China lied. People died.
That rhyme took hold on Twitter as the Wuhan crisis spread around the globe in 2020. China lied about the Wuhan virus and waited months to alert the world. When it notified the World Health Organization, it claimed that the virus posed no risk of human transmission. Then it lied about how many people had died in the contagion.
China also waged a disinformation campaign to blame the US military for possibly bringing the virus into the country. It diverted scrutiny by rallying the left-wing media to insist that the phrase “Wuhan virus” was racist against the Chinese.
When fear was exploding in the United States and President Trump bluntly criticized China publicly for its lagging response to the pandemic threat, Chinese officials threatened to withhold supplies of antibiotics and fever-reducing ibuprofen. That exposed China’s endemic malevolent intent and its disregard for the rest of the world.
The shocker for many of us was that China provides 95 percent of our entire supply of those medicines. This must end. And never should we forget it. US drug makers made us dependent on China by switching their supply lines to that country to save a few bucks in labor costs. They did so without regard for the risk of relying on our archrival for mission-critical medical supplies. US manufacturers in all sorts of industries made that same unwise call, and the Wuhan virus crisis, if it has any upside at all, may shock many of them into bringing their production facilities back home to the United States. It’s about time.
Threatening our access to medical supplies, lying about the Wuhan virus, blaming it on the US military, playing word games; these are the calculated, intentionally hostile acts of an evil empire rather than the missteps of an overly aggressive trading rival.
Admit it: President Trump was right all along. China is the real enemy. No matter what its government claims to be, China is the biggest threat to peace, prosperity, and world order. It is an irresponsible bully on the world stage. For decades it has been a crooked trading partner, a tyrant in business and international affairs, and a siphon of US jobs. More recently, it has been a rising military threat.
For thirty years, President Trump has been right about the unfair trade practices of our rivals and their devastating consequences for the US economy. Japan was his first target before its long slide into torpidity and stasis. Then he turned his sights on China as it grew ever more powerful. He has said he sees the two countries as interchangeable.
The larger and more powerful a country grows, the more fearful its rise can be for its neighbors and the rest of the world. When a nation is one of the biggest, most potent players on the planet, smaller rivals are all but helpless against it. The only thing they can fall back on is trust: Can they trust this leviathan to tell the truth, keep its word, and play by the rules? With regard to China, the answer is a clear no, and its leaders have shown that continuously for the last twenty or thirty years.
As China has arisen to become a global economic juggernaut, we tend to forget that it hews to the same habits and strategies the rulers of the Middle Kingdom have used for decades, even centuries. Those who know China intimately know that its government officials lie with impunity. This is official policy. When a crisis or controversy descends, the Chinese leaders obfuscate. They lie their asses off.
The Wuhan virus crisis has exposed China’s penchant for political and economic transgressions, unfolding live and in real time as it reacts to daily events beyond its fiendishly dictatorial control. Its unabashed, ballsy proclivity for fabrication is on display, bared more than ever before. China may be the most formidable opponent to confront any US president in our history.
Donald Trump, in turn, is the most formidable president ever to confront China—and the only president to do so. He has been waiting for this face-off for much of his life, long before he ever became president. Their intertwined futures were always on a collision course. From the start of his presidency, he raced to bring the Chinese to heel while fending off his enemies at home and elsewhere. After Wuhan, his confrontation with China took on new stakes as we debated over how widely and how rapidly to open up the economy for recovery.
The contest would play out on two different levels: in the real world of restoring the people’s confidence, rebuilding the economy, and shaping the logistics of crisis response; and in the online world of Twitter, the pixel punditry, and hordes of his followers and resistors. The online world is where President Trump excels—and, it turns out, it is where China, too, would devote a lot of effort.
In the aftermath of accusations and second-guessing, President Trump got squeezed between his Chinese rivals and Never Trumpers as they found common ground. During the crisis, China would launch a sophisticated social media campaign with woke, umbrage-laden messaging that would appeal to the left-wing corporate media and the woke, liberal social justice warriors leading the Trump resistance in the United States.
