Beijing’s decision to hide the severity of the novel coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak, a move that allowed the disease to spill over to other countries, has rendered communist China an “existential threat” to the globe, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre proclaimed on Wednesday.
China is the birthplace of the lethal and highly contagious Chinese coronavirus.
Referring to China’s coronavirus “cover-up” during a Tiananmen remembrance event online on Wednesday hosted by Students for a Free Tibet, Fengsuo Zhou, a survivor of the massacre and founder of Humanitarian China, declared, “With this communist party in power, the world is doom to repeat such a disaster.”
“This totalitarian regime, its globalization, and digital power, it cannot coexist with the universal values we love,” he added.
“Today’s China, under the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], it has become an existential threat to the world because there’s a pandemic we are all suffering from all over the world,” the Tiananmen massacre survivor explained. “This was because of a cover-up because there’s no freedom of people who can talk. There’s no way.”
His comments came on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the incident in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in which Chinese communist troops thwarted student-led protests in a bloody crackdown on June 4 and 5, 1989. Demonstrators were calling for democracy, free speech, and a free press, among other things.
Although there is no official count, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has endeavored to keep precise information about the incident a secret, estimates place the number of casualties in the thousands.
Alluding to China’s muzzling of whistleblower doctors who did not toe the CCP line of keeping silent about COVID-19, Zhou noted during the event on Wednesday:
Even the doctors, for example, very early [in the coronavirus outbreak], end of last year, Dr. Li Wenliang, discovered that this was striking like SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome]. He raised alarms to his internal circle — his friends, and family – warning them and he was censored. Later he died of it, months later, and that’s why it spread to so many people and now. So many killed and so many infected.
Health officials have named the coronavirus itself SARS CoV-2.
The Trump administration has lambasted Beijing for allowing the lethal and highly contagious novel coronavirus to spread by mismanaging its response and covering up the extent of the outbreak during its early stages, with the help of the China-influenced World Health Organization (W.H.O.), a United Nations entity.
U.S. intelligence and independent assessments have determined that China did cover up the severity of the coronavirus. Beijing reportedly muzzled and jailed whistleblowers and critics in a move that allowed the disease to spread and ravage other countries.
Both China, the birthplace of the novel coronavirus, and the W.H.O. have denied the assertions.
In late May, Trump announced he was severing ties with the W.H.O., ending U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to the U.N. agency for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus. America is the agency’s top source of funding.
The Trump administration has also taken action to prevent China from stealing research for vaccines and treatments to combat the Chinese coronavirus.