Source : Global Times

March 23.

US State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus Friday picked a fight with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Twitter as more and more US politicians become involved in escalating diplomatic spats with China over the COVID-19 pandemic, which Chinese analysts assert as acts of pure political calculation.

The fiercer the war of words between Beijing and Washington, the closer the US gets to achieving its goal of distracting Americans’ attention from their government’s incompetence in fighting the virus, they said.

Pitching on a piece of Hua’s tweet reading “China has been updating the US on the coronavirus and its response since Jan. 3… And now blame China for delay? Seriously?” Ortagus skirted around the facts Hua mentioned and argued that by January 3, Chinese authorities had “ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online,” without providing any evidence.

Hua refuted Ortagus with three more tweets in which she urged Ortagus to take some time to understand how transparent China has been over the virus, noting scapegoating China would not help curb the US pandemic and cooperation between Chinese and US experts would save American lives.

US politicians have been failing to confront the facts confirmed by the Chinese side for some time since the outbreak of the epidemic, according to Chinese experts. They will not acknowledge China’s accomplishments, they said.

Instead they continuously find fault with China’s response to the COVID-19 at the early stage of the outbreak when the Chinese government was struggling to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the newly discovered virus before making a major decision, experts explained.

There was little point attempting to reason with the US anymore, Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Global Times on Sunday.

“Washington never wants to argue with China based on facts,” Xin said. “All it tries to do is scapegoat China and fabricate stories to achieve that goal.”

The US has been increasing rhetoric attacks on China since Zhao Lijian, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, tweeted “it might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”

The US response to this speculation had shown its moral bottom line reach a new low, said Xin.

US President Donald Trump, who once used the term “coronavirus,” started to deliberately ramp up of the use of “Chinese virus” to describe the COVID-19.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been reiterating “Wuhan virus” since the very beginning despite World Health Organization advice not to link the virus to a specific country or region.

On Friday, Pompeo told Fox News, “China has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to leave Wuhan to go to places like Italy that’s now suffering so badly.”

Politicians in Trump administration were “political hooligans,” said Xin.

They were “far from being reasonable and all they are doing now is serving Trump’s personal interests – securing a second term in the Oval Office,” he noted, adding that calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” was a tactic.

The tactic has also become increasingly evident for US mainstream media and public. The New York Times on Sunday tweeted: “Italy’s experience shows that steps to isolate the coronavirus and limit people’s movement need to be put in place early, with absolute clarity, then strictly enforced.”

Some US internet users commented that it was time to talk about the experience of countries that have actually turned this around.

Actions, not words, would crack the pandemic, Liu Weidong, research fellow at the Beijing-based institute of American studies in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday.

China was sharing its experience in the COVID-19 fight while sending medical experts to help hard-hit countries including Iran, Italy, Iraq and Serbia.

“What China has done is observed and is well aware of by people from the world,” Liu said.

More countries will realize that in the face of a global crisis, the one that can genuinely lend a helping hand was “not the hegemon US, but China,” Xin said.