China needed new friends. It was reeling from the shocking economic and reputational repercussions of its failure to thwart the most frightening new virus in a century. Soon it began seeking allies, whether anyone knew it or not. The rest of the world had every reason to view China with hostility and suspicion in the aftermath of the Wuhan catastrophe. So China decided to play the victim, and many of the events that would follow were an outgrowth of that posturing.
As huge an economy as China was able to build, as powerful as its military buildup was, suddenly the virus crisis turned that massive, egotistical nation-state into an oversensitive adolescent, seething with resentment and taking offense where none was intended. In fact, the more powerful China gets, the more thin-skinned its leaders become about its reputation—and the more they will lie to protect it from harm.
Long before the Wuhan pandemic rocked the United States, my nightly program on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, was one of the harshest and bluntest critics of China’s many sins. After Wuhan, we turned the criticism up to high heat.
The Chinese government richly deserved it. Usually when a nation screws the pooch on a disaster of global scale so terribly, the right thing to do is to apologize abjectly and focus on the fix. Instead China grew obstinate and accusatory as never before.
That had its intended effect: a lot of meek souls in the media retreated from challenging China aggressively, which was more reason for us at my show to take the reverse approach. On January 22, my Twitter account put out one of the first of our many notes on the Wuhan crisis, saying “Lies Go Viral” and predicting that China was underreporting cases.
Eight days later we praised the president:
Crushing Coronavirus: @DrMarkSiegel praises @POTUS administration for their swift and thorough action to protect U.S. citizens from Coronavirus.
Mike Pillsbury came to our attention on January 31, just as President Trump was announcing a ban on all incoming flights from China, by saying that China was hurting itself by denying Trump’s gracious offer to help it combat the coronavirus. A few days later Peter Navarro was on our show saying that China might use the coronavirus as an excuse to dodge buying $200 billion in US goods, a deal signed only weeks before.
In February, things got ever more aggressive in our hard look at the Wuhan crisis. Expert guests including my Fox News colleague Dr. Marc Siegel and Peter Navarro helped amp up the pressure on China. We were outing the outbreak, as we put it, and we warned that 80 percent of the active elements in US drugs were produced in China, that the country’s infection and death numbers couldn’t be believed, and that the Wuhan crisis was being worsened by that nation’s failing leadership.
On February 16, I posted a tweet linking to a new story in the Daily Mail in London and asked anyone who was watching: Did coronavirus originate in a Chinese government laboratory?
A few weeks later, the China machine shot back. On March 4, a tweet appeared in the Twitter feed of a New York–based China scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, Sr. It included a web link to an op-ed just posted on the website of the Xinhua news service, the government’s primary propaganda outlet: “China’s Xinhua News just posted a piece titled ‘Be bold: the world owes China a thank you,’ which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be ‘plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.’” There was no other comment.
Click on the link, and a Chinese-language version of the article shows up. Translated into English, the op-ed pointed out that China makes ingredients that go into 90 percent of the US pharmaceutical supply, as well as most of the medical masks used in the United States. It said that China could retaliate by banning exports of both. If it did so, the United States would “fall into the sea of new coronaviruses” and “fall into the hell of a new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic.” The Trump flight ban, it said, was “unscrupulous.”
It was an astonishing set of threats by the government that had just spawned a biblical-scale plague upon the planet. China should have taken responsibility, accepted the penalty, repented, and asked for our help. Instead, it offered condemnation instead of contrition, arrogance in the place of humility.
That was an unmitigated outrage. It struck me as an act of war. The US media worked far harder at second-guessing President Trump and trying to thwart much of what he was achieving on our behalf.
On April 16, 2020, on my nighttime program, I’d had enough. I interviewed a regular on my show, K. T. McFarland, who had been General Michael Flynn’s deputy national security advisor in the early months of the Trump administration. I told her my view of China’s actions:
If we don’t go to war over the loss of 31,000 now, and certainly more to come, 31,000 American lives, what do we go to war over? When do we quit sending strong letters and talking tough? At what point are there consequences for this kind of behavior? Because whether they did it intentionally or not, we do know this: that that virus was unleashed on the world and they lied, and that is the same as making it an intentional and conscious act of warfare, as far as I’m concerned.
