By Yang Sheng
US President Donald Trump using the term “Chinese Virus” to refer to the COVID-19 in his tweet is an act of inability and irresponsibility, as he wants to make Americans to blame China and cover his own administration’s terrible response to the predictable outbreak and his failure to ease panic in the US stock market, said Chinese experts on Tuesday, adding that hyping up racism and anti-China sentiment won’t help the US deal with the pandemic at all.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed strong indignation and firm opposition to Trump’s tweet calling COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus.”
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said at a press briefing Tuesday afternoon that Trump’s act stigmatizes China, which China strongly condemns.
“The World Health Organization and the international community are clearly opposed to linking viruses to specific countries and regions and to stigmatizing them,” Geng said. “We urge the US side to immediately correct its mistakes and stop making groundless accusations against China.”
Where the virus had come from should be a topic for science rather than politics, and by arrogantly provoking China at this juncture, the situation that the US and many other countries are being confronted with will get worse, especially the stock market, as the two biggest economies of the world could see a new conflict amid a pandemic that has already brought serious harms to the world economy, analysts warned. Some observers noted that Trump’s tweet could be a reaction to a tweet sent by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on his personal Twitter account that asked the US to be transparent about its epidemic situation, as Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), openly admitted last week at a hearing at the House of Representatives on the outbreak, that some COVID-19 deaths have been misdiagnosed as influenza in the US.
On Monday, in a phone call requested by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi, Pompeo conveyed strong US objections to China’s “efforts to shift blame for COVID-19 to the United States.” The secretary stressed that “this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumors,” according to the website of the US Department of State.
– The Daily Mail-Global Times News exchange item
