On Saturday, the Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 face masks. The equipment had arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on 21 March, and had already been distributed to front-line medical teams.

Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate,

"The rest of the shipment was immediately put on hold and has not been distributed,” a statement read. “Now it has been decided not to use any of this shipment.”

Spain’s government encountered similar problems with testing kits ordered from a Chinese company.

It announced it had bought hundreds of thousands of tests to combat the virus, but revealed in the following days that nearly 60,000 could not accurately determine if a patient had the virus.

The Chinese embassy in Spain tweeted that the company behind the kits, Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology, did not have an official license from Chinese medical authorities to sell its products.

It clarified that separate material donated by the Chinese government and technology and retail group Alibaba did not include products from Shenzhen Bioeasy.

Turkey also announced that it had found some testing kits ordered from Chinese companies were not sufficiently accurate, although it said that some 350,000 of the tests worked well.

Allegations of defective equipment come after critics warned China could be using the coronavirus outbreak to further its influence.

In a blog post last week, EU chief diplomat Josep Borrell warned that there is “a geo-political component including a struggle for influence through spinning and the ‘politics of generosity’.”

“China is aggressively pushing the message that, unlike the US, it is a responsible and reliable partner,” he wrote. "Armed with facts, we need to defend Europe against its detractors."

據《華盛頓時報》3月30日報道，中共政府的研究人員發現並分離了2000多種動物病毒，並在武漢P4實驗室，一個離野生動物交易市場三英里的地方，開展了各種科學研究。

這次襲卷全球致幾十萬人感染的病毒，被很多人認為源於蝙蝠，然後通過傳染了位於武漢的野生動物市場的動物最終傳染了人。但這個致命病毒的來源至今還是個迷。

就在疫情爆發後，中共官員們拒絕向美國提供毒侏樣本給美國研究人員，也不允許國際病毒專家去武漢。

“這是人類歷史上最惡劣的掩蓋事實，現在全世界都要面對這場大瘟疫的爆發。”麥克.麥考爾(Micael T.McCaul)上周說，他是德州共和黨人，也是國會外交事務委員會的重要成員，他認為中共政府應該要為這次全球疫情負責。

關於中共在蝙蝠病毒上的深入研究以及各種相關報道，不得不讓人們對中共政府有必要公開這些研究工作的呼聲越來越高。

研究蝙蝠病毒之領銜人物：田俊華

一些中共媒體在最近幾個月宣傳有關病毒研究的新聞里，出現了一位名叫田俊華的研究人員，他是蝙蝠病毒研究的重要參與者和領導人之一。

在去年12月由中共政府資助拍攝的一段視頻流傳於互聯網。視頻中，這位田先生在湖北省的某個山洞裡，從捕捉的蝙蝠身上提取樣本並儲存在小玻璃瓶里。

中共官員聲稱病毒是通過武漢華南海鮮批發市場裡的野生動物傳染給人的，而巧合的是，這個批發市場不遠處就是武漢疾病控制預防中心，也是全國研究蝙蝠病毒的地方。

有一個名叫《曠野青春之隱形防線》的中文視頻，記錄了研究人員如何小心處理這些含有致命病毒的蝙蝠，在這個7分鐘的短片裡，炫耀了中共如何在全球處於領先地位，在過去12年中發現超過2000種新病毒，也恰是在SARS病毒爆發之後的這段時間。目前正在爆發的病毒就是SARS病毒的一種，稱為SARS Coronavirus–2,，無獨有偶，都可以追蹤到蝙蝠病毒上。

短片裡提到，在中共開展研究前，全世界在過去200年才發現了2284種病毒。中共黨媒透露這位田先生有次沒有穿防護服在山洞裡，並接觸了蝙蝠的尿液，為了避免傳染，他自我隔離了14天，和現在的疫情建議隔離時間一致。

