Coronavirus has infected 1.6 million people worldwide and has resulted in deaths of more than 100,000 people but China, the source of the virus, remains defiant and shrugs off its responsibility to contain the virus and inform the world about the virus at the earliest.
Europe is discussing how China has become a global threat due to its mismanagement of the virus, delayed response, censorship, and lies, as written in New Europeerts by Herman Tertsch, Spanish Member of the European Parliament.
China could possibly face a global backlash for failing to contain the coronavirus and refusing the magnitude of the crisis that has resulted in the world entering an unprecedented crisis, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has called an "unchartered territory".
China refused the take initial help from the US and WHO in February to contain the virus and reported that all is under control despite China knowing that there would be no U-turn for a pandemic of this sort.
Tertsch says that there are several indicators that point out why China is becoming a global threat and why the world must reply to it quickly.
He alleges that even though the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew about the disease as early as November 2019, it however, chose to keep it under wraps.
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The country immediately scrambled to silence and discredit the doctors who first reported the virus from Wuhan on state-run social media service WeChat.
They immediately accused the doctors of spreading misinformation. Given that the state was in denial of the virus, it did not provide adequate production for the doctors many of which were the earliest whistleblowers of the virus. These doctors are either missing or dead, writes Tertsch
Tertsch quotes a report by Radio Free Asia that says the total death toll due to the outbreak in China was reported to be 3, 500 but hospitals in the region had been handing back 500 sets of ashes of deceased people every day.
Tertsch writes, "Chinese state media began to report disinformation to deflect from their own poor handling of the quarantine. 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."
At the same time Chinese authorities pursued a program of public relations that included sending millions of euros worth of aid to Europe in the form of ventilators, masks, and other personal protection equipment, Tertsch writes.
However, he says, "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. As a result, China's public relations campaign has backfired."
Such a campaign of misinformation is not the first one according to Tertsch. He says the Communist Party holds one of the world's tightest control and censorship on information and have tried to export their propaganda through video sharing services.
The video-sharing like Tik-Tok is full of videos where Chinese doctors could be seen arriving in Italy and Italians singing Chinese national anthem.
European Conservatives and Reformists Party will meet on a virtual panel conversation to discuss China as a new global threat in the backdrop of coronavirus crisis. He would be joined by other like-minded people from 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, will also join the debate to uncover China's lies.
He concluded by saying, "It is clear that for many years now China under the Communist Party has not been a fair player on the world stage and is increasingly considered as a rising threat to the Western World.