China Floats Anonymous Report Biden May Pull Diplomats over Coronavirus Crisis

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday quoted an anonymous source “familiar” with the U.S. State Department’s thinking to claim the Biden administration is planning to withdraw American diplomatic personnel due to the deteriorating coronavirus “epidemic situation” in China.

“While the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed serious concerns and dissatisfaction over such a plan, Chinese experts said by politicizing China’s anti-epidemic work, such ill-intentioned tactics expose only the true intention of Washington in sabotaging the Winter Olympic Games and its inconsistent China policy,” the Chinese Communist paper fulminated.

“Such tricks ahead of the Chinese New Year and the Winter Games showed [the Biden administration’s] true intention, which is beyond the anti-epidemic consideration but only serves to create panic, slander China’s anti-epidemic work and disrupt China’s successful hosting of the Winter Olympics,” the editors raged.

The Global Times used the highly dubious numbers released by the Chinese government to argue that China is “one of the safest places in the world,” so leaving it to escape the Wuhan coronavirus is insane:

According to data from Worldmeters, a real-time statistics site, as of press time on Wednesday, the US has more than 72 million coronavirus infection cases and a death toll of 891,595. US media reported that cities and states are still struggling with a high demand for hospital services due to the spread of the Omicron variant, and in the past 24 hours, there have been 789,789 new confirmed cases and 1,583 new deaths.

About 2,000 Americans are dying from COVID-19 each day, ticking up from December. COVID-19 deaths, which often lag days to weeks behind outbreaks, are still increasing nationally.

In contrast, 4,636 patients died as a result of the virus infections on the Chinese mainland since the onset of the pandemic. And the toll has remained unchanged for almost a year, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.

The editorial sputtered along for thousands more words, dredging up “Chinese experts” who confidently asserted the flailing Biden administration is trying every sleazy trick it can think of to embarrass China ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics. For extra bonus fun, the Global Times even railed against the U.S. for suspending flights to China – exactly the sort of measure China imposes without hesitation when it wants to protect itself from coronavirus outbreaks in other countries.

The Global Times’ editorial aneurysm spilled over into a second article built off Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian chiding the U.S. for pulling diplomats out of the authoritarian wonderland to escape from a virus China had totally conquered until dastardly Canadians shipped the omicron variant to Shenzhen in a package of frozen fish.

Zhao was quoted expressing China’s “serious concerns and dissatisfaction” over the Biden administration’s irrational insult, and warning that leaving China “will only greatly increase the risk of infections for U.S. personnel.”

The Associated Press (AP) on Wednesday quoted an unidentified State Department spokesperson who said the “operating status at our mission in the PRC has not changed.” PRC is the People’s Republic of China, the Communist government’s preferred name for itself.

“Any change in operating status of this nature would be predicated solely on the health, safety, and security of our colleagues and their family members,” the State Department spokesperson said.

China has filed a formal protest with the State Department over the alleged withdrawal order, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

According to the SCMP’s sources, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing “sent a departure request to Washington for a formal sign-off,” but it appears to be based on specific concerns raised by individual diplomatic staffers about China’s draconian coronavirus control policies, rather than fear of catching the virus itself. In other words, the staffers in question were worried about getting caught in dungeon-style lockdowns like the one imposed on the city of Xi’an for over a month.