Gordon Chang reacts to Trump taking aim at China’s leader over pandemic
Fox News Asia analyst Gordon Chang tells ‘America’s Newsroom’ President Trump is being more ‘realistic’ and is moving in the right direction with the coronavirus outbreak.
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Fox News Asia analyst Gordon Chang told "America's Newsroom" Thursday that President Trump is right to a take harsh tone toward China after previous presidents tried to “entice China into good behavior” while being fully aware that Beijing was “acting badly.”
“What President Trump has done starting yesterday is [use] some really corrosive language and I actually think this is a good thing because he’s now becoming much more realistic about what the Chinese did,” said Chang, who added that Chinese leaders took steps that “inevitably led to the spread of the coronavirus beyond China’s borders."
“President Trump ... called this ‘mass worldwide killing’ and he has mentioned ‘incompetence,'" Chang noted. "Actually, I think the president could have gone further and said this was either reckless or malicious, but, anyway, we’re seeing a new tone out of the White House and that, I believe, is a move in the right direction,” Chang said.
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Trump unleashed a series of scathing tweets Wednesday night in response to what he called a “massive disinformation campaign” by the Chinese government regarding the coronavirus outbreak.
Trump said Beijing was “desperate to have Sleepy Joe Biden win the presidential race so they can continue to rip-off [sic] the United States, as they have done for decades, until I came along!”
The president also accused two top Chinese spokespeople of trying to “deflect the pain and carnage that their country spread throughout the world.”
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In addition, Trump appeared to direct blame toward China President Xi Jinping, although Trump did not mention him by name.
“It all comes from the top,” Trump wrote. “They could have easily stopped the plague, but they didn’t!”
Trump and his administration have blamed the Chinese government for the pandemic, accusing Chinese officials of downplaying the scale of the outbreak in Wuhan and providing faulty data to the World Health Organization – resulting in nations around the world, including the U.S., being ill-prepared for the impact of the virus as it crossed their borders.
Chang said that the World Health Organization “helped China propagate the false notion” that the disease did not spread between humans while knowing otherwise. Chang also said the the WHO helped China pressure countries into not implementing quarantines and travel restrictions when such measures were necessary to prevent the spread of the virus.
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“This disease is a lot worse outside of China because of the actions of the World Health Organization,” Chang said.
Fox News' Dom Calicchio contributed to this report.