My argument became truer still as the United States surpassed 100,000 deaths by mid-May 2020. President Trump was publicly saying that he would stop short of “retaliation” against the Chinese for the Wuhan pandemic. If the pandemic didn’t warrant retaliation by the United States, however, then almost nothing does; perhaps the president didn’t rule out “punishment” by sanctions and other measures. China must pay for this, in some way and in some form of recompense.
Four days later we called China a global pariah and warned that the Chinese Communist Party would face consequences for its lies. What else were the Chinese hiding? One of the foremost experts on China and its many misdeeds was Michael Pillsbury, a longtime associate of mine and a former Department of Defense official. On my show on April 21, he told me that the president’s investigation of China’s role in the crisis might lead to serious ramifications for WHO for its complicity in the Wuhan cover-up.
Another erudite and fearless China critic on my show was Gordon Chang, a New Jersey–born Chinese American who studied at Cornell Law School and lived in China for almost twenty years as a lawyer for two white-shoe firms. He argued that China had recklessly and maliciously ensured that the virus would spread to sicken people around the world.
He had a good point about that. China had disclosed the virus outbreak on New Year’s Eve 2019. In the ensuing four months, more than 430,000 Chinese travelers arrived on direct flights from China to the United States. That included 40,000 people who were able to land in our country in the two months after President Trump imposed the ban on flights from China.
No wonder President Trump has been willing to fight through so much static to tighten the control over our borders and who is allowed to visit or immigrate here.
On April 30, at an event in the East Room, the president stepped up his accusations aimed at China. The gathering was on behalf of elderly Americans, who were dying in disproportionately higher numbers in the pandemic. The president had previously theorized that China might have unleashed the virus in some kind of horrible mistake. Now he added that its release might have been intentional.
And that might be the case. I had underscored this on air a number of times in the crisis. But the president’s mere speculation was reported as an overstep by the Associated Press, which shares news and op-eds with hundreds of member media outlets. The headline read, “Trump Speculates That China Released Virus in Lab ‘Mistake.’”
The story implied that Trump advisors doubted his theory and might have felt pressured to produce findings to support it—the latter assertion coming from no one quoted in the story at all. The AP also quoted Chinese officials at length, printing their lies without any attempt to present them skeptically.
The AP story said, “This all comes as the pace of Trump’s own original response continues to come under scrutiny, questioned as too meager and too slow.” It invoked the Chinese statement that those claims were “unfounded and purely fabricated out of nothing” and that the lab “strictly implements bio-security procedures that would prevent the release of any pathogen.” It quoted a researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, who put the odds of a lab accident at “a million to one.” How could she know that?
The story neglected to reveal that China had refused all outside efforts to visit the lab and inspect it and had rejected offers of help by the CDC. The AP did say that China “criticized those in the US who say China should be held accountable for the global pandemic, saying they should spend their time on ‘better controlling the epidemic situation at home.’” It was as if the AP were subtly chastising our president.
Also, the AP added that “a U.S. intelligence official disputed the notion that there was pressure on agencies to bolster a particular theory.” (Italics added.) Whose notion, ventured by whom and from where? And if that anonymous government spook had “disputed the notion,” why did the AP put it into the story at all?
This kind of sleazy innuendo has riddled thousands of news articles and op-eds on dozens of lib media platforms. The renegades were raging out of control, and they were destroying the credibility of all the media. The Trump battle cry of “Fake News” came to be invoked by millions of Americans on the right and the left.
The virus’s origins trace to Wuhan (population 11 million), five hundred miles west of Shanghai. In April 2020, the Chinese government was claiming that there had been only 2,700 deaths in that city. That is a small number, considering that New York City had more than 12,000 covid-19 deaths at the time, in a smaller population (8.5 million). Then, in one day, the Chinese government increased the death count in Wuhan precisely 50 percent, from 2,579 to 3,869. The real toll may be higher. Media reporters spotted many thousands more urns lined up at Wuhan’s eight funeral homes.
The Chinese government also made use of “useful idiots” to distract the media from the country’s own culpability. When a Chinese official tried to lay blame on the US military for bringing the virus into China, the mainstream media reported it with a straight face—without denials from the Trump administration and the US military.
