[Catherine Nay] China: coronavirus does Beijing’s business

While Europe and the United States are severely weakened by the pandemic, perhaps for a long time to come, China, the world’s factory, is in full swing. Its trade surplus reached 535 billion dollars (443 billion euros), a record. Without being able to travel, eat out, go to the movies, Western consumers spend their money on Chinese products: computers, laptops, video games, medical equipment, toys. Order books are overflowing. China is the big winner of the disease which started at home a year ago, in Wuhan, the first city in the world to be put in long-term confinement.

In this context, two images collide: the insolent health of China and its reluctance to welcome the ten investigators from the World Health Organization who want to know how the coronavirus was able to pass from animals to humans. It was very difficult for them to obtain visas. These scientists from Japan, Vietnam, Denmark or Germany, specialists in epidemiology, zoology or virology, ended up arriving in Beijing. They were immediately placed in quarantine for two weeks. Their visa being for six weeks, they will only have four weeks left to trace the epidemic. Not having the necessary experience to navigate Chinese political waters, we have already understood that these scholars will leave with little else than what Chinese propaganda wants to tell them, which intends to make people forget their responsibility in the pandemic. More than 2 million dead around the world.

The whistleblowers were held in solitary confinement for several weeks.

The supposed origin of the virus? Wuhan market where wild animals were sold: pangolins and other bats. The Chinese had admitted it. The proof: the market was burnt down last April. We removed the crime scene. Despite the authorities’ old promises to suppress them, these markets still exist without hygiene control. New viruses can therefore emerge.

But the Chinese regime is never wrong and cannot stand criticism. The whistleblowers were held in solitary confinement for several weeks. idem for a journalist who had covered the Wuhan epidemic: four years in prison! There is therefore no question of foreigners coming to investigate its territory at a time when China is stepping up its health diplomacy in Africa (construction and equipment of hospitals), to the detriment of Westerners. We wonder: if China refuses an investigation that is very little dangerous for it, it is perhaps because there is more serious to hide: a laboratory accident in Wuhan where this deadly virus would have started. An accusation launched several times by Donald Trump, the great enemy. The hypothesis has not been ruled out by Westerners.

So many very revealing events: China is no longer a developing country, but a giant that wants to put the world under its governance because it has the means for its ambition. Thanks to its technological advances, its research, China will soon hold all the patents. But, alas, this goes hand in hand with a true nature that it can no longer hide: its opaque, repressive regime, which tortures, deports, condemns minorities to forced labor, including Muslim Uighurs. In short, a dictatorship that gives chills.

This is why we regret the agreement facilitating access for European investments, signed on December 30, between the European Commission and China. And this, the very eve of the end of the German rotating presidency, that of Angela Merkel, who, anxious to respond to the concerns of German industrialists, wanted to end in style. The agreement is satisfied with a single quid pro quo in terms of respect for human rights: that China one day ratify the convention of the International Labor Organization on forced labor, when it is not even hiding from it. have recourse to it. Keep talking !! Emmanuel Macron had asked the Chinese for reciprocity. This is their response. MEPs, on the initiative of French Raphaël Glucksmann, would like to block this agreement.

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