這位田先生，在武漢疾控中心消毒與病媒生物防治所工作，根據2017年5月武漢晚報的報道，他自2012年以來捕捉了上千隻蝙蝠用於研究蝙蝠病毒。“蝙蝠身上有大量人類未發現的病毒，”他說，“對蝙蝠的研究越多，就對人類的健康越有好處。”這位研究人員還從虱子，老鼠和黃蜂身上收集病毒。在一次意外接觸蝙蝠尿液後，他和妻子保持了安全距離，“只要我在14天隔離期間沒有得病，就說明我幸運的沒有被感染，”他說。

武漢的相關報道稱收集病毒標本是件非常困難，危險而且不易被資助的事情。深圳日報，一個共青團主辦的報紙，在去年12月報道這位田先生，翻山越嶺尋找蝙蝠和虱子的病毒，所謂的“原始病毒攜帶體”，目的是為了發明疫苗。報道說過去12年中發現的超過2000種新病毒，是目前全球已知病毒的一倍。

疫情大爆發後：神秘消失的田俊華

而在武漢疾病預防控制中心官方網站上，自從中共冠狀病毒爆發以來，卻找不到有關這位田先生研究工作的任何信息，他至少兩次和別人共同簽名發表過有關該病毒及其影響的科學研究文章。多次試圖聯繫這位田先生本人也沒有成功。中國駐華盛頓大使館的發言人也沒有對此發表任何意見。

美國國務院的官員表示，這位田先生在蝙蝠病毒研究方面的工作令人擔憂。這位官員說：“田先生生活和工作在武漢疾病預防控制中心，在近些年一直在病毒捕捉和尋找領域的專項小組裡供職。”

多位科學家表示：新型冠狀病毒極可能來自中共武漢P4生物實驗室

一些美國和國際科學家不想把這個新病毒與中共武漢P4生物實驗室聯繫起來，他們覺得病毒是直接自然傳染到人類，然後開始人傳人。

但其他科學家說更多證據表明，這個病毒是在中共武漢P4生物實驗室里研究過，並可能通過被傳染的工人或者通過被傳染的實驗動物，泄露出去的。

生物安全研究人員，李察德.艾布萊特(Richard Ebright),也是羅格斯(Rutgers)大學瓦克斯曼微生物研究所的教授，他說，這個病毒和武漢病毒研究所2013年發現並在武漢疾病預防控制中心研究的蝙蝠病毒有96.2%的相似度，病毒可能自然的從動物傳染到人類，也可能是從中共武漢P4生物實驗室泄露的。

“蝙蝠冠狀病毒在在中共國好幾個病毒研究所都有收集和研究，這也包括武漢疾病預防控制中心和武漢病毒研究所。所以第一例人感染病例也可能是一個實驗室事故造成的。”他對《華盛頓時報》說。

直到疫情大爆發，還有兩個冠狀病毒在中共P2（而非P4）的實驗室里研究，這樣級別的設施無法給工作人員最基本的防護以免被感染。病毒的收集，隔離，以及動物傳染在一個P2極別的實驗室里進行，給高傳染性特點的病毒傳播帶來極大的風險，對工作人員和公眾都是不負責任的。

艾布萊特先生說中共的短片裡展示了在那位田先生的帶領下，武漢疾病控制預防中心的工作人員工作時並沒有足夠的個人防護設備，操作不具備安全性，包括裸露的臉和手腕，以及缺少護目鏡和防護面部的工具。這樣的操作如遇到具備高傳染性的病毒會有嚴重的感染風險。從相關的新聞和視頻中可以看到這種意外傳染的可能性很多，包括在山洞裡被意外傳染，或者在野外實驗室里由於沒有足夠的防護而意外傳染，也可能是從山洞到野外實驗室的運輸過程傳染，甚至在武漢疾病控制預防中心實驗室里缺乏安全措施，包括在與其他病毒研究所分享工作的過程缺乏必要的防護而發生意外感染事件。

肯尼斯.普蘭特(Kenneth Plant),是德州大學在加爾維斯頓醫學分部新興病毒和蟲媒病毒世界參考中心的副主任，他也懷疑這個新型冠狀病毒是來自中共武漢P4生物實驗室。他說：“現在有許多陰謀論說病毒來自於一些生物控制領域的東西，但我覺得這些病毒與蝙蝠有着非常密切的聯繫。真正的病毒發作機理都是猜測和早年的SARS冠狀病毒十分相似。”

