A woman wearing a protective mask is seen past a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping on a street as the country is hit by an outbreak of the coronavirus, in Shanghai, China March 12, 2020. REUTERS/Aly Song
Brussels [Belgium], April 12 (ANI): A senior Spanish member of the European Parliament and Vice-Chairman of the Conservatives Group, Herman Tertsch has lashed out at China for lying and misinforming the world about the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed over a hundred thousand people worldwide, devastated the global economy and still continues to perish people across the continents.
Writing a scathing commentary in the New Europe, the European Parliament arian has held China directly responsible for the pandemic saying that Chinese Communist Party-led regime knew about it in November yet chose to keep silent and mislead the world about its “punishing global consequences with the worst supposedly yet to come.” Tertsch, whose country has lost five times more lives than that of China ‘s official death toll in the pandemic, has padded up his arguments with facts in the piece.
When doctors treating Covid-19 patients in Wuhan- the epicentre of coronavirus , raised the red flag about the deadly virus on state-run social media service WeChat, the regime outrightly discredited them. Later these ‘whistle-blowers’ either died or ‘disappeared.’ The World Health Organisation and the US’ Centre for Disease Control (CDC) offered to send experts to China to help in containing the virus but China lied and said they had it all under control- even as the lethal pathogen had started spiralling out of control, bursting out into other countries.
The Spanish leader suggests that China , in order to not let the world know about the severity of the impending doom, lied about the havoc that the virus wreaked on its own people. He cites an investigation about Radio Free Asia, which has poked holes in China ‘s claim that 3,500 people died of Covid-19 in the country. “Hospitals in the region had been handing back an average 500 sets of ashes of deceased relatives a day.
The city had also reportedly ordered over 45,000 urns to their hospitals. The estimated number of deaths in China has instead been reported to be around 40,000 people – not 3,500,” writes Tertsch. The journalist-cum-politician hasn’t spared the Chinese media as well, which instead of being a watchdog, was hand-in-glove with the regime, deflecting attention and reporting disinformation. “They started to spread stories that the United States or the United Kingdom had created the virus as a biological weapon, none of which is based on fact.
They began to escalate the war of words with US President Donald Trump and accused the United States of not having taken the crisis seriously,” Tertsch asserts. China did not stop here. After a damage had been done, it pursued a ‘program of public relations’ by sending medical aid and equipment to Europe, which was reeling severely from China -originated Coronavirus. But this, backfired. “Unfortunately for the Communist Party, much of that equipment was defective.
The Dutch ministry of health was forced to recall 600,000 face masks because they didn’t protect health workers. Spain and Croatia have had similar issues with faulty Chinese equipment,” the member of European Parliament writes. Such a campaign of misinformation is not the first one, according to Tertsch. He said that the Chinese Communist Party holds one of the world’s tightest control and censorship on information, exporting their propaganda through various means.
The Chinese video-sharing app, TikTok, popular amongst youngsters, gleans data of the users from the Western World to push China ‘s propaganda, like deleting the pro-Tibetan content last year. “A leaked strategy document from TikTok’s parent company revealed the extent to which Beijing was censoring posts from outside China . The app has also been used during this crisis to promote propaganda videos of Chinese doctors arriving in Europe, including fake videos of Italian people singing the Chinese national anthem from their balconies,” Tertsch elucidates.
He further argues that the Asian Dragon has its eyes set on the intellectual property of the West in order to fuel the black market of fake goods that are sold around the world, denting big into European companies. Tertsch again puts out a fact to substantiate, saying, “in January 2019, a major telecommunications company from China faced heavy criticism for having allegedly attempted to steal or stolen intellectual property from six US firms, including T-Mobile.
Equally, Apple has repeatedly been the subject of IP theft in China and industrial sabotage. A poll conducted by CNBC found that 1 in 5 American companies claimed to have had their intellectual property stolen by China .” Calling China a new global threat, the Spanish Member of the European Parliament said that soon he will meet the European Conservatives and Reformists Party on a virtual panel conversation to discuss China.
“The panel will consist of leading European politicians including my colleagues at the European Parliament Anna Fotyga, who has recently been appointed to NATOs Reflection Committee, and Carlo Fidanza, as well as Mattias Karlsson MP and former leader of the Swedish Democrats,” he says. (ANI)
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