“Hide your dagger behind a smile.” According to a classic Chinese text on geopolitical strategy, one should charm enemies while moving in secret against them. This principle sums up how Beijing has manipulated and usurped international institutions for decades to further its geopolitical ambitions and disguise its communist tyranny.
The coronavirus pandemic has let the world see the oversight deficit of the Chinese Communist Party’s stranglehold over the World Health Organization. As was noted in our organization’s coronavirus cover-up timeline, the WHO has promoted and helped legitimize the CCP’s lies since the emergence of the virus.
In December, Chinese doctors like Dr. Li Wenliang began sounding alarm bells over the virus, and Taiwan reported evidence of transmission among humans to both the WHO and Chinese authorities. Yet as late as mid-January, the WHO unquestioningly repeated Beijing’s claim that no evidence existed of human-to-human transmission. The organization urged countries not to close borders to foreigners from China even as President Xi Jinping himself had shut down travel from Wuhan within China. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus even had the gall to express confidence in the quality of China’s investigations and praise China’s efforts in late January.
Under the 2005 International Health Regulations, which the WHO is responsible for enforcing, member states are required to notify the WHO within 24 hours of assessment of any events that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern. The inaction of the WHO in the cover-up of the pandemic has cost tens of thousands of lives and tens of millions of livelihoods. And this is not the first time the WHO witnessed misinformation from Beijing concerning global health issues.
International Health Regulations had already been strengthened in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic specifically to eliminate the possibility of a future cover-up. Yet the WHO failed to investigate properly any evidence of a potential epidemic weeks after it had emerged. The WHO officially declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11, yet on March 25, Tedros admitted that “the time to act was actually a month ago, two months ago.”
Due to the objections of Beijing, the WHO has also sidelined Taiwan — an advanced democracy whose pandemic response has been exemplary, including its early warning to the WHO about the virus. It has been rebuffed from participation in the organization. According to reports, Taiwan has seen only hundreds of cases compared to the thousands that most developed countries have confirmed.
WHO’s negligence in investigating the emergence of the virus has resulted in unprecedented international criticism of the organization and in particular of Tedros — a member of a Maoist political party of Ethiopia who had previously quashed news of cholera outbreaks in Africa.
Last month, President Trump announced that the United States would halt funding to the WHO. Also, a group of U.S. senators sent Tedros a letter about their investigation into the international response to the WHO to the virus — particularly that of the WHO. Other governments, including Japan and Australia, have criticized its response. Rightly so, the Japanese deputy prime minister has called it the “Chinese Health Organization.”
This complicity of the WHO in the Chinese cover-up of the coronavirus pandemic is the tip of the iceberg concerning an increasing lack of oversight of China’s human rights practices at international organizations. Just last month, China was appointed to a seat on the Consultative Group of the United Nations Human Rights Council, tasked with appointing independent human rights experts. It is outrageous that a country inflicting a campaign of cultural genocide against its ethnic and religious minorities, such as the incarceration of over 1 million Uighur Muslims, should be given any responsibility to oversee human rights practices. It is an institutional oxymoron.
In recent years, China has gained increasing influence over U.N. human rights bodies and has used this influence to obstruct civil society participation and human rights mechanisms to establish accountability for human rights violations. This is also the reason why U.N. bodies have failed to hold China accountable for the horrific practice of forced organ harvesting.
The moral scandal only gets worse. Despite mounting evidence of extrajudicial killing in China for organ harvesting, the WHO has praised China for its organ transplant reforms and given it leadership on the WHO task force responsible for its oversight. Officials have even admitted that oversight of China on this issue is based on China’s own self-assessment. Recently, our organization released an extensive research report detailing how the Chinese Communist Party has falsified official data sets on organ transplantation and evidence of the victimization of Muslim Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners.
China has won global trust and used its dagger against Western institutions. As the history of communism shows, it is all strategically sound, from infiltrating international bodies to extrajudicially dissecting human ones. As the coronavirus pandemic has made the daggers visible, it is about time we stopped smiling too.
Kristina Olney is director of government relations for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
