In “Izvestia”, Natalia Potryakova wrote about a Western campaign exploiting the origins and spread of the Corona virus to discredit China.
The article said: The second half of April brought to China many disappointing news. On its seventeenth, the Chinese Statistical Office published data on the country’s gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year. Under it, the Chinese economy registered negative growth for the first time since 1992, when the country’s statistics began to officially take into account the GDP index. Moreover, according to many economists, the current economic situation can be compared to the times of the end of the cultural revolution in 1976.
Moreover, it is impossible to measure the damage caused by the spread of the Corona virus to the country’s image, either in percentage or numbers. In April, it became clear that the damage to reputation was real, as was the reality of economic losses China had suffered.
The United States has played the largest role in amplifying anti-Chinese sentiments in the world. And in recent days, Americans have started to publicly spread the idea that the virus has never appeared on the wild animal market in Wuhan, but has come out of the walls of a secret laboratory on the outskirts of the city itself.
The negative attitude towards China began to grow not only in America. In mid-April, French leader Emmanuel Macron said in an interview that it was naive to think that the People’s Republic of China had dealt well with the Corona virus. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Rap also expressed a similar view, noting that after the end of the epidemic, Beijing would have to answer “difficult questions.”
Of course, in these difficult times, it turned out that China has sincere friends, led by Russia. In a recent phone conversation with President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin highly valued the actions of the Chinese partners that allowed control of the epidemiological situation in the country, and called attempts to accuse China of not informing the international community in time of a serious non-fruitful infection.
However, the truth remains, in fact, as the events of recent weeks present to the Chinese authorities not only the task of economic recovery, but also a far-reaching goal that is equally important: to overcome the damage to the country’s image globally.
The article only expresses the opinion of the newspaper or the writer
