US and China Locked in Superpower Superstruggle over Coronavirus - But Masks Needed

US and China Locked in Superpower Superstruggle over Coronavirus - But Masks Needed

The United States and China are having a major spat over messaging pertaining to the coronavirus it appears. President Donald Trump who was president during the coronavirus outbreaks in 2020 blamed the Chinese government for "covering up" what was going on with the outbreak and not being totally transparent with the rest of the world about it back in December when the first incidences of the virus allegedly appeared in Wuhan China. The president and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dubbed the virus the "Chinese Virus" and the "Wuhan Virus" respectively.

 

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President Xi Jinping, then president of the People's Republic of China cried foul. In addition to tossing out American journalists from the country and rescinding their press credentials, the Jinping government stirred the wrath of the Trump administration by repeating a conspiracy theory that the virus had been taken to China by American servicemen and women. However the Americans countered with a theory that the virus started from wet markets where in certain provinces in the People's Republic of China, bats are consumed as food. The Covid 19 strain of the coronavirus were believed to have been contracted from infected bats.

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While both countries saw their respective economies spiral downwards (given that citizens were under a mandatory lockdown and confinement due to the virus) the two leaders continued to have tense interactions concerning how to handle the virus and who was to blame.

China reportedly shared the genome for the virus with the West despite this standoff however the countries had difficulties negotiating a deal for much needed medical masks which were to be manufactured by China and sold the the US who badly needed them to stem the viral spread of the deadly respiratory ailment in the United States.

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China Gets Defensive About the Coronavirus and Expels American Journalists From the Country

 

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Hello Readers of China Buzz Today! How are you all???


I have taken a 10 year sabbatical and now I am back, taking charge of all my blogs including this one. 😁I just updated another blog I had let go for about a decade called Small Biz Society International Blog. I have about 11 or 15 of these blogs that I just let go about a decade ago and completely forgot how to even log in to them. I was trying to clean my digital archives and found a bunch of these blogs which were all under the same log in. I figured it would be a good idea to maybe start blogging on them again.

So, I visited China a long time ago, around 2011. I wrote a love letter to the country on this blog when I returned to America and you can read all about it here. 

In addition to that, I wrote a piece on China for Small Biz Society International Blog called, simply China which you can read here.

Since that time, a lot has obviously happened in the world. At the time of my visit, Barack Obama was president of the United States and I was living in the USA. It could have been in Brooklyn but I may also have been studying at the time so I was in Texas when I wrote the last post on China Buzz. Now I am living in Paris and spend a huge part of my day on a new blog called Business English Paris.

These days, there is a new president in the USA and his name is Donald Trump. And he and the Chinese Prisident Xi Jinping have a very uneasy relationship to say the least. The last straw seems to be the insistence on President Trump to dub the coronavirus which is currently decimating the world by taking lives and making people very ill, the "Chinese virus" or the "Wuhan virus" (the first case of the virus showed up in Wuhan China.)

The Chinese government objects to this and has accused  the president of being "racist", of using racist tactics and of trying to stigmatize China and Chinese people by calling the virus the "Chinese virus." As a result, the government of China has decided to revoke press credentials of dozens of American journalists in the country. They also stated that they were taking "countermeasures" for Mr Trump's expulsion of dozens of Chinese journalists in the USA.

The situation has gotten so out of hand, that reputable media in the US and Europe are calling it an "escalation between superpowers." According to a recent piece in the New York Times,

Reporters at foreign news outlets in China were among those who aggressively reported on the coronavirus epidemic in January and February, including in its earliest days, when it was a regionalized outbreak in central China and the Chinese government sought to play down its severity.

The news organizations have also reported in the past year on other issues deemed extremely sensitive by Chinese officials, including the mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region and the shadowy business dealings of family members of leaders, including President Xi Jinping.

Oh, what a difference a decade makes! 

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