With the number of confirmed Coronavirus cases exceeding 2.5 million, along with a death toll in excess of 1.7 lakh, anger is monunting against China across the world.
Initially, it was Beijing’s ruthless cover-up that emerged as a major issue, but now the spotlight has shifted to even murkier allegations about the origin of the Wuhan virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology(WIV) — the largest virus bank in Asia which preserves more than 1,500 strains and is situated just 8 miles away from the Huanan wet market.
China is, meanwhile, looking to ward off the pressure that it is feeling from countries around the world by raking up old Pandemics that arose in other countries.
In fact, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang has said, “The H1N1 flu that broke out in the US in 2009 spread to 214 countries and regions, killing nearly 200,000 people, has anyone demanded the US for compensation?”
In order to deflect blame, Beijing is bringing up the H1N1 Pandemic. It is established that the flu had originated in a very small region in Mexico, but China somehow feels that the United States should be held responsible for a Pandemic that did not even originate there.
The spokesman also said that AIDS was first discovered in the United States in the 1980s, from where it spread to the world and wondered if anyone held the US accountable.
China understands that it is not facing backlash across the world because the Pandemic originated, but because it kept hiding the Pandenic for quite some time from the rest of the world and even its own citizens. Having created the Pandemic, it also misled the world about human to human transmission of the virus and low fatality rate, both of which delayed the global response against the novel Wuhan virus.
Apart from Pandemics, the Chinese spokesman also drew a false equivalence with economic recession, once again targeting the United States. He again cited the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 as the cause of the global recession that had followed at that time.
#FMsays "The H1N1 flu that broke out in the US in 2009 spread to 214 countries and regions, killing nearly 200,000 people, has anyone demanded the US for compensation?" Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang asked on Monday. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/JDpxxGE1OW
— China Daily (@ChinaDaily) April 20, 2020
This meltdown comes days after the Group of Seven (G7)- an intergovernmental organisation consisting of seven advanced economic powers, showed first signs of near unanimity in taking concrete action against the mighty Dragon and also raising tough questions about its role in management of the Pandemic.
The United States has been leading the charge against China for quite some time, and now the political climate is turning against China in other countries such as Japan, Australia, France and the United Kingdom.
Anger is directed against China not because the Pandemic originated, but because China tried taking undue advantage of it. The Chinese officials wanted to strongarm other parts of the world into accepting Huawei 5G technology, which has been already rejected by the US and European countries over security and privacy concerns. China however made it clear that it will export medical gear, masks and testing kits only if the recipient countries accepted the Chinese telecom major.
Beijing has cited past Pandemics, but it has deliberately glossed over the fact that it must be for the first time that faulty testing kits and substandard medical equipment have been shipped in desperate times like this.
China has sold faulty testing kits and PPE kits to Spain, Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and India which has tamed the global response against the Coronavirus, and this is where China must come clean. It is because Beijing went into crisis profiteering that it is facing global outrage, and bringing up past Pandemics and recessions is just a naive attempt to mislead the entire world.
China knows that what it is going through is actually its Chernobyl moment, and therefore it is leaving no stone unturned in its attempts to somehow deflect the blame for slipping the entire world into a public health emergency. First, its diplomats started bullying other countries and when that didn’t yield any positive results, China started playing the victim card in order to sidestep the real issues.
