“History will remember China’s achievements and U.S.’ shames in Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] battle,” declared the first of a string of editorials in Chinese state media on Wednesday and Thursday that presented the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as a stepping stone to greatness for China and a gravestone for the American century.
Hu Xijin, editor of the state-run Global Times, argued the spreading wave of coronavirus cases China began admitting to this week is nothing compared to the bio-horror engulfing the inept democracy of the United States.
“Having 107 cases confirmed in one day is very scary to Chinese [sic]. But in the US, over 4,400 people died from coronavirus between Monday evening and Tuesday evening local time. Meanwhile, more than 230,000 Americans were tested positive for the virus on the same day. It is unimaginable what our lives would be like if this scenario occurred in China!” he wrote.
Hu was absolutely giddy that the pandemic has supposedly delivered a lethal lesson in the superiority of Chinese authoritarianism:
The US and Western countries tossed out quite a few showy rhetoric. They hijacked the public’s attention in an attempt to make a good excuse for their own incompetence. In any previous war, the US did not lose over 4,400 people in one day. The US failures in this battle are completely unforgivable. It can be argued that US national governance has collapsed in the face of this virus.
This winter will really test different governments’ leadership and their peoples’ ability to unite as a whole; instead of simply bragging about themselves.
Compared with the US and other Western countries, China’s performance in the COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] fight may be much too better. It has become meaningless for China to compare with the US, as if China deliberately wants to criticize the country. In fact, it is the US that always wants to compare itself with China in terms of human rights. The US does not even feel embarrassed about its poor human rights situation, forcing people like me to make necessary counterattacks against it: Do not discuss human rights with others when you are failing to stop masses of American people from dying of COVID-19.
Another Global Times editorial celebrated the coronavirus-fueled political demise of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) most pugnacious adversaries in Washington:
The COVID-19 fight led by Trump was a total failure. Although this has had some impact on his election, the blow to his reputation is far from fundamental. Trump’s protests against the election results have caused him much more trouble, like a second impeachment, and he has been silenced by the US social media. The different penalties show how “tolerant” the US system is for the malfeasance which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
It would be the Democratic Party’s most urgent task to completely defeat Trump, eliminate the possibility of him running for president again in 2024 and holding official titles after stepping down, as well as to try its best to suppress and divide the Republican Party. Although fighting COVID-19 is important, it is the responsibility of Trump and the Republican Party for how many people would have died before January 20. The Democratic Party is only responsible for what happens afterward.
The US, a country which has performed very poorly in the COVID-19 fight, has a shameless secretary of state who has not done any work to promote the global COVID-19 fight, but has tried his best to pull hatred in the world and create geopolitical confrontation between major powers.
The Global Times singled out Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a failed epidemiologist because Pompeo has been an unflagging critic of China’s human rights violations. Pompeo announced new sanctions against China over its “coercive behavior” in the South China Sea on Thursday.
One of the CCP’s most persistent coronavirus political narratives is that all criticism of China’s bad behavior must cease because China supposedly did the best job in the world of controlling the pandemic. The Global Times editorialists went over the top into foaming rage while hammering that point later in their editorial:
China and the US are not at the same level in epidemic control and prevention. The Chinese people are not willing to make a comparison with the US in this regard. If it were in a socialist country, a large number of officials would have been sent to court with so many deaths. It is not a question of how good or bad they had performed in this fight, but the extent to which they should be investigated in crimes of negligence. Washington asks to be insulted when it shouts the so-called human rights at China, inviting us to simply tear off its mask and point to its nose and say: Are you guys qualified to talk about human rights? Your own people are dying in droves!
“The U.S. is the most failed country of 2020,” the editorial concluded.
The Global Times also strove to minimize the new coronavirus wave sweeping through supposedly virus-free China at the moment, insisting the cases were asymptomatic, the patients were mostly old people from backward villages, and the deaths are due to “underlying causes.”
Another state media outlet, China Daily, on Thursday dismissed the outbreak swelling around Beijing as a minor problem that will pass quickly.
“It is highly unlikely that China will experience a major resurgence of the novel coronavirus during the upcoming Spring Festival, given that the nation has created containment measures to quickly identify, isolate and control any possible outbreaks,” China Daily quoted a health official predicting.
The Spring Festival is usually a time of heavy travel and tourism in China, which factored into the early spread of the coronavirus after the initial outbreak in Wuhan last year. Chinese officials claimed lessons have been learned and the new outbreak “will be contained in no time as long as the containment measures are promptly and decisively implemented.”