There is a bizarre connection between a Reuter news agency picture of a Chinese female athlete winning a gold
medal in the weightlifting event at the ongoing Tokyo Olympics and the politics of the pandemic. The common thread is China’s aggressive diplomacy.
China’s Colombo embassy took to Twitter to slam Reuters for distributing a picture which the embassy initially thought was ugly. The picture had captured Chinese weightlifter Zhihui Hou’s facial expression as she lifted the weight in the 49 kg event in a Valsalva manoeuvre of holding her breath on her way to win her country’s first gold medal.
In a Twitter message, the embassy said: “Among all the photos of the game, @Reuters has chosen this one, which only shows how ugly they are. Don’t put politics and ideologies above sports, and call yourself an unbiased media organization. Shameless. Respect the spirit of #Olympics.”
The message created a social media debate on what beauty or ugliness was. The saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is apparently lost on the Chinese embassy’s tweet writers, who seem to be in overdrive with their aggressive public diplomacy these days.
Later, drawing attention to Reuter pictures of beaming athletes of other countries, the embassy in another tweet tried to clarify its position. It said: “Same day, same Olympics, same @Reuters, different faces. Maybe it’s because everything good in life comes easier for the white westerners? We said that these biased MSM {Main Stream Media} are ugly. Never the athletes. They’re beautiful.”
Obviously, the Chinese embassy’s twitter war is in line with Beijing’s new counter-offensive against the Western media and governments as the cold war over the covid virus intensifies.
China believes that Western media are part of a campaign which seeks to undermine China’s vaccines against COVID-19 and give some credence to the claim that the virus began in a Chinese laboratory. The Chinese also allege that western media bosses have a stake in western pharmaceutical companies that have developed vaccines against COVID-19. Therefore, the Chinese the western media often give prominence to reports questioning the efficacy of China-made Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, while downplaying stories that speak of the Chinese vaccines’ success, especially against the Delta variant.
In recent week’s China has hit back hard on calls to reinvestigate the claim that the covid virus originated from a lab in Wuhan, China. This came after the World Health Organisation (WHO) sought fresh permission to visit China to carry out what the world body referred to as the second phase of the investigation.
China rejected the WHO’s call, with China’s National Health Commission deputy chief Zeng Yixin saying the plan smacks of disrespect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. “We cannot accept this kind of plan for origin-tracing,” he said.
China’s counter-offensive also includes calls for international investigation to find out whether the virus originated from a United States military laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland. China insists that the WHO should also investigate whether the virus was manufactured in the US military lab and released in Wuhan via frozen food. China has also said that months or weeks before the disease was detected in Wuhan, countries such as Italy had been treating patients for illnesses caused by an unknown virus.
In Colombo, the Chinese embassy re-tweeted a tweet from China’s state-affiliated China Daily. It said: “Over 10 million Chinese citizens have signed an open letter calling on the @WHO to investigate the US’ Fort Detrick lab over #COVID19 origins. The server of the petition campaign was under #cyberattack twice on Saturday night with the hackers’ IP addresses detected from the US.”
China’s aggressive diplomacy with regard to the covid war went up by several notches after WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom on July 16 announced a research plan over the covid virus origin. The research will focus on geographic areas of the virus’ circulation, a study on the Wuhan wet market, animal track-back activities and an audit of laboratories and institutions in Wuhan.
Needless to say, for China, the WHO’s call appears as part of a pre-determined campaign. In China’s eyes, it is nothing but politicization of the war against the pandemic.
The world body was initially soft on China. Perhaps, it did not want to earn the wrath of its biggest funder after US withdrew from the WHO during the Donlad Trump presidency. Now that the US has rejoined the WHO after President Joe Biden took office this year, Washington appears to be wielding more influence within the world body. The WHO is now seen to be toughening up its stance on China. The WHO chief knows well that China will not accept his proposal for a second phase of the investigation; yet he is calling on China to be more co-operative and more transparent with the WHO’s second phase of the investigation.
The call for an investigation into the origin of the virus first came from Australia last year. The call was supported by the US with the then US president Trump describing the virus as “China virus” and “Wuhan virus” in an apparent bid to make China criminally responsible for the pandemic. President Biden has also called on the US intelligence agencies to submit a report before the end of next month on the origins of the virus, especially the claim that it originated from Wuhan. His call was endorsed by G7 leaders when they met last month.
For its part, China did allow a WHO experts’ team to visit Wuhan in January, of course after months of foot dragging. The WHO in an interim report said there was no evidence to prove that the virus originated in Wuhan. China has been insisting that the world body should look in other directions also if it is keen on tracing the origin of the virus.
Why make only China a suspect? Although the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) prohibits the development, production, stockpiling or acquisition, or retention of biological weapons, a loophole in the convention allows countries to carry out research and produce viruses in labs to find vaccines and treatment methods in case of an outbreak of a pandemic or a rogue state resorts to biological warfare. If viruses originate in labs, then every country possessing expertise in bio-engineering or gene splicing is a suspect.
It is high time the United Nations revised the BWC with the aim of closing the loopholes and bringing every virus research lab under UN inspection.
