In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks by video with patients and medical workers at the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province, Tuesday, March 10, 2020. China’s president visited the center of the global virus outbreak Tuesday as Italy began a sweeping nationwide travel ban and people worldwide braced for the possibility of recession. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. (Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via AP)
We’ve been talking about how a lot of media in this country has basically failed in their journalistic duty to call out China, and place the blame for a lot of this pandemic where it belongs.
But people including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump, Jr, are pointing out one journalist who isn’t afraid to lay a truth smackdown on China. It’s Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief for Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild. It’s just too bad it isn’t an American journalist or liberal news network here that’s willing to say this.
Phenomenal: Very much worth watching. Germany’s largest newspaper shows courage & clarity. Is ANYBODY at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, WaPo, NYT, Bloomberg willing to demonstrate even a fraction of this journalistic integrity? Or are the $$ from the Chinese market all you care about? https://t.co/KgR7o1nrks
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 19, 2020
Germany’s largest newspaper comes out swinging against China. This is a must watch for US journalists who seem intent on doing China’s bidding. #BildTV @jreichelt https://t.co/UsqN9gKLVO
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 19, 2020
Reichelt chastised China and laid out the case against them.
From Jerusalem Post:
“You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”
He continued with his bill of particulars, noting that “surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
“China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own,” Reichelt wrote. “The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is coronavirus.”
Reichelt pointed that China knew.
“You [Jinping], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.”
Reichelt also called them out for their failure to keep their labs in Wuhan safe.
Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners? Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of corona victims all over the world?”
He concluded that, “In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.That is your political legacy.”
What had sparked Chinese anger against Bild and caused his response was that Bild had calculated a bill for the damage that they believed that China owed Germany, estimating it was about $149 billion euros, so far.
BILD, the largest German newspaper, today presented the first coronavirus bill China owes Germany now.
They added: "Only one thing does not fit on any bill, cannot be made good by any money in the world: the thousands of people who have died of the #COVID19 virus." pic.twitter.com/CvGlEMzZwP
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) April 14, 2020
Good on them. More of this please. The world needs to give China a reckoning.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member