China’s state-run Global Times on Friday slammed NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg for criticizing China’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Global Times howled that Stoltenberg was a liar, China clearly wants the Ukraine war to end, and NATO is more of a threat to world peace than the Chinese Communist Party.
Stoltenberg held a press conference ahead of a NATO summit in Brussels on Wednesday in which he accused China of giving Russia “political support” for the invasion of Ukraine, “including by spreading blatant lies and misinformation.”
Stoltenberg said NATO is concerned China’s political backing could escalate to “material support” for Russia and advised the Chinese government to “live up to its responsibilities” by joining the rest of the world in opposing the invasion.
“We face a fundamentally changed security environment where authoritarian powers are increasingly prepared to use force to get their way. Beijing has joined Moscow in questioning the right of independent nations to choose their own path,” he said.
Voice of America News (VOA) cited research that backed up Stoltenberg’s comments about China spreading misinformation on Russia’s behalf:
Posts by Chinese officials and news outlets have “remained largely aligned with Russian messaging,” according to analysis by the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks online propaganda.
“‘NATO’ was the tenth most used key phrase in Chinese tweets last week, as Chinese officials and state media continue to frame potential NATO enlargement as the root cause of Russia’s invasion,” the alliance said, noting Beijing also repeated Russian disinformation efforts tying the U.S. to biological weapons labs in Ukraine.
The Global Times responded on Friday by accusing Stoltenberg of “peddling lies which have confused black and white” while his “face skin might be thicker than the Berlin Wall,” which is evidently a tortured metaphor for lying with a straight face.
“Is NATO, the biggest promoter of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in any way qualified to point a finger at China, which has been facilitating dialogue for peace from the very beginning?” the Global Times shrieked.
After reciting some Chinese Communist boilerplate about how Beijing, which adamantly refuses to denounce the Russian invasion, wants nothing more than peace in Ukraine, the Global Times accused NATO of tricking Russia into attacking because it wants to recreate the Cold War to justify its continued existence.
“NATO, which has long been considered ‘brain dead,’ needs to find a life-saving ventilator, as relying on the oxygen brought about by creating a ‘Russophobia’ is increasingly insufficient. It fears it will expire at any time without being ‘intubated,’” the editorial ranted.
Those are some deeply offensive metaphors coming from the brutal regime that unleashed the Wuhan coronavirus upon the world and condemned millions of innocent people to suffer on very non-metaphorical ventilators. (The sputtering Chinese editors never got around to explaining they were attempting to riff on French President Emmanuel Macron referring to the “brain death” of NATO in a 2019 interview with The Economist).
The Global Times hooted that NATO’s focus on the rising threat of China proves it is merely a “tool for the U.S. to maintain hegemony” and a “machine for the implementation of the U.S.’ global will.”
“As long as NATO exists, there will be no day of peace in Europe and in the world,” the hysterical editorial concluded.