此外，人口研究所的中國專家史蒂芬.摩舍(Steven W. Mosher)表示，中共在U形SARS的冠狀病毒對人類的有害的課題上花了很多年的深入研究，他們發表了很多論文說從U形蝙蝠身上收集了類似於SARS的冠狀病毒，並證明這些病毒和SARS一樣，可以直接傳染給人類。中共也寫到過利用基因改造技術製造新型有致命性的病毒感染人類，正如今天這個中共冠狀病毒一樣。摩舍先生呼籲中共政府公開其研究，幫助全球各國的衛生部門官員共同對抗這個疫情危機。如果中共聲稱這個病毒不是來自其武漢P4生物實驗室，那就請把實驗室的所有研究記錄都公布出來，證明自己的清白。

原文鏈接

It was only a matter of time before the coronavirus pandemic started to show a rupture in Western relations with China. Today, the market got some of the first hints of a rising probability of “decoupling”.

Evidence came today in the form of two BBC reports, one of the U.K. government of Boris Johnson (who has COVID-19 now) saying there would be ramifications for China failing to share how they stopped the virus from spreading. One such punishment was getting rid of Huawei in their 5G program.

Over the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Johnson team doubted China’s SARS-CoV-2 infection count, which totals around 81,000, saying they were probably off by a factor of 40.

The wide spreading disease throughout Europe is turning people off to China in leadership positions who, only a few months ago, were fine with Beijing and thought the U.S. trade war with China was just Trump being Trump. Three years ago, Davos Man invited Xi Jinping to the World Economic Forum, heralding him as the new leader of the free trade world.

The other signal today comes from news reports that Spain, Turkey and The Netherlands are angry with their Chinese partner over what they described as faulty medical equipment used to combat COVID-19.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the new SARS coronavirus, first reported in Hubei province China in late December.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has COVID-19. He is reportedly livid with the Chinese ... [+]

The Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 Made in China face masks. The equipment was used by front-line medical teams. Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit right, and that their filters did not work as intended, the BBC reported on Monday.

"The rest of the shipment was immediately put on hold and has not been distributed,” a statement read. “Now it has been decided not to use any of this shipment.”

On Sunday, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton tweeted out a South China Morning Post story about how Chinese movie theaters are being shuttered one week after being reopened.

Cotton noted, "China just shut down movie theaters nationwide after reopening them. Sound to you like they have pandemic under control? Me neither. China is still lying."

Cotton is a consistent China basher, but his comments come at a time when Italy and the U.S. have long passed China’s total infections. Spain passed this weekend, now with over 85,000 cases. Italy has 11,591 deaths, nearly four times that of China.

The Western world are being made to look like the Three Stooges.

People in the markets are scratching their heads, trying to figure out a timeline as to when this all ends, but unable to fully trust China. Afterall, they ask, how did the epicenter of the outbreak manage to get away with just 81,000 cases, while Italy is still not at peak coronavirus, and some U.S. states are only just getting started?

For sure, China will recover from the coronavirus before it recovers from this face plant with its big investors in the West. The longer this disease ravages the U.S. and Europe, the more it turns into a public relations disaster for the Chinese government.

Their economies are in lockdown and in freefall.

What was once a European recovery story in 2020 is now another year of economic contraction, especially in Italy.

The U.S. economy is also seen ending the year in the red, based on economic projections by Barclays Capital. Every week, the forecasts keep getting worse.

The capitalist Democracies of Europe and the U.S. are on life support, ironically of the kind that requires big government spending to keep people employed who are otherwise at home watching Netflix. In Italy, they cannot even go out for a jog in Milan. In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro beaches are closed. In the U.S., Disney World, the symbol of American life, is closed. Central Park, the heart of the most important city in the nation, has been turned into a M.A.S.H. unit.

As people watch this unfold, Beijing’s response to the coronavirus is increasingly treated with skepticism, if not anger in government circles. They feel China got away unscathed, despite the fact that China is still very much living with this today.

