A Chinese aid team arrive at Fiumicino International Airport in Rome on Thursday last week.
Posted on 03/20/2020 7:03:50 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
PROPAGANDA PUSH: Aid is much needed, but China is consciously exercising its soft power in supplying it, a Mercator Institute for China Studies analyst said.
As Europe becomes the epicenter of the coronavirus, Beijing is stepping up its outreach to individual governments there.
That is coming at the very moment that the US — and in some cases the EU — is seen to be turning away. The result is a battle for hearts and minds that China seems to be winning, at least for the moment.
“It’s great that China has this availability and that it is currently in a position to offer this kind of help,” Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies analyst Lucrezia Poggetti said.
Aid is much needed, but in supplying it, China is consciously exercising its soft power, she said.
“There is a major propaganda push at play on the side of the Chinese with some willing enablers on the European side,” Poggetti said.
For China, the outreach to Europe is part of an effort to claw back an international leadership role after early cover-ups helped the virus spread well beyond its borders.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government has sought to silence critics, including reporters and online commentators, and it has also spread conspiracy theories about where the virus originated.
Xi this week described China’s mass deployment of medical aid to Europe as an effort to further a “Health Silk Road,” stretching his Belt and Road Initiative.
Along with state help for stricken countries such as Italy, aid is being channeled across the continent by private companies in the name of Beijing, helping to burnish China’s image from France to Ukraine.
China’s ambassador in Athens on Wednesday delivered more than 50,000 protective masks to the Greek minister of health.
(Excerpt) Read more at taipeitimes.com ...
A Chinese aid team arrive at Fiumicino International Airport in Rome on Thursday last week.
Italy is devastated, at least in part due to shortage of masks and medical supplies which China has up to now withheld and which the EU’s atrophied manufacturing base cannot supply in sufficient quantity.
EU abandons Italy
China comes in to “save the day” on a crisis totally of China’s own making
What a group of humanitarians
Heard from a friend that is a big Twitter-person that it has already been put out there that China has and has been sitting on drugs to cure the virus and will now try to come in on a white horse to save the day.
I think China’s “soft bio-weapon attack”, primarily aimed at the US to destroy our economy and get rid of the President, got out of control faster than they could have imagine and is going to come back and bite them in the a$$ in a big way. When this all settles down and the President starts getting corporations to move their manufacturing to Vietnam, SKorea, India and, who knows where else, China will become the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.
Probably with vials of the nasty stuff to insure the west suffers enough to give China the competitive long term advantage.
China figures it will be easier to buy off the EU bureaucrats than the US.
US bureaucrats are easy. And don’t get me started on the press!
What a group of idiots if these countries buy the line of crap being pushed by China. The initiating cause of Italy’s grief is China’s decision to export Coronavirus, because Trump hadn’t levied a tariff on it.
The Chinese do this while they threaten America.
When this settles down, President Trump has some unpleasant surprises for China, IMO. He hinted at just that yesterday.
Those who push the panic, sell the pill.
The Chinese government needs to be destroyed and the Chinese people need to be free.
We need to get our biz the hell outta there, and let the Chinese people worry about the Chinese government.
Ditto to all the posts above this one
Well, China owes us all big time.
For sure. To Hell with China. We need a Marshall Plan to manufacture what we need right here in the USA and medicine should be on top of the list.
Brought to you by the Chinese Propaganda Ministry. C’mon even here?
Oh Good it’s the Second Wave
This is all following the Chernobyl script just a biological version instead of a nuclear version. Maybe it will result in the final political collapse of the Chinese Communist state.
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