The Washington Post’s opinion section took a break this week from pushing racial grievances to promote Chinese communist propaganda.
“Democracy dies in darkness” indeed.
“I’m from Wuhan,” reads the headline to a Wednesday opinion article authored by journalist Xinyan Yu. “I got covid-19 — after traveling to Florida.”
Say, how did the virus get to Florida? Never mind. Moving on.
“Since news of the coronavirus began to emerge, I’ve been living with extreme vigilance. I wore masks everywhere, despite being coughed at and made fun of,” Yu writes. “‘Thank you, China. God bless America,’ a lady shouted at me at a supermarket near Washington in late March.”
Yu adds, “But the mocking didn’t bother me. I’ve seen what it takes for 11 million people in Wuhan to get the coronavirus under control, and I knew eventually everyone would have to come to terms with it.”
This is absurd. There is no way that the numbers out of Wuhan are accurate. Beijing claimed in March that new coronavirus cases for the mainland increased by only 1,782 since late February after it reported new cases jumped from 920 to roughly 80,000 between Jan. 23 and Feb. 29. That is not just incredible. It is totally unbelievable.
“In six months, it feels like China and the United States have swapped places: Wuhan, where it all started, has reported zero cases,” Yu writes, “and found just 300 asymptomatic carriers since late May, while some U.S. states are seeing thousands of new cases daily.”
To prove her point about China’s alleged success on the coronavirus battlefront, she includes a hyperlink to Chinese state media, in case you were wondering just how seriously you should take her article.
If you think that is the end of it for Yu, you are sorely mistaken. Her recitation of what is almost certainly Chinese propaganda goes on for quite a bit, including when she writes, “My mother is baffled by the U.S. pandemic response: ‘Americans just won’t listen,’ she would tell me with frustration.”
Yu adds of her mother, “She is used to seeing Chinese authorities aggressively stomp out every flare-up of the virus. In mid-May, Wuhan swabbed 9 million residents in a ‘10-day battle’ in response to a handful of new cases.”
After all that, and nearly 11 paragraphs into her opinion article, Yu eventually concedes that China’s handling of the virus has not been all that great.
“In China,” Yu writes, “whistleblowers and citizen journalists have been silenced, censors have been scrubbing content of dissent online, and rigid quarantine policies have displaced migrant workers and immigrants.”
Though it is good she acknowledges at least these points, one has to wonder why she would trust China’s case numbers or praise its coronavirus response, given that she already knows about its aggressive efforts to silence whistleblowers and scrub the official record.
Moreover, one has to wonder why the Washington Post would give space for a contributor to repeat uncritically China’s laughable assertion that it has defeated the virus it gave to the rest of the world. After all, China has been duplicitous and aggressively dishonest about the virus since day one, and its infections and fatality data are outright farcical. One has to wonder especially why the Washington Post would give space in its opinion pages to China’s alleged success story, given that the article’s author herself concedes we have no good reason to trust the Chinese government.