Reports of faulty test kits and medical equipment serve to amplify existing apprehensions. The China zeitgeist is a bit dismal.

In a report by Business Insider yesterday, reporter Adam Payne quotes (anonymously) a British official saying, “There has to be a reckoning when this is over. The anger goes right to the top.”

To be sure, President Xi Jinping has his plate full, says Vladimir Signorelli, head of Bretton Woods Research, a macro investing research firm out of New Jersey. “Repairing China’s global trust may come at a price,”he says. “We expect the Chinese to become more willing to concede in trade negotiations with the U.S. going forward because it’s all about volume and market share. They don’t want to lose anymore market share in the supply chain then they have to because of this disaster.”

American multinational corporations operating in China are likely to take a longer-term view on the China market, especially if China is a domestic market for them, or a launching pad into southeast Asia.

But if COVID-19 severely hurts the home market, then watch for foreign companies to become less ambitious about being in China, UBS strategists led by Wendy Liu in Hong Kong wrote in a client note dated March 27.

People set up an emergency field hospital to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic in Central Park on March ... [+]

“If Chinese subsidiaries are not profitable and remain difficult to turnaround, then the decision to sell or exit could be made. American small to midsized business suppliers based in China are lagging the big corporations in work resumption by about two weeks, and we believe are more likely than the larger companies to exit China,” she says.

Giant corporations like Starbucks and Tesla may very well increase investment there as promised, but that has to do with the local market. That is not an offshoring story.

Meanwhile, as far as China’s coronavirus numbers go, other Asian countries that have had experience with SARS in 2003 were quick to restrict travel, require surgical masks in public, and institute social distancing and other measures to stop the spread. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan — they have been experts at keeping this thing under control.

If the U.S. can’t trust China for guidance, then they don’t have to look far for a worthy group to imitate.

For its part, Hubei was locked down and people were required to shelter-in-place. Grocery stores were not opened. The government appointed people to do the shopping and delivery to the tens of millions of people stuck at home.

Unlike South Korea, China did not test vast amounts of people so those who may have died and not tested for COVID-19 were unlikely to be counted in the official tally.

“The hardest thing for me was that people died in Wuhan because we didn’t have the ICU beds...especially in the early stages of the outbreak,” says Doctor Peng Zhiyong, Dir of Critical Care at Wuhan’s Zhonghan Hospital in Hubei.

He said that of the patients that needed ICU during the one month period of February 8 to March 7, 25% to 30% of them died. “Asymptomatic patients were probably main source of transmission,” he says, despite some in China saying there is still no evidence of asymptomatic transmission to this day.

A symbol of American retail, Macy's is laying off over 100,000 people because of the coronavirus. ... [+]

Information on how to contain, treat and kill COVID-19 are all over the place.

The U.S. government recently toyed with the idea of locking down the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the new American Hubei province, but has since balked on that call.

This could prove to be the unwinding, helping spread a disease already cranking up in New Orleans and Detroit as New Yorkers look to get off Manhattan.

President Trump this weekend extended the recommended quarantine measures until the end of April.

By comparison, the epicenter of Hubei was locked down for two months.

This fact isn’t lost on some money managers.

“Yeah, I think we could even go longer than a month,” says Sam Hendel, co-fund manager of the $5 billion asset manager Levin Easterly Partners in Manhattan. He is now working out of his home in Westport, Connecticut. “This is going to take longer because pockets of the country are just starting with this. Spring breakers are coming back and they’re sick and they’re going to get their families sick, and that’s concerning to me,” he says, warning: “Calling a bottom and using China for timing it is a fool’s errand.”

I've spent 20 years as a reporter for the best in the business, including as a Brazil-based staffer for WSJ. Since 2011, I focus on business and investing in the big…

The Chinese Communist Party is the “central threat of our times”, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo astutely said in January. Back then, coronavirus was already spreading throughout China and over the world; the Communist Party’s attempt to hide the epidemic proved that Pompeo was more than right. “My concern is that this cover-up, this disinformation that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in, is still denying the world the information it needs so that we can prevent further cases or something like this from recurring again”, Pompeo added this week.

