China is *not* your friend
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Beijing demanded praise in exchange for medical supplies
A growing number of reports indicate Chinese officials pushed their counterparts in Europe to make positive statements about China in order to receive shipments of medical supplies to fight the novel coronavirus.
Why it matters: The revelations further taint Beijing's attempts to portray itself as a responsible and trustworthy leader in global public health.
Context: Over the past two months, numerous high-ranking government officials from countries fighting coronavirus outbreaks have offered seemingly effusive praise to China for its assistance.
The Italian foreign minister credited China with saving lives in Italy, the Serbian president kissed the Chinese flag as he welcomed a shipment of medical supplies on the tarmac, and the Mexican foreign minister tweeted a photo of a plane delivering Chinese aid, writing "Gracias China!!!"
What's happening: Officials in some countries are now saying there was pressure to praise Beijing.Poland: In exchange for medical supplies, Chinese officials pressured Polish President Andrzej Duda to call Chinese President Xi Jinping to express gratitude
“Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda purposes, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, told the New York Times.
Germany: German officials have been approached by Chinese counterparts trying to get them to make positive public statements about China’s coronavirus response and international assistance, according to German newspaper Die Welt Am Sonntag.What they're saying: “What is most striking to me is the extent to which the Chinese government appears to be demanding public displays of gratitude from other countries; this is certainly not in the tradition of the best humanitarian relief efforts," Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.
“It seems strange to expect signed declarations of thanks from other countries in the midst of the crisis.”
The big picture: A quid pro quo for vital medical aid alienates global audiences who had at first been inclined to welcome Chinese Communist Party leadership in the fight against the coronavirus."The fairly aggressive party-state effort to 'tell a good China story' actually increases public awareness that these propaganda efforts on the Chinese side are going on," Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, told Axios.
"They are shooting themselves in the foot by being so pushy on this." -
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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I hate the CCP, I have nothing against the Chinese people.
China would have become THE superpower, if they would have used Taiwan or Hong Kong as a model. I guess that's a "duh" statement.
The Chinese people do hate the U.S., from what I've ascertained. Mainland Chinese seem to be in a system where the government tells the people whom to hate, and why. Once again, "we're number 1!"
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Put this story in the light of "had we done something sooner..."
https://apnews.com/3c061794970661042b18d5aeaaed9fae
Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.”
But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found.
Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents.
Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.
WHO officials were lauding China in public because they wanted to coax more information out of the government, the recordings obtained by the AP suggest. Privately, they complained in meetings the week of Jan. 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.
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Well, now they can coax the Chinese out of some money.
