The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday circulated an infographic on Twitter that claimed the United States has “poisoned the world” by allowing its citizens to travel with coronavirus infections.
This latest bit of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda contradicts the months of dogged undermining of travel bans that the Party engaged in, back when the world had a fighting chance to keep the Wuhan pandemic bottled up in China:
Twitter is strictly forbidden to Chinese citizens who are not high-ranking agents of the state.
In addition to accusing the United States of wantonly spreading the coronavirus, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sneered that the U.S. has “failed to control the pandemic at home” and whined about the persistent efforts by Americans to trace the origin of the coronavirus – an investigation in which much of the evidence points to the unsafe bio-research facility known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The Chinese state has concealed a great deal of critical data about the early days of the outbreak and thwarted attempts to conduct a thorough independent investigation of the Institute. Frightened and angered by persistent questions about its activities, the Chinese government concocted a bizarre retaliatory conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and spread with e-cigarettes, which it insists must be taken at least as seriously as the WIV lab leak hypothesis.
“The U.S. has recently enhanced its efforts to manipulate the origin tracing of Covid-19 via political means,” the Foreign Ministry propaganda bulletin railed on Tuesday. “It seemingly cares about the origin tracing work, but actually has done nothing conducive to it or global solidarity.”
In the early months of the pandemic, the Communist Party worked tirelessly to undermine travel bans that might have prevented the coronavirus from spreading beyond China.
China pulled strings with international organizations to secure recommendations against blocking travel for infected Chinese. Even as the Chinese government was locking Wuhan’s Hubei province down and forbidding internal travel, it pushed international travel.
On the other hand, when Beijing grew concerned about coronavirus cases coming back onto Chinese soil with foreign travelers, it did not hesitate to issue the very travel bans it had once ardently opposed.