Had China responded to the outbreak three weeks earlier than it did, cases of coronavirus could have been reduced by 95%, according to a study by the University of Southampton. In those three weeks, China was busy hiding the truth. According to Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute, “It is the cover-up of the Communist Party for the first two months or so which created conditions to generate a global pandemic”.

Chinese leaders, however, seemed obsessed only with the sustainability of their totalitarian regime, and as eager to silence any criticism as they have been in the past. Since January, the evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus in Wuhan has become a matter of public record. The Chinese government censored and detained brave doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm. One of China’s richest entrepreneurs, Jack Ma, recently disclosed that China hid at least one-third of the coronavirus cases.

China has been able to grow into a superpower because it adopted economic practices from the West. No other country ever achieved such rapid economic and social progress for such a sustained period of time. However, hopes placed by the West in the Chinese market also nourished a dangerous mirage. We in the West thought that a modernizing China with a rising GDP would also democratize and come to respect transparency, pluralism and human rights. Instead, the mirage turned into a disaster as we watched China become even more of a “totalitarian state“.

The nature of the Chinese regime — its ban on the free press and all critical voices; the absolute domination of the Communist Party over social, spiritual and economic actors; imprisoning minorities and crushing freedom of conscience — is also contributing to the emergence of this public health disaster. The cost, in terms of human lives and world’s GDP, is immense.

The Chinese government’s complicity in the pandemic is now an opportunity for the West to reevaluate its ties to Beijing. According to Guy Sorman, a French-American expert on China:

“Like useful idiots, we have not only helped the Party prosper but, even worse, we have given up on our humanitarian, democratic, and spiritual values in doing so.”

“It is time”, stated the American columnist, Marc A. Thiessen, “to immunize our economy and national security from our dependence on a deceitful regime”.

China is waging a double information war: one abroad and one for its own public, both led by the Chinese authorities with President Xi Jinping at its head. They apparently see the West as weak and submissive. We have been.

China seems to believe that it is rising, while the West is in decline. “We find ourselves in what Germans call a Systemwettbewerb, a ‘competition of systems’ between liberal democracies and China’s authoritarian state capitalism, which is increasingly projecting its absolute claim to power beyond its borders”, said Thorsten Benner, co-founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. The Cold War with Russia was clearer.

“We had an ideological and security antagonist who was not an economic competitor. There was a Chinese wall between the economies of the West and the Soviet Union. Today, we are confronted with an opponent who is a powerful economic competitor and intricately involved in the political economy of the West. At the same time, we also depend on cooperation with China on transnational issues such as climate change and pandemics. China’s authoritarian state capitalist system with its hegemonic ambitions is by far the most difficult strategic challenge the West has faced to date”.

According to historian Niall Ferguson, “China today poses a bigger economic challenge than the Soviet Union ever did”. The Soviet Union could never rely on a dynamic private sector, as China is doing. In some markets — such as technology — China is already ahead of the United States. Not only that; the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest, is more closely integrated with the West than the Soviet one ever was. China’s totalitarian one-party rule allows greater personal freedoms, at least at the moment, than the Soviet Union did. The coronavirus epidemic is, in fact, partly a consequence of the freedom of movement Chinese citizens enjoy.

China has also been able to convince much of the West that it is not an enemy. Beijing’s goal has appeared to be to try to draw the West — and the rest of the world — into its economic and ideological orbit. China opened markets in the West while it offered to its own people a kind of devil’s bargain: give up your ideas and principles and you will enjoy material improvement and societal security. Meanwhile, China became an industrial and technological behemoth, a feat the Soviet Union could only dream about.

Consider, for instance, pharmaceuticals. According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese companies supply the US with more than 90% of its antibiotics, vitamin C and ibuprofen, as well as 70% of acetaminophen and 40-45% of heparin. The US was never dependent on the Soviet Union for that.

In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpieces, Beijing threatened to halt pharmaceutical exports, after which the US would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus”. The Xinhua article was actually entitled, “Be bold: the world owes China a thank you.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was right to blast members of the American elite for selling out their country to Chinese economic interests.

