Global Backlash Builds Against China Over Coronavirus
As
calls for inquiries and reparations spread, Beijing has responded aggressively,
mixing threats with aid and adding to a growing mistrust of China.
·
May 3,
2020Updated 9:08 a.m. ET
·
BRUSSELS
— Australia has called for an inquiry into the origin of the virus. Germany and
Britain are hesitating anew about inviting in the Chinese tech giant Huawei.
President Trump has blamed China for the contagion and is
seeking to punish it. Some governments want to sue Beijing for damages and
reparations.
Across
the globe a backlash is building against China for its initial mishandling of
the crisis that helped loose the coronavirus on the world, creating a deeply
polarizing battle of narratives and setting back China’s ambition to fill the
leadership vacuum left by the United States.
China,
never receptive to outside criticism and wary of damage to its domestic control
and long economic reach, has responded aggressively, combining medical aid to
other countries with harsh nationalist rhetoric, and mixing demands for
gratitude with economic threats.
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The
result has only added momentum to the blowback and the growing mistrust of
China in Europe and Africa, undermining China’s desired image as a generous
global actor.
Even
before the virus, Beijing displayed a fierce approach to public relations, an
aggressive style called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after two
ultrapatriotic Chinese films featuring the evil plots and fiery demise of
American-led foreign mercenaries.
With
clear encouragement from President Xi Jinping and the powerful Propaganda
Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a younger generation of Chinese
diplomats have been proving their loyalty with defiantly nationalist and
sometimes threatening messages in the countries where they are based.
“You
have a new brand of Chinese diplomats who seem to compete with each other to be
more radical and eventually insulting to the country where they happen to be
posted,” said François Godement, a senior adviser for Asia at the Paris-based
Institut Montaigne. “They’ve gotten into fights with every northern European
country with whom they should have an interest, and they’ve alienated every one
of them.”
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Since
the virus, the tone has only toughened, a measure of just how serious a danger
China’s leaders consider the virus to their standing at home, where it has
fueled anger and destroyed economic growth, as well as abroad.
In
the past several weeks, at least seven Chinese ambassadors — to France,
Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and the African Union — have been
summoned by their hosts to answer accusations ranging from spreading
misinformation to the “racist mistreatment” of Africans in Guangzhou.
Just
last week, China threatened to withhold medical aid from the Netherlands for
changing the name of its representative office in Taiwan to include the word
Taipei. And before that, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin sparred publicly with
the German newspaper Bild after the tabloid demanded $160 billion in compensation
from China for damages to Germany from the virus.
Mr.
Trump said last week that his administration was conducting “serious
investigations” into Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
He
has pressed American intelligence agencies to find the source of the virus,
suggesting it might have emerged accidentally from a Wuhan weapons lab,
although most intelligence agencies remain skeptical. And he has expressed
interest in trying to sue Beijing for damages, with the United States seeking
$10 million for every American death.
Republicans
in the United States have moved to support Mr. Trump’s attacks on China.
Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, filed a lawsuit in federal court
seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the outbreak.
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A
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, called the suit “frivolous,”
adding that it had “no factual and legal basis’’ and “only invites ridicule.”
The
suit seems to aim less at securing victory in court, which is unlikely, than at
prodding Congress to pass legislation to make it easier for U.S. citizens to
sue foreign states for damages.
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“From
Beijing’s point of view, this contemporary call is a historic echo of the
reparations paid after the Boxer Rebellion,” said Theresa Fallon, director of
the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, referring to the anti-imperialist,
anti-Christian and ultranationalist uprising around 1899-1901 in China that
ended in defeat, with huge reparations for eight nations over the next decades.
“The party’s cultivation of the humiliation narrative makes it politically
impossible for Xi to ever agree to pay any reparations.”
Instead,
it has been imperative for Mr. Xi to turn the narrative around, steering it
from a story of incompetence and failure — including the suppression of early
warnings about the virus — into one of victory over the illness, a victory
achieved through the unity of the party.
In
the latest iteration of the new Chinese narrative, the enemy — the virus — did
not even come from China, but from the U.S. military, an unsubstantiated
accusation made by China’s combative Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian.
Chinese
diplomats are encouraged to be combative by Beijing, said Susan Shirk, a China
scholar and director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of
California, San Diego. The promotion of Mr. Zhao to spokesman and his statement
about the U.S. Army “signals to everyone in China that this is the official
line, so you get this megaphone effect,” she said, adding that it makes any
negotiations more difficult.
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But
in the longer run, China is seeding mistrust and damaging its own interests,
said Ms. Shirk, who is working on a book called “Overreach,” about how China’s
domestic politics have derailed its ambitions for a peaceful rise as a global
superpower.
“As
China started getting control over the virus and started this health diplomacy,
it could have been the opportunity for China to emphasize its compassionate
side and rebuild trust and its reputation as a responsible global power,” she
said. “But that diplomatic effort got hijacked by the Propaganda Department of
the party, with a much more assertive effort to leverage their assistance to
get praise for China as a country and a system and its performance in stopping
the spread of the virus.”
In
recent days, Chinese state media has run numerous inflammatory statements,
saying that Australia, after announcing its desire for an inquiry into the
virus, was “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe.” Beijing warned that
Australia risked long-term damage to its trading partnership with China, which
takes a third of Australia’s exports.
“Maybe
the ordinary people will say, ‘Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat
Australian beef?’” China’s ambassador, Cheng Jingye, told The Australian
Financial Review. Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, dismissed China’s
attempt as “economic coercion.”
Even
in European countries like Germany, “the mistrust of China
has accelerated so quickly with the virus that no ministry knows how to deal
with it,” said Angela Stanzel, a China expert with the German Institute for
International and Security Affairs.
In
Germany, as in Britain, in addition to new questions about the advisability of using
Huawei for new 5G systems, worries have also grown about dependency on China
for vital materials and pharmaceuticals.
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France,
which traditionally has good relations with Beijing, has also been angered by
critical statements by Chinese diplomats, including a charge that the French
had deliberately left their older residents to die in nursing homes. That
prompted a rebuke from France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and anger
from legislators, despite an early reciprocal exchange of medical aid like
masks.
Recently,
the German government complained that Chinese diplomats were soliciting letters
of support and gratitude for Beijing’s aid and efforts against the virus from
government officials and the heads of major German companies.
The
same has been true in Poland, said the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, Georgette
Mosbacher, in an interview, describing Chinese pressure on President Andrzej
Duda to call Mr. Xi and thank him for aid, a call the Chinese heralded at
home.
“Poland
wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could
use that phone call” for propaganda, Ms. Mosbacher said.
There
is some unhappiness in China with the current diplomatic rhetoric. In a recent essay, Zi
Zhongyun, now 89, a longtime expert on America at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, sees parallels in the harsh nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of
the Wolf Warriors of today with the period around the Boxer Rebellion against
Western influence in China.
Ms. Zi said such reactions risked
getting out of hand.
“I can say without a doubt,” she
concluded, “that as long as Boxer-like activities are given the official stamp
of approval as being ‘patriotic,’” and as long as “generation after generation
of our fellow Chinese are educated and inculcated with a Boxer-like mentality,
it will be impossible for China to take its place among the modern civilized
nations of the world.”
Isabella Kwai
contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia. Monika Pronczuk contributed
research from Brussels.
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