China did that on the record—on the president’s chosen platform of Twitter, no less. It was a clear in-your-face. The BBC has identified fifty-five Twitter accounts run by Chinese consulates, embassies, and diplomats, thirty-two of them opened in 2019 alone. In August 2019, Twitter disclosed a significant state-backed information operation originating from within China and targeting pro-democracy (and anti-China) protesters in Hong Kong. Twitter closed almost a thousand accounts and suspended 200,000 others as being illegitimate, The Guardian reported at the time.
That part of the Chinese propaganda campaign began on March 12, 2020, with a tweet from Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman. The platform is blocked inside China, but the Chinese flack, as the New York Times put it, “has made good use of the platform . . . to push a newly aggressive, and hawkish, diplomatic strategy.” The tweet plumbed conspiracy fears:
When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!
That brazen, scandalous claim, made on the record by a Chinese government spokesman, reveals the unbridled arrogance that China’s leaders now feel in their role on the world stage. They no longer bother trying to hide it. They pulled the stunt in the middle of a frightening emergency that was killing Americans by the thousands.
The tweet was reposted to the Chinese social site Weibo, where it was viewed 160 million times within a few hours. In the United States, the Chinese spokesman has 600,000 followers. The video attached to the Chinese tweet was viewed almost 4 million times. The tweet gave the impression that it summed up the video, when, in fact, they were unrelated.
The China-edited, one-minute snippet, set to haunting music added in postproduction and overlaid with screen captions in Chinese characters, shows CDC director Robert Redfield testifying to Congress. His comments have nothing to do with “patient zero,” tracking case numbers, or the US military.
A congressman asked him whether, if someone had died of the flu a few months earlier without being tested, he or she might have died of the coronavirus. According to Redfield, “Some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.” From that, China speculated, “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”
The post drew more than 15,000 “likes” on Twitter and almost 8,000 retweets by people (or software bots) forwarding the Chinese charges onward to their followers.
The left-wing Fake News media, including the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, and dozens of other lefty outlets in the United States, relayed that ridiculous canard to the American people. The Times published a story of 1,500 words and twenty-seven paragraphs, without quoting a US military spokesperson denying the assertion. Reuters ran a story of 600 words and eighteen paragraphs, without including a US denial.
The mainstream media largely avoided stating the obvious: that the China charge was silliness on its face. US troops would have had to take the long way around the barn. The virus had come from a breed of bats native to parts of China. The bats may have contaminated the food of a pangolin, an especially scaly Chinese armadillo. Edible meat from the pangolin may have been consumed by people at a “wet market.”
Actually, that would be the long way around the barn, too: in Wuhan, the government runs two virus labs that are believed to have been working with the strain. What I want to know is: Why were they working with this wickedly lethal virus at all? Maybe it was research for germ warfare gone awry.
Further, the China tweet brimmmed with subconscious persuasion. It opened by asking “when” patient zero had showed up in the United States, rather than whether the disease had begun here at all, as if that were already accepted as true. The term “patient zero” made it sound very clinical and medical, and the exhortation to “Be transparent!” should have been directed at China itself.
In the United States, Twitter quashes conservative commentary and suspends conservative accounts for transgressions the libs get away with all the time. Yet a spokesman for China, the most antagonistic government on the planet, is welcome to spin away all he wants.
The Chinese government also concocted a controversy over what to call the virus. In late January 2020, it began playing the race card. Suddenly, invoking the word “China,” “Chinese,” or “Wuhan” and linking it to “virus” or “pneumonia” was racist. Anti-Asian.
That was inane—and entirely insane. The world pandemic was raging, and China had been the epicenter and botched the early response that might have avoided all of this. It was scrambling to prevent the deaths of possibly millions of people. Yet it took time out to start strong-arming the media in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other parts of the world to press its concern about what everyone was allowed to call it.
You will note in this book that I use the terms “Wuhan virus,” “China virus,” and the like many times. My point is that we should refuse to surrender to verbal brainwashing and that no change in terminology can hide the truth it is intended to hide: that the virus came from China.