China’s leaders are probably hoping that you cannot challenge a powerhouse that is selling you most of your vital medications.

Italy, a country hit hard by China’s coronavirus pandemic, is now at the center of a strategic Chinese propaganda campaign. Beijing has sent doctors and supplies to Italy and is doing the same all over Europe. In Italy, you can see posters saying, “Go, China!” [“Forza China!“] China is trying to buy our silence and complicity. Sadly, that is already taking place. In February, while some Italian officials (on the political right) were urging Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to quarantine schoolchildren in the north who were just returning from holidays in China, Italy’s highest officials were busy trying to please Beijing. Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella; Minister for Culture, Dario Franceschini, and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, hosted a concert in Rome for “Italian-Chinese friendship“. China’s President Xi Jinping warmly thanked them.

China is not helping at this point out of “solidarity”. The Chinese regime is now seeking to portray itself as the world’s savior. Beijing, at the beginning of the pandemic, did not care about the lives of even its own people: it was busy censoring the news.

“Hidden behind declarations of solidarity, China plans to buy out our troubled companies and infrastructure”, according to Germany’s leading newspaper, Bild. Italy was the first G-7 country to sign up for China’s global investment program, a deal that rightly raised concerns in the US. China seems to be ready to continue its expansion into the Italy’s economy and strategic interests.

China’s Communist Party also seems to be at war with the free flow of information internationally. The regime, in the most sweeping media ejection from China since the death of Mao Zedong, recently expelled US journalists. Beijing has also tried to shift the blame for the pandemic to the US by saying that coronavirus originated with US military personnel in Wuhan. Lijian Zhao, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, posted statements to that effect on Chinese social media and Twitter. The coronavirus crisis is now a battleground for Chinese propaganda.

The paradox is that the Global Times, a media outlet of the Chinese Communist Party, spreads false anti-US propaganda on Twitter, which is banned in China. Twitter, meanwhile, banned the website Zero Hedge, for publishing an article linking a Chinese scientist to the outbreak of coronavirus. Twitter also unfortunately decided that China’s Communist Party does not violate the rules of social media by spreading lies against the US.

Already a few years ago, in 2013, a secret Chinese Communist Party directive known as Document No. 9 called for the rejection of seven Western ideas, such as “Western constitutional democracy”, “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the Party’s questionable past. Targets to combat included “Western embassies, consulates, media operations and nongovernmental organizations”. Huang Kunming, the Party’s propaganda chief, attacks “some Western countries who use their technological advantages and dominance of discourse that they have accumulated over a long period to peddle so-called ‘universal values'”. China’s Education Minister Yuan Guiren, a former president of Beijing Normal University, threw in: “Never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes”.

In speeches and official documents, the President Xi talks about a struggle between “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “Western anti-China forces” with their “extremely malicious” ideas of freedom, democracy and human rights. The West seems to be their target. According to a new study by the International Republican Institute:

“The Chinese Communist Party… is employing a unique set of tactics in the economic and information domains that undermines many developing countries’ democratic institutions and future prosperity as their dependence on China grows.”

China evidently understands how to use Western media for its own propaganda. “The Vatican and the Western business elite”, wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty, “once instrumental in the West’s winning the Cold War, have been brought to heel by the Chinese Communist party”. The Chinese regime has succeeded where the Soviet regime failed. Last December, a six-year-old girl in London preparing Christmas cards found a message inside: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China, forced to work against our will”, read the handwritten note. “Please help us and notify human rights organization”. Western capitalism has even become complicit with Chinese slavery.

Western brands are not alone in caving in out of fear of “offending” the Communist Party. Western culture has been eagerly submitting itself to self-censorship about China. “The West is so tolerant, passive, accommodating and naive towards Beijing,” said Liao Yiwu, a Chinese writer exiled in Berlin.

“Westerners look at China with incredulous eyes, they are seduced like an old man in front of a young girl. Everyone trembles before Chinese omnipotence. Europe shows all its weakness. It does not realize that the Chinese offensive threatens its freedom and values”.

