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."

据《华盛顿时报》3月30日报道，中共政府的研究人员发现并分离了2000多种动物病毒，并在武汉P4实验室，一个离野生动物交易市场三英里的地方，开展了各种科学研究。

这次袭卷全球致几十万人感染的病毒，被很多人认为源于蝙蝠，然后通过传染了位于武汉的野生动物市场的动物最终传染了人。但这个致命病毒的来源至今还是个迷。

就在疫情爆发后，中共官员们拒绝向美国提供毒侏样本给美国研究人员，也不允许国际病毒专家去武汉。

“这是人类历史上最恶劣的掩盖事实，现在全世界都要面对这场大瘟疫的爆发。”麦克.麦考尔(Micael T.McCaul)上周说，他是德州共和党人，也是国会外交事务委员会的重要成员，他认为中共政府应该要为这次全球疫情负责。

关于中共在蝙蝠病毒上的深入研究以及各种相关报道，不得不让人们对中共政府有必要公开这些研究工作的呼声越来越高。

研究蝙蝠病毒之领衔人物：田俊华

一些中共媒体在最近几个月宣传有关病毒研究的新闻里，出现了一位名叫田俊华的研究人员，他是蝙蝠病毒研究的重要参与者和领导人之一。

在去年12月由中共政府资助拍摄的一段视频流传于互联网。视频中，这位田先生在湖北省的某个山洞里，从捕捉的蝙蝠身上提取样本并储存在小玻璃瓶里。

中共官员声称病毒是通过武汉华南海鲜批发市场里的野生动物传染给人的，而巧合的是，这个批发市场不远处就是武汉疾病控制预防中心，也是全国研究蝙蝠病毒的地方。

有一个名叫《旷野青春之隐形防线》的中文视频，记录了研究人员如何小心处理这些含有致命病毒的蝙蝠，在这个7分钟的短片里，炫耀了中共如何在全球处于领先地位，在过去12年中发现超过2000种新病毒，也恰是在SARS病毒爆发之后的这段时间。目前正在爆发的病毒就是SARS病毒的一种，称为SARS Coronavirus–2,，无独有偶，都可以追踪到蝙蝠病毒上。

短片里提到，在中共开展研究前，全世界在过去200年才发现了2284种病毒。中共党媒透露这位田先生有次没有穿防护服在山洞里，并接触了蝙蝠的尿液，为了避免传染，他自我隔离了14天，和现在的疫情建议隔离时间一致。

这位田先生，在武汉疾控中心消毒与病媒生物防治所工作，根据2017年5月武汉晚报的报道，他自2012年以来捕捉了上千只蝙蝠用于研究蝙蝠病毒。“蝙蝠身上有大量人类未发现的病毒，”他说，“对蝙蝠的研究越多，就对人类的健康越有好处。”这位研究人员还从虱子，老鼠和黄蜂身上收集病毒。在一次意外接触蝙蝠尿液后，他和妻子保持了安全距离，“只要我在14天隔离期间没有得病，就说明我幸运的没有被感染，”他说。

武汉的相关报道称收集病毒标本是件非常困难，危险而且不易被资助的事情。深圳日报，一个共青团主办的报纸，在去年12月报道这位田先生，翻山越岭寻找蝙蝠和虱子的病毒，所谓的“原始病毒携带体”，目的是为了发明疫苗。报道说过去12年中发现的超过2000种新病毒，是目前全球已知病毒的一倍。

疫情大爆发后：神秘消失的田俊华

而在武汉疾病预防控制中心官方网站上，自从中共冠状病毒爆发以来，却找不到有关这位田先生研究工作的任何信息，他至少两次和别人共同签名发表过有关该病毒及其影响的科学研究文章。多次试图联系这位田先生本人也没有成功。中国驻华盛顿大使馆的发言人也没有对此发表任何意见。

美国国务院的官员表示，这位田先生在蝙蝠病毒研究方面的工作令人担忧。这位官员说：“田先生生活和工作在武汉疾病预防控制中心，在近些年一直在病毒捕捉和寻找领域的专项小组里供职。”

多位科学家表示：新型冠状病毒极可能来自中共武汉P4生物实验室

一些美国和国际科学家不想把这个新病毒与中共武汉P4生物实验室联系起来，他们觉得病毒是直接自然传染到人类，然后开始人传人。

但其他科学家说更多证据表明，这个病毒是在中共武汉P4生物实验室里研究过，并可能通过被传染的工人或者通过被传染的实验动物，泄露出去的。

生物安全研究人员，李察德.艾布莱特(Richard Ebright),也是罗格斯(Rutgers)大学瓦克斯曼微生物研究所的教授，他说，这个病毒和武汉病毒研究所2013年发现并在武汉疾病预防控制中心研究的蝙蝠病毒有96.2%的相似度，病毒可能自然的从动物传染到人类，也可能是从中共武汉P4生物实验室泄露的。

“蝙蝠冠状病毒在在中共国好几个病毒研究所都有收集和研究，这也包括武汉疾病预防控制中心和武汉病毒研究所。所以第一例人感染病例也可能是一个实验室事故造成的。”他对《华盛顿时报》说。

直到疫情大爆发，还有两个冠状病毒在中共P2（而非P4）的实验室里研究，这样级别的设施无法给工作人员最基本的防护以免被感染。病毒的收集，隔离，以及动物传染在一个P2极别的实验室里进行，给高传染性特点的病毒传播带来极大的风险，对工作人员和公众都是不负责任的。

艾布莱特先生说中共的短片里展示了在那位田先生的带领下，武汉疾病控制预防中心的工作人员工作时并没有足够的个人防护设备，操作不具备安全性，包括裸露的脸和手腕，以及缺少护目镜和防护面部的工具。这样的操作如遇到具备高传染性的病毒会有严重的感染风险。从相关的新闻和视频中可以看到这种意外传染的可能性很多，包括在山洞里被意外传染，或者在野外实验室里由于没有足够的防护而意外传染，也可能是从山洞到野外实验室的运输过程传染，甚至在武汉疾病控制预防中心实验室里缺乏安全措施，包括在与其他病毒研究所分享工作的过程缺乏必要的防护而发生意外感染事件。

肯尼斯.普兰特(Kenneth Plant),是德州大学在加尔维斯顿医学分部新兴病毒和虫媒病毒世界参考中心的副主任，他也怀疑这个新型冠状病毒是来自中共武汉P4生物实验室。他说：“现在有许多阴谋论说病毒来自于一些生物控制领域的东西，但我觉得这些病毒与蝙蝠有着非常密切的联系。真正的病毒发作机理都是猜测和早年的SARS冠状病毒十分相似。”

此外，人口研究所的中国专家史蒂芬.摩舍(Steven W. Mosher)表示，中共在U形SARS的冠状病毒对人类的有害的课题上花了很多年的深入研究，他们发表了很多论文说从U形蝙蝠身上收集了类似于SARS的冠状病毒，并证明这些病毒和SARS一样，可以直接传染给人类。中共也写到过利用基因改造技术制造新型有致命性的病毒感染人类，正如今天这个中共冠状病毒一样。摩舍先生呼吁中共政府公开其研究，帮助全球各国的卫生部门官员共同对抗这个疫情危机。如果中共声称这个病毒不是来自其武汉P4生物实验室，那就请把实验室的所有研究记录都公布出来，证明自己的清白。

原文链接

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.