It’s not easy being a Western diplomat in Beijing these days. It’s not just because of the restrictions imposed by the Chinese communist authorities to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
Ever since the virus broke out in Wuhan back in December 2019—which for some weeks was covered up by the authorities—Beijing has gone on a massive campaign of disinformation and intimidation.
It is targeting Western embassies based in China. It is targeting any democratic government that dares call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the new coronavirus. It is targeting any organization that dares to challenge China’s narrative about a virus that has already killed over 211,000 people worldwide as of April 28, 2020.
When Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, recently called for such an investigation, China threatened to retaliate by banning the import of wine and other products.
When the European External Action Service (EEAS) was putting the finishing touches to a report about how Russia and China are stepping up their disinformation campaigns throughout Europe, Beijing piled on the pressure on some of its diplomats. The report was released but watered down in parts, according to Politico Europe, which broke the story.
The report—on “narratives and disinformation” around the coronavirus pandemic—was finally published on April 24 with heavily toned-down language on China.
According to Politico Europe, references to Beijing running a “global disinformation” campaign and to Chinese criticism of France’s handling of the pandemic were removed. The final version of the report stated that “official and state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and—to a lesser extent—China, have continued to widely target conspiracy narratives and disinformation.”
The New York Times reported that an EU official who disagreed with the changes accused the EEAS of “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party.”
Why the self-censorship? Why the timidity of the EU not to speak openly about how China is making every effort to disseminate its own nationalist narrative about the origins of the new coronavirus?
As for Russia, its insidious campaigns of spreading false information about the virus and about how European governments are so badly prepared to deal with it are attempts to sow distrust and panic.
All this is happening at a time when people are dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, or are subject to severe restrictions in order to contain its spread.
China’s aggressive attempts to have its narrative accepted have not gone unchallenged in several EU countries.
Sweden, for one, which has criticized Beijing’s handling of the pandemic and the silencing of critics and human rights activists, has been subject to a barrage of intimidation by the Chinese ambassador in Stockholm. But other countries, particularly Hungary, never criticize Beijing because of the extremely close economic ties.
As for the EEAS’s rather timid criticism, if there is an element of self-censorship at play, then the EU is playing China’s game. In doing so, it is undercutting its own principles of transparency and truthfulness at a time when the need to understand how the new virus appeared is becoming more important by the day. Cover-up and self-censorship are not panaceas.
No doubt some EU countries fear that China will retaliate by threatening to ban certain imports. The EU and China are already two of the biggest traders in the world. China is now the EU’s second-biggest trading partner and the EU is China’s biggest trading partner.
But given the state of China’s economy—and Europe’s—Beijing is going to need all the economic support it can muster to bring back the high levels of growth needed for its stability and global influence.
More importantly, its tactics of intimidation and its attempts to silence critics could backfire in Europe and other democracies.
“China is shooting itself in the foot,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, a leading German Greens party member of the European Parliament. “All the kind of goodwill it tried to build up over the past thirty years since Tiananmen Square has gone down the drain in the past three months,” he told Carnegie Europe.
Huawei, China’s giant electronics company, may be the first casualty.
Before the pandemic broke out, European governments were divided about integrating Huawei into their 5G networks. That may be changing.
Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee warned against signing up to it. “Corona should teach us that we must not be dependent on China for critical infrastructure—not for masks and certainly not for 5G.” he tweeted. (Shipments of masks and testing equipment sent by China to several EU countries were found to be faulty.)
Indeed, if Germany opted for a European network it would be a massive setback for Huawei and a signal for other EU countries to follow Berlin’s line.
The European Commission is also becoming more aware of China’s attempts to establish a strong and influential presence in Europe’s infrastructure. Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, has proposed that European countries should buy stakes in certain companies instead of succumbing to Chinese takeovers.
“It’s clear what Europe should do with regard to China,” Bütikofer said. “There should be pushback. We have the instruments to do so, especially with the commission’s strategy paper on China.”
If only the EU member states were united, even over their own principles. Whether the coronavirus could make that happen is a big “if.”
Comments(9)
Communist dictatorships know how to handle wartime very well, and in the case of China we can assure that they are ready for "everything" in order to obtain an indisputable and all-powerful power. Chinese "patience" is the art of undermining the power of your neighbors and subduing them by overwhelming, constant, and stressful threat, in all known "settings", and with extreme, progressive, and boundless violence ... just imagine 800 million Chinese armed with the latest military technology (a small number of warriors if we refer to China) Imagine 100 armored divisions attacking Russia and Europe by land, with air support and launching millions of missiles ... The European Union should frivolize less with politics and cut relations of all kinds with China. It is the most dangerous and deadly enemy of freedom and liberal democracy.
Judy has opened for discussion a pretty complex issue for the EU, in good part because of the erratic stance of the Trump administration relating to the origins of Covid 19 within China and the likely failures of the Chinese government in preventing the spread of the virus early on. So I saw recently a retired US Army General who is very pro-Trump write: ”The Wuhan Virus, aka Covid-19, was developed in a Chinese laboratory and was apparently modified to be transmitted to humans.” I felt obliged to respond with noting that General Mark Milley chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has said “It should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that (the origins of Covid 19) and we’ve had a lot of intelligence look at that. And I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don’t know for certain.” The USA and China are on a very dangerous path right now, one that could lead to actual conflict. Both President Trump and Joe Biden are throwing media bombs at each other as to who was more pro-Chinese, it actually might be a good idea for the EU to stand down this time not out of fear of China, but out prudence.
China government knows that many people in the US and Europe fear the "danger" from breaking up with China. Some of them fear the loss of business in China, Some of them fear the conflicts with China. China under CCP is a beast. It is the time for Americans and Europeans to answer the question: should we bow to or fight against CCP China? If we continued to bow, then we would have to knee down to CCP some day.
