Don't Let China Get Away With Coronavirus

The Chinese regime is in large part responsible for aggravating the coronavirus pandemic: Chairman Xi has blood on his hands. Now, China is taking steps to erase all evidence of its wrongdoing with a coordinated propaganda campaign.

Don’t believe a shred of it.

For weeks, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been coughing up anti-American and pro-Chinese propaganda, perhaps even at a greater rate than the spread of the virus itself. It takes a particular kind of disdain for the facts to accuse the US military of starting the outbreak by shipping coronavirus into Wuhan.

Unfortunately, the CCP has had help from unlikely sources.

Lo and behold! Stanford students are ready to answer the CCP’s call for volunteers. In a recent Daily Op-Ed, author Ravi Veriah-Jacques applauds China’s “deeply efficient and competent model” for dealing with coronavirus -- the same “efficient and competent model” which China uses to systematically kill and torture Uighur Muslims.

Meanwhile, officials from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are muzzling heroic doctors and attempting character assassinations of Nobel laureates in a frantic attempt to deflect the world’s attention from its criminal mishandling of the crisis.

But brazenly fascist Daily op-eds aside, Beijing is playing geopolitical games with people’s lives, plain and simple. It’s high time that Americans wake up to the reality of China’s shamelessly autocratic and cruel government.

There are hundreds of people dying from coronavirus every day in Europe. The continent is shut down and facing its worst crisis since World War II.

However, the Chinese regime is busy using its army of state-run enterprises to profit from Europeans’ misery.

For example, reports have claimed that China is donating masks and ventilators to Italy and providing medical aid. However, while some of the supplies are donations, in many cases, they are actually being sold to desperate victims for profit. Additionally, some supplies are for exclusive use by Chinese citizens trapped in Italy, not for Italian citizens themselves.

Even worse, these supplies may not even work. According to authorities in the Netherlands, Spain, and Slovakia, a large percentage of Chinese-made testing kits and masks were found to be unreliable , giving frontline healthcare workers a dangerously false sense of security. At the start of the outbreak, China also hoarded the world’s supply of masks, causing critical shortages for other nations.

However, these offenses are unsurprising to me: the Chinese state excels at turning the plight of vulnerable, struggling countries into profiteering expeditions aimed at filling the Communist Party’s coffers.

China already has a history of lying to the WHO about public health figures, particularly during the 2003 SARS outbreak. They’ve recently reported no new cases, but without reliable and free reporting, we have no way of verifying whether this is actually true. In fact, local residents have suggested that the total number of deaths in Wuhan is actually 40,000, not 2,500 as indicated by official government figures.

The CCP also has a track record of denying medical care to political dissidents. Countless activists, authors, artists, and journalists have been left to die due to intentionally delayed or denied care. Let’s hope that Beijing isn’t doing the same to coronavirus whistleblowers.

With all this in mind, it is no surprise that China just kicked out reporters from America’s top three investigative newspapers. What is Chairman Xi hiding?

By removing the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post from the country, we’ve lost our best chance of exposing the truth behind China’s coronavirus response. We’ve also lost an opportunity to verify official Chinese statements and ensure that no new draconian tactics are being used to silence dissenters.

Ultimately, the outbreak will end and hopefully the true extent of China’s dishonesty will be exposed on the global stage.

But there is also the question of the post-pandemic world. Will authoritarianism now be viewed as a viable problem-solving tool? Media outlets eyeing Wuhan’s lockdown with childlike wonder risk emboldening bad actors worldwide to take similar steps.

China is the world’s new evil empire: we cannot afford to succumb to Beijing’s tactics, especially in the midst of a crisis.

So next time you wash your hands, take an extra 20 seconds to remind yourself of the sheer malevolence with which China has used the coronavirus crisis to its advantage. As we face our own battle with coronavirus, don’t fall victim to the misinformation campaigns of the CCP.