China is shaping a fake narrative of the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s not going to work.
The facts are clear. China enabled its domestic epidemic to become a global pandemic by hiding the scale and nature of what was happening in Hubei province in December 2019 and January 2020. It refused to allow international health teams into Wuhan city to study the virus. And it failed to restrict travel outside China, even when the virus had spread across the mainland.
China presents a different version of truth.
In its false “truth,” China says that any criticism over its early handling over the epidemic is racist. Beijing insists that it is leading the global effort to provide scientific research and guidance and medical supplies to those in need. At the same time, its minions now say that U.S. Army soldiers spread the virus, and (truly absurdly) that speedy U.S. vaccine research shows America had been working on COVID-19 long before the outbreak. What we’re seeing here is a threefold strategy: deflect culpability, damage America, and deploy this crisis to present China as a powerful force for good in the world.
It’s getting some good traction at the moment, but it won’t work in the long term.
Yes, China is winning some absurdly good press. And yes, China is delivering medical supplies to nations like Italy which badly need it. But China’s problem is the horizon of suffering and of truth. Namely, what will happen in the coming months as more people around the world suffer directly or indirectly from this pandemic, and as more people learn of what Xi Jinping’s regime knew about, but did not do, to confront it.
Most of the Western world is likely to still be under some kind of lockdown even at the start of May. That’s a lot of isolation for more than a billion people who are accustomed to socializing and free movement. Now combine that reality with the likelihood that healthcare systems are going to be increasingly burdened. This won’t simply affect those with the coronavirus, but those who need medical care for other serious conditions such as cancer and heart disease. If they can’t access that care in the manner they expect, well, they and their families are going to be rather upset. Then there’s the economic impact ripping through the global economy like a tsunami. Hundreds of millions of people may lose their jobs. Supply chains and small businesses will be smashed. The coronavirus will ensure that human suffering is an economic factor as much as a healthcare factor.
And all of this will happen as we learn more about China’s effort to conceal the nature of the original epidemic. Against the hardships of the lockdown, more and more people will start blaming Xi’s regime for what it enabled. The truth will show that Xi and his Communist Party minions were far more concerned about their own reputations than they were about protecting humanity. Again, people are going to want someone to blame. And as they look closer at China, people will see the reality of what that communist regime does to its own people and others. In turn, they’ll have an increasingly low regard for Xi’s coronavirus excuses.
Xi, in short, has a public relations problem.
