In the last few days, the first airlifts to Ukraine of medical supplies from China touched down in Kyiv. Ukraine is set to receive 10 million lab tests, 400,000 COVID-19 testing kits, 10 lung ventilators, and one million face masks.
Officials and the public in Ukraine (and other countries) are obviously expressing their gratitude for these Chinese donations, while Beijing state-owned media such as CCTV and CTGN are making a point of broadcasting the generosity 24-7. Soft power in action.
Special praise here in Ukraine has been reserved for the private businessman Jack Ma, co-founder of the Chinese tech company Alibaba, who donated $80 million to make the airlifts possible.
In the European Union, Chinese health officials and doctors are bravely working alongside their counterparts to try and bring the Wuhan pandemic under control. Beijing’s state-owned TV is enjoying that story too.
In China, things have slowed down but there are still new cases of COVID-19. The country continues to suffer. But we shouldn’t forget how it all started – with the inaction, negligence, and suppression of truth from a totalitarian regime in Beijing.
Another Chinese disease
How many more major global health crises will China fail to contain and then share with the world before its authorities clean up their act?
This catastrophic pandemic was avoidable and so were others that can be traced to China. The SARS outbreak of 2003 (8,000 infected, 724 dead) and the Asian swine flu pandemic of 2009 (394,000 cases, up to 13,000 suspected deaths).
COVID-19 is a global catastrophe and one of the biggest public health crises the modern world has ever faced, with more than 316,000 cases globally and at least 13,600 deaths to date.
Ukraine does not exist in an isolation ward. Action or inaction on the other side of the planet can infect our country too. There are 47 confirmed cases in Ukraine and three deaths. We expect those numbers to spike, and will be tallying the economic impact for the entire year, with thousands of businesses closed under quarantine and countless workers facing possible unemployment.
It’s good that some Chinese are sending some relief packages and expertise. But frankly, it is the least it can do. China did send us this pandemic in the first place.
Propaganda offensive
Chinese officials not only failed to contain the initial outbreak, but failed to properly inform the world of what was coming. The regime’s negligent attempt at a coverup must not be forgotten.
China’s doctors and nurses who have fought the Wuhan epidemic are heroes. But the Chinese Communist Party, led by their dictator Xi Jinping, has threatened and silenced them. Many are now dead.
The government in Beijing has suppressed or manipulated the truth about this outbreak from day one. Their lackeys in the secret police have silenced whistleblowers and tried to keep the coronavirus as China’s dirty little secret.
“Legitimate information about the virus has been suppressed by government control over the news and efforts to silence negative coverage. Numerous articles have been censored since the beginning of the crisis,” stated Amnesty International in a report.
“Online posts and hashtags related to the coronavirus… have been quickly deleted. Independent journalists and activists have been harassed by authorities for sharing information about the coronavirus…” it added.
These efforts to suppress free speech and allow the Chinese people to properly share important information about the virus likely meant people were not properly prepared or informed until the outbreak was already out of control.
The attempted coverup may have also significantly delayed the global response, leaving us all in the dark over the viral storm that was headed our way.
Democracy dies in darkness, as we know. And in China, uninformed and ill-prepared citizens are dying in the darkness of an information vacuum, where only state propaganda and deadly viruses can spread.
Even now, the Chinese authorities are aggressively trying to use social media and state-owned broadcasters to reshape the entire narrative around COVID-19.
Their disinformation inside and outside of the country is even attempting to dispute the fact that the pandemic originated in China, blaming the U.S. instead.
Ban the bloody markets
We cannot get the Chinese regime to stop relying on propaganda and instead allow a free press, but we must somehow insist that the country closes and outlaws its so-called wet markets. These disease-ridden, hellish, blood-soaked markets for dead flesh and live creatures are widespread in China and common in other Asian countries too. Virtually all experts agree that the novel coronavirus came from the barbaric and unsanitary conditions that are common in such Chinese animal markets.
I used to live and work in Southeast Asia and have traveled through China. For a year, I worked at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), running journalism workshops for NGO workers in Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Some of my former colleagues there are now under strict quarantine.
The marketplaces, where living, dead or dying animals are kept in close proximity to each other and humans, are a breeding ground for parasites, bacteria, and new viruses, experts say.
Chinese authorities and those in some Southeast Asian countries have routinely failed to act — even after one such market in China spawned the deadly SARS virus in 2002.
“It’s mother nature’s revenge,” said one conservationist on Australia’s ABC news, assessing that COVID-19 may have originated from the carcass of a critically endangered pangolin — routinely poached before being sold to wet market butchers in China.
If such marketplaces are not closed down and outlawed, another deadly pandemic is only a question of time.
