removal.”
An executive of one of these companies entered Wuhan on December 6.
After inspecting related facilities of the aforementioned “Yangtze River Production Technology Industrial Research Institute” and Wuhan University,
he also entered the Wuhan Institute of Virology in question.
This institute is designated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a State Key Laboratory,
and has entry restrictions comparable to those of a military facility.
Originally, it was not the kind of facility into which people from the West could enter.
From early December, the representatives of the three Japanese and American organizations
visited separately,
yet almost the same facilities.
The earliest departed Wuhan on December 10,
and the latest stayed there until December 17.
And the people connected with all three organizations,
under names such as
“restoration of lakes and wetlands,”
“construction of urban sewage facilities,”
and
“improvement of water quality in rivers, lakes, and dams,”
are said to have conducted energetic negotiations with the Chinese side over virus technologies and the like.
The first infected person in Wuhan was reported on December 8.
This means that the three Japanese and American private organizations,
at precisely the time when the major outbreak of the new virus had begun,
were holding extremely concrete and in-depth discussions with the Chinese side on issues such as
“virus removal,”
“sterilization and decontamination,”
and
“virus management using artificial intelligence.”
Why did the Chinese government and the Wuhan municipal government invite as many as three Japanese and American organizations with strong virus-related capabilities to Wuhan in December,
and even show them facilities dealing with state secrets?
The schedule of their visit to China had been fixed by late November.
If infection by the new virus had already begun at that stage,
and if China was considering the introduction of Japanese and American technologies as part of its countermeasures,
then the Chinese government must have detected the spread of the new virus by November 20 at the latest.
Is something happening in mainland China that the Japanese government does not know about?
Was it merely a coincidence that the new virus spread throughout China from Wuhan,
the center of Xi Jinping’s pet mega-project?
Is there no possibility that the virus was artificially processed and maliciously scattered?
Why is the United States taking the highest level of defensive measures against a virus that the Japanese government believes to be minor?
Can we declare that the worst kind of pandemic, in which healthy people in Japan die one after another, will not occur?
These questions and concerns are based only on speculation, and therefore there is no way to verify them.
However, precisely for that reason, they cannot be completely denied,
and the suspicions will likely remain for the time being.
The remainder is omitted.