This week, China’s Foreign Ministry Commissioner Xie Feng wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “China Wants to Help the World Fight Coronavirus," it got some lawmakers like Senator Marco Rubio (R) furious.
Rubio responded to Commissioner Feng’s op-ed with an op-ed of his own wherein he argues that “it is the latest attempt in the Communist Party’s blatant effort to sow chaos through conspiracy theories, spread propaganda and rewrite history amid” the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the article, Commissioner Feng writes that Beijing made “tremendous sacrifice against all the odds, it created a strong first line of defense for China and the world.”
In response, the Florida lawmaker declared that “these lies may work within China, where the Communist Party’s authoritarian grip on the media and censorship of social media gives the party full control of the narrative, but the world knows better.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to claim lives and add financial duress to Americans and the globe, China has faced heavy scrutiny for spreading misinformation and mishandling the spread of the virus.
Rubio further explains this by saying “that China covered up the outbreak of the virus, forcefully silenced medical professionals like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, lied about the number of infections and withheld information about the virus from the global community.”
He added that “the failure of the Chinese Communist Party to be transparent and disclose critical information from the beginning led to increased deaths around the world, a higher rate of infection, and caused the pandemic to spread faster and further than it otherwise would.”
In turn, lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed to hold China accountable for their actions during the initial spread of the Coronavirus. As well, Florida leadership has called for an investigation, which Rubio notes in the letter by saying that the Communist Party of China should “cooperate with an international investigation to find out exactly how this global pandemic began in the first place.”
However, he does remark, “I won’t hold my breath waiting.”