China’s embassy in the Czech Republic is now financing a study course at Charles University, the most prestigious in the country. British universities are today largely dependent on Chinese students; conservative estimates put their combined tuition fees at about $1.75 billion. Australia is now even more reliant, with 200,000 Chinese students. If they go back to China or if Chinese donations stop coming to these faculties, they stand to lose about $4 billion.

The 1,500 branches of the Confucius Institute that China’s regime has established in 140 countries offer language and “cultural” programs. However, according to Matt Schrader, a China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, these institutes are “propaganda tools“. Last October, Belgium banned the head of Confucius Institute in Brussels, Xinning Song, after security services accused him of spying for Beijing.

In 2013, when the University of Sydney shut down a talk by Tibet’s Dalai Lama on campus, many saw the university’s links to Chinese interests as being involved in the lobbying efforts to stop the previously approved event. Topics such as Tibet, Taiwan independence, or the dissident Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, are taboo.

According to a Bloomberg report, China is also infiltrating Europe’s political landscape by supporting political parties and inviting politicians to China. President Xi, taking his ideological battle abroad, even donated a statue of Karl Marx to his German hometown Trier on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth.

Beijing, unsurprisingly, has been using Western multilateral institutions to its own advantage. As Michael Collins detailed in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, Beijing has expanded its presence in the World Health Organization. “China’s WHO contributions have grown by 52% since 2014 to approximately $86 million”, Collins states.

“This is largely due to China’s increase in assessed contributions which are based on a country’s economic development and population. However, China has also slightly increased voluntary contributions from $8.7 million in 2014 to approximately $10.2 million in 2019”.

Like the former Soviet Union, China now seems to be building a giant apparatus of control. They call it the “Internet police“. Try to imagine the former East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, using the most advanced surveillance system in the world: This is China in 2020.

Communist dictatorships always end up following the same script. The Soviet writer Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but the communist regime prevented him from receiving it. In China, literary critic, writer, poet, and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded Nobel Prize for Peace but was never able to receive it: he died under guard in a Chinese hospital. The Soviet Union had forced-labor camps just as China does. Chinese dissident Harry Wu, who endured 19 years in jail, compared the Chinese camps (laogai) to the Soviet gulag and Nazi concentration camps.

In the Soviet Union, writers, politicians, generals and doctors who were silenced and executed under Stalin, were later “rehabilitated” by the Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death. The Chinese Communist Party just “exonerated” Dr. Li Wenliang who warned about the coronavirus outbreak. He was accused of “making false comments and disturbing the social order”, then forced to recant, and soon after, at the age of 33, died of the disease. It is a shameful attempt by the Chinese officials to whitewash their own image.

In a column last week for the Spanish daily El Pais, the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about coronavirus:

“Nobody seems to be warning that none of this could have happened in the world if popular China were a free country and democratic rather than a dictatorship”.

Vargas Llosa then likened the epidemic outbreak to Russia’s Chernobyl disaster during the Soviet era. Both dictatorships censored and silenced information about the crises. In response, Beijing’s regime not only called Vargas Llosa “irresponsible“, but also banned his books from Chinese e-book platforms. Vargas Llosa has warned Western “fools” not to believe in China, “the free market with a political dictatorship”, and that “what happened with the coronavirus should open the eyes of the blind”.

The risk now is that, instead of Chernobyl which led, in part, to Soviet Union’s downfall, China’s communist regime will enjoy reinforcement — especially if, due to the coronavirus crisis, the American people in November fail to support the first president in the last 40 years who has openly challenged China.

The Western dream of a “renaissance of the Chinese nation” has now turned into a globalized nightmare. Hundreds of millions across the world are in lockdown; thousands are dead; the economies of Western countries are paralyzed, with some on the verge of collapse. Empty shops and streets are commonplace.

This might be what analysts call “the end of liberal order“. China’s communists today are more capitalist than Marxist, at least at the state level. President Xi has adopted “market Leninism” — mixing a state-run economy with a “terrifying form of totalitarianism“. The West needs to wake up to China’s duplicity.