Musundali Bhuiyan
There is a saying that faults come thick where love is thin. This proverb holds fully true when it comes to the treatment of some mainstream media towards China. No matter what happens in China, they scramble to tarnish the image of the country.
They go all out to mislead the world by spreading negativities and mysteries and twisting the facts regarding anything that occurs in China. It has long been observed by many analysts and experts from all over the world.
These media have earlier proved their vindictive mentality towards Beijing by running a large-scale smear campaign against China. In continuation of the campaign