CHINA HAS DESIGNED A HELL FOR THE UNITED STATES The Pentagon is the only obstacle to taking over the planet. We need luck to: Surviving a long struggle in the twilight was the first logical reaction of a sleepy American establishment that could not believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff's incredible and dramatic warnings had not, in due course, been preceded by a strategic report on Defense. as a "shake-up" to hurry up where precisely the sleeper reigns and the apathy of the well-to-do in the Pentagon. Some appropriate trumpet apocalyptic blast that would have set off the alarm, long before the pathetic acknowledgment of lack of resources and utter inoperativeness to deal with a credible naval deployment in the Indo-Pacific. A spectacle that could dissuade Communist China from dangerous attacks on Washington's allies and, above all, from the evident intention, by Beijing, to expel the US Navy from the Chinese seas. The United States can no longer afford to waste even a single minute responding to the "stinking" and ridiculous propaganda war of the Chinese Communist Party. The situation in the Department of Defense is so alarming and so serious that not even the specialists in the "Russian universe" pay any attention to the accompanying fanfare of Moscow in its attempt to get a cut in the European Union. It must be said in favor of Vladimir Putin that the Russian President is obliged-by necessity-to fish in troubled waters and take advantage of the gigantic chaos that is coming; and the one we already have on top. Crimea is a perfect example of the Russian President's strategic intelligence; that a smart guy lacks table manners is absolutely inconsequential in geopolitics. Someone should make this clear on Capitol Hill. We are not at Plato's banquet, but at the Peloponnesian War ...
In a recent discussion, Ferguson, an apologist of Empire, was mentioning that the Chinese he interacts with know history, and reference it (and exactly what Indians do). Parsing history, and especially re-writing it, is very dangerous in our time, when it is clear that only nuclear weapons have delayed a global conflict. China’s rise was part of the geopolitical competition between the US – USSR, Kissinger’s move was made ignoring Napoleon’s “Let her sleep, for when she wakes,”. So, China got huge help to wake up, lots of people made lots of money, lots of people lost their jobs (after being happy for a while, buying cheaper goods). Napoleon’s quote continues with “she will shake the world”, and after a generation of expansion never seen in world history, the world is shaken. It isn’t disinformation, in the sense that people don’t need to read the Renmin Ribao to assess how the European governments (and NATO) have handled the pandemic, they just need to read FT and compare with South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (Singapore on Thames talked first of heard immunity, as it was cheaper). It is that Australia’s economy can be devasted if tomorrow China cuts its economic ties. It isn’t just wine, it is beef, energy exports, education and tourism, which is a mix of exports which is more associated with a colony, not an advanced industrial economy; check along these lines the exports of other countries, except Germany. Education is a separate topic, and it is now across the entire Western world, budget cuts everywhere as many full tuition paying students are from China. Rottgen is from Germany, once an engine of industrial leaps forward (sometimes very unfortunate), and it is shocking to see him complaining about Europe relying on China for PPE and anything advanced, be it laptop, quantum encryption or 5G. It isn’t disinformation that China is the factory of the world. It gets even worse, when the focus shifts to the UK, where the industrial revolution started. It isn’t about lack of PPE, it is about an Oxford successful vaccine test. It shows that the West still has scientific capacity, but it doesn’t have a functional socio-economic blueprint. Friedman taught too many people that money is the only thing that matters, nothing else, until China was awaken and changed the world. The Western way of solving problems is going to war; even now this article, NYT and Obama don’t forget Russia, the more enemies the better. This time is different, China and India cast their own course.
China will become the new god of the world and everyone will be on their knees in 2021, with the current mentality of world leaders and billionaires around the world
After D. Trump's unextected victory, there was a "Russia-Russia -Russia" collusion campaign which amounted to very little in the final report, even including about 100000$expenses on facebook. Now, with the epidemic, we seem to be hearing the samevthing with China. The issue with China is not its propaganda: EU countries are at least as good at it. It is its industrial power. Huawei is making better and cheaper electronics than EU firms. and the accusation of potential spying by the US is gross, coming from a country which spies over the whole Internet everywhere in the world. The answer should be a european policy of strengthening its own industry. We are not hearing anything like this. Is the dominant ideology prevailing over necessity?
With hindsight western goverments should have never got so deeply involved in dictatorships and one party states, by intertwinning there trade and supply chains so dependant on them. This is a failure of democracy, freedoms of peoples, basic human rights, and a free press, now we see the pitfalls that have beset them. The democracies of the World should after WW2 should NEVER! have fully engaged with these actors, as they should have learned the lessons of the past from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the Japanese Junta of the 30s and 40s. How to undo this grave mistake is to combine as a giant democratic trade group with rules of the WTO on trade and defence of NATO applied to democratic nations around the world. Sadly thats what should have been done after WW2 but we are not in that place now and will never likely get there, possibly we may get a great or great world leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt that could push something like this along. Because this world will never rid itself of dictators and gangster states until this happens. This great mistake of shunning these undemocratic actors is a failure of democratic statecraft which is waiting for a reckoning, Trumps US is challenging this possibly one of the few things I would agree with him, sadly to say.
I am an overseas Chinese. China Xi Jinping/CCP cover-up of the pandemic has opened my eyes wide. Unbelievably devastating to find that no other country is standing up to China except US Trump. The whistle-blowers who tried to tell the truth have likely lost their lives for nothing. China should be shunned at all costs and not allowed to gain more power. Democracy is so at risk. What's happened to the UK? Are they not putting their weight behind the US?
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