US officials: China, Russia, Iran pushing similar disinformation campaigns on COVID-19
Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane on efforts from China, Russia, and Iran to exploit U.S. amis coronavirus pandemic.
The Chinese government has been “transparent, open” and “very quick” in its response to the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing’s ambassador to the United Kingdom said Thursday.
Liu Xiaoming urged international cooperation during the pandemic and said “blaming” and “bullying” would just create a wedge between nations.
The United States thinks “they can bully China, they think they can bully the world," he continued in an online news conference with a member of Britain's House of Lords. "If WHO [the World Health Organization] do not act in their way, they stop supplying, they stop support. They criticize WHO to be China-centric, that’s not right."
Liu compared America's actions regarding China to 19th-century colonial wars.
“Some politicians, some people, want to play at being the world’s policeman - this is not the era of gunboat diplomacy, this is not the era when China was a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society," he said.
Liu said there was a lot of “disinformation” about an alleged cover-up by the Chinese government and rejected the idea that the country is an enemy of the United States.
"If they regard China as an enemy they chose the wrong target,” he said.
“I hear quite a lot of this speculation, this disinformation about China covering up, about China hiding something - this is not true,” Liu said, according to Reuters. “The Chinese government was transparent and very quick to share data.”
He said it would be up to the WHO when asked if China would allow investigators and access to data and witnesses for any future international inquiries, the state-run China Daily reported.
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"The government adopted very swift actions, and notified the WHO four days later, and shared information seven days later with the Americans," he added.
China has been criticized for allegedly attempting to cover up the scale of the virus when it first started to spread through the country and continuing to underreport cases.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday said "China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy as well by not sharing the information they had,” adding that the Communist Party still isn’t being transparent with the U.S.