The new word game was a cunning parody of the woke ultra-Left and Fake News in this country. Many viruses carry place names: Ebola (a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo), Spanish flu, Zika (a rain forest in Uganda), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), Norovirus (Norwalk, Ohio). Plenty of diseases, too: Lyme disease (Connecticut), German measles, Coxsackievirus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the Guinea worm (for a spot on the west coast of Africa, a phrase coined in the seventeenth century).
George Orwell said that if you control the language, you control the masses. Now the Chinese were doing him one better, covering up a crime on a global scale.
One early effort in the word-banning campaign showed up on January 29 in a Chinese-language editorial on the China-controlled Xinhua news site. It argued that the term “Wuhan pneumonia” was “prejudiced” and disrespectful to the city’s residents. A week later, the Global Times weighed in similarly. The tabloid newspaper is an affiliate of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily. Recently the Global Times staff had conducted “astroturfing” campaigns against foes of the Chinese government, faking a grassroots movement and hammering such targets as the artist and antigovernment activist Ai Weiwei.
The Daily Telegraph in London reported that the Global Times was one of three state-controlled media outlets that were “flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.” The other two players were Xinhua and China Central Television, and the trio “have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese, and Arabic.”
The ads “depicted Mr Trump as misguided and racist, and suggested that the virus might have originated in the US,” the Telegraph reported. The Facebook and Instagram ads “initially ran without a political disclaimer, allowing them to hide information about who they were targeting and sometimes letting them sidestep Facebook’s strict rules on political advertising.”
On February 6, while that effort was under way, the Global Times published an op-ed by a New York writer. At one point, the writer referred to the philosopher Susan Sontag and her musings on “the need to make a dreaded disease foreign.” He added, “Some Chinese people in the US and European countries have been verbally or physically attacked by hotheaded strangers simply because they were wearing masks.” This sounds short on evidence. Some? How many?
Then the Global Times column cited a new Change.org petition that had drawn 70,000 signatures to demand apologies from the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph in Australia. The first paper’s sin was “for its reference to ‘Chinese virus’ in a subtitle under a headline.” The second one for “highlighting the words ‘China kids stay home’ in a headline.” That is kind of strict, yes?
For the kicker, the writer cited a story in a Chinese-language newspaper in New York that told of the “ordeal” of a couple rushing back to the United States from their wedding in China to beat the travel ban. “They said they now understand how people from Muslim countries on the US travel ban feel. These are small sparks carrying hope.”
For China, anyway.
Coda: the writer of the op-ed is a New York–based reporter for Sing Tao Daily, a Hong Kong–based newspaper that supports the government of China.
By February 12, the Chinese government’s campaign was in full hue and cry. Xinhua posted an “opinion” under the headline “Western Media Should Quit Racist Reporting as China Fights Epidemic.” The writer complained that “certain western media outlets are generating viciously misleading reports, undercutting global efforts to end the epidemic.”
Here is an example of what the Chinese Propaganda Ministry considers to be “racist reporting” so vicious that it undercuts the government’s efforts to quell the Wuhan pandemic: Der Spiegel in Germany featured a cover image of “a man wearing a red hoody, protective masks, goggles and earphones, with a giant headline ‘Coronavirus made in China.’” A newspaper in Denmark ran “a cartoon of the Chinese national flag that replaced the five symbolic stars with virus-like particles.” Clever.
Last, from People’s Daily: “Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal last week published an op-ed that called China and its people the real ‘Sick Man of Asia,’ a highly racist tag that has long been spurned.” Though a less hysterical view emerged in the South China Morning Post by a columnist who traced the origins of the phrase “Sick Man of Asia” to more than a hundred years ago to describe China as a crumbling empire like the original “Sick Man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire.
The South China Morning Post put an angry headline over such a nuanced piece: “Coronavirus Triggers an Ugly Rash of Racism as the Old Ideas of ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Sick Man of Asia’ return.”
The paper, it should be noted, is owned by Alibaba, which is pro-government (and it is impossible to build an Alibaba in China and be anything but pro-government).
Any nuance was beside the point. China’s feelings were hurt, and it wanted to play the victim and make a show of it. The government was so miffed by the headline in Wall Street Journal that it expelled three of the paper’s Beijing-based reporters in response, the biggest such move it had made since the Mao era, the paper reported. That was way off target. The headline ran with an opinion article that had nothing to do with the news reporters China had just jettisoned.
The Journal reported, “China’s Foreign Ministry said the move Wednesday was punishment for a recent opinion piece published by the Journal.”
It is a rather histrionic overreaction to an innocuous slight that the Chinese leaders could have let pass. It wasn’t as if the Journal had accused China of intentionally releasing the Wuhan virus from a state-run germ warfare lab in the city. Which . . . someone really ought to investigate.
The Chinese let nothing pass these days. Their newfound wealth, accumulated over twenty years of cheating on free-trade deals, has made them cockier and more combative. They might want to work harder on trying more velvet glove and less iron fist. In the coronavirus crisis, it has been all of the latter.
In April 2020, government officials in Australia were watching the alarming rise in virus cases and deaths. They did what they always do in a crisis: expressed grave concern, monitored the situation, set plans to investigate things on the ground. How dare they say investigate? China immediately threatened a quid pro quo: back off, or the largest nation in the world will stop buying your beef. The headline in the pro-government Sing Tao Daily was “Australian Ambassador Advocating Investigation of New Crown Epidemic Situation: May Not Buy Australian Beef.”
The Chinese paper reported that the government’s ambassador to Australia had given an interview to the Australian Financial Review, in which he fired a warning shot that threatened broad retaliation. An official transcript of the interview, posted in English by the Chinese Embassy in Australia, quotes the Chinese ambassador to Australia as saying:
“I think if the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think why should we go to such a country while it’s not so friendly to China. The tourists may have second thoughts. Maybe the parents of the students would also think whether this place, which they find is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to. So, it’s up to the public, the people to decide. And also, maybe the ordinary people will think why should they drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef. Why couldn’t we do it differently?”
Beef, wine, tourism, foreign exchange education, the Chinese official had just pulled off threats to four separate industries in Australia in a single sentence. It was like a great tumbling run in an Olympics floor routine. China has stopped even trying to conceal the threats and coercion that it carries into every negotiation. It is doubtful, without explicit orders from the Chinese government, that the Chinese “general public” would ever be so upset by the issue as to forgo a nice steak and a glass of cabernet.
It’s hard to remember that before Trump, the ruling class believed that capitalism would eventually bring the Chinese government around to being a good global citizen. How could it ever have imagined such a thing would come to pass?
China is “giving the sell,” as the practice is called in fake pro wrestling. When your opponent flips you onto the canvas, you let out an anguished scream and writhe in phony pain to “sell” the stunt as the real thing. That was what China was doing during the coronavirus crisis, manufacturing phony umbrage over supposed “microaggressions.”
It is a bold strategy. The rest of the world should be furious with China for inadvertently (or intentionally) giving coronavirus to the world. So China cries racism and turns itself into the wailing victim. It is as if China’s leaders had been studying the tactics of America’s radical Left. Everything is a racist slight.
Nobody seemed to mind that this was entirely contrived as a propaganda ploy by the Communist government in China. The Fake News gleefully advanced the China memes. As the crisis grew more frightening with each day, reporters at televised briefings challenged President Trump directly on why he insisted on using such hurtful terms. There had been “dozens” of recent attacks on Asian Americans in a nation of more than 300 million people. The president, as ever, obstinately held his ground, as in this back-and-forth at a White House briefing on March 18:
CECILIA VEGA OF ABC NEWS: Okay. Why do you keep calling this the “Chinese virus”? There are reports of dozens of incidents of bias against Chinese Americans in this country. Your own aide, Secretary Azar, says he does not use this term. He says, “Ethnicity does not cause the virus.” Why do you keep using this? A lot of—
THE PRESIDENT: Because it comes from China.
VEGA: —people say it’s racist.
THE PRESIDENT: It’s not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.
VEGA: And no concerns about Chinese Americans—
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, please, John.
VEGA: —in this country?
THE PRESIDENT: No.
VEGA: And to the aides behind you, are you comfortable with this term?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I have a great—I have great love for all of the people from our country. But, as you know, China tried to say at one point—maybe they’ve stopped now—that it was caused by American soldiers. That can’t happen. It’s not going to happen—not as long as I’m president. It comes from China.
Five days later, the case numbers and deaths were beginning to build, but the press pack was still in hot pursuit of the president for continuing to use the W-word. At the briefing on March 23, another reporter circled back around, this time asking the president whether his saying “Chinese virus” was fueling a rise in assaults on Asians.
REPORTER: Mr. President, just quickly, a second question: What prompted you to say at the beginning of your—beginning of your comments that you’re going to take care of the Asian Americans? Has there been something in particular that was prompting you?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, because it seems that there could be a little bit of nasty language toward the Asian Americans in our country, and I don’t like that at all. These are incredible people. They love our country, and I’m not going to let it happen. So I just wanted to make that point—
REPORTER: Do you think you contribute to the (inaudible)?
THE PRESIDENT: —because they’re blaming China. People are blaming China—
REPORTER: —by calling this the “Chinese virus”?
PRESIDENT: —and they are making statements to great American citizens that happen to be of Asian heritage. And I’m not going to let that happen.
Once the Fake News plays the same old race card, it opens the way for more attacks. At one point at a Trump coronavirus briefing, a black reporter for NPR directed a question to Surgeon General Jerome Adams: Was he aware that some people felt that his use of the terms “big momma” and “pop-pop” for “grandmother” and “grandfather” was condescending and racist? The surgeon general himself is black.
It is doubtful that the lib lemmings in the left-wing corporate media would ever have come to the angle of racist-naming the virus if the Chinese government had not fabricated a nonsensical and unnecessary controversy around it. They were happy to prosecute it, though, for the government of our avowed enemy.
Many of the same liberal media outlets dogging the president on his supposedly racist terminology were using certain terms themselves before China cowed them into a new level of political correctness:
WASHINGTON POST, JANUARY 8, 2020: “China Virus: Specter of New Illness Emerging from Wuhan”
NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 15: “Japan and Thailand Confirm New Cases of Chinese Coronavirus”
NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 21: “First Patient with Wuhan Coronavirus Is Identified in the U.S.”
WIRED, JANUARY 22: “Experts Can’t Agree If the Wuhan Virus Is a Global Crisis”
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, JANUARY 23: “Wuhan Virus Death Toll Rises to 26 as China Moves to Restrict Travel in More Cities”
CNN, JANUARY 23: “Wuhan Coronavirus Is Not Yet a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, WHO Says”
WASHINGTON POST, JANUARY 31: “An expert on influenza says we may not be able to contain the Wuhan coronavirus—but it may not spread as fast as some others.”
CNN.COM, FEBRUARY 8: “A US national in China is believed to be the first foreigner to die from the Wuhan coronavirus, authorities confirmed.”
Even the same Chinese government–controlled websites that decried the use of “Wuhan virus” and other terms as racist were using those same words right up until Chinese officials decided to declare them to be racist and xenophobic. And hurtful, of course, very hurtful. Some examples:
XINHUA, JANUARY 9: “Wuhan’s Viral Pneumonia Epidemic with Unknown Causes”
PEOPLE’S DAILY, JANUARY 21: “Fourth Death Confirmed in Wuhan Pneumonia Cases”
GLOBAL TIMES, JANUARY 22: “Wuhan Pneumonia a Wake-up Call for Basic Chinese Research”
PEOPLE’S DAILY, JANUARY 25: “Wuhan Pneumonia a Wake-up Call for Basic Chinese Research”
By early February 2020, however, the Chinese media websites had scrubbed all their online content to remove the supposedly offending words. You won’t find any trace of them if you look up those old stories on their sites today. In their eyes, it never happened.
Were all these left-wing media outlets racist for using that term—or did they let the Chinese rewrite the rules in the middle of a crisis? And all because the Chinese government wanted to divert attention away from its own monumental failings. The truth underlying both sides—the lib media wretches and China—was that they shared a common enemy in President Trump.
He had barely gotten started. The president’s advisors were planning their next steps and bracing for further confrontations with the dissembling liars of the Chinese government. In the previous two years, President Trump had figured out the Chinese mind-set and had racked up a string of remarkable victories against our largest rival. It was another challenge that no one had thought he could win. Up next, an inside look.