A man wearing a face mask walks across a road as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, in Shanghai, China, on 9 March 2020. Reuters/Aly Song
Reuters
BEIJING, China, 15 March 2020
Some United States politicians are using coronavirus as a weapon to smear China, the Xinhua official news agency said on Sunday, as a war of words escalated between the two countries over China’s handling of the epidemic.
The editorial accused Robert O’Brien, the U.S. national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of spreading a “political virus” and using it to put China down.
O’Brien said last week that China had reacted slowly to the coronavirus, probably costing the world two months when it could have been preparing, in remarks that angered China.
Pompeo has said the US response to the coronavirus outbreak had been hindered by what he called imperfect data from China.
However Xinhua said China’s actions including strict quarantine of millions of people had earned the world “precious time” to prepare for the epidemic, which has been recognized by the international community.
It added that the US efforts to deal with its own virus cases had been widely criticized.
It accused the United States of having double standards when it came to evaluating the lockdown in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus that emerged in December last year, compared with its view of the recent lockdown in Italy.
Ties between Washington and Beijing are already strained over issues including trade, intellectual property rights and press freedom but they have been further tested by the virus outbreak.
Xinhua also attacked the US politicians for calling the virus the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese virus”.
Beijing has disputed the widely held belief that COVID-19 originated in China, and comments by a foreign ministry spokesman that it could have been brought to the country by the US military have further fanned tensions between the two.
On Friday the US State Department summoned the Chinese ambassador to the United States to protest against those remarks.
The virus has infected more than 156,000 people globally and killed more than 5,800. It has also pummeled financial markets, halted industry, brought flights to a standstill and led to the closure of schools in many countries.
The Chinese communists are known to blame everyone except themselves. This is their trademark. All the atrocities they committed against the Tibetans and the Chinese people during the Cultural Tevolution was alleged to have been perpetrated by the Gang of Four. It is customary for them to always blame somebody in order to exonerate themselves and keep a clean image of the evil CCP. They go to extreme lengths to cover their tracks by silencing critics like the citizen journalists who have all disappeared.
The latest is 69-year-old Ren Zhiqiang, a blogger with 37 million followers. He is the son of a revolutionary and a member of the CCP, who called Xi a clown. He has been a fierce critic of the CCP and is known as “cannon Ren”. Xi made a speech on Feb 23rd. After studying the speech, Ren wrote an article which said, “he saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his new clothes, but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor.” He also wrote that the “lack of free press and speech had prevented the outbreak” being curtailed sooner. Xi sent his loyalists to Wuhan to stamp out dissenters, not to douse the raging coronavirus. This is how the CCP makes sure that any dissenting voice is nipped in the bud and laid the blame squarely at the door of the Wuhan local officials!!!
Today, CCP officials from the foreign ministry are on a disinformation blitz, claiming that the US military was responsible for the pandemic by bringing it into China in October, without a shred of evidence. This is how they deflect criticism of the CCP and deceive their own people to believe fictitious nonsense and fabrications to lull them into a sense of déjà vu. The more likely truth is that the Wuhan bio-weapon Institute was responsible for the spread of this deadly disease.
Before the US politicians called the virus “Wuhan Virus,” it was Dean Koontz who called it “Wuhan 400” in his fiction book titled The Eyes of Darkness published in 1981. He called it a perfect weapon since it afflicts only human beings. “Wuhan 400” was developed in labs outside the city of Wuhan. The book also says that around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe.
Lately both Italy and Iran were gung-ho about China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Now the two are severely blindsided by the virus. As such, we all must come together as one and work in developing an antidote for the virus. Let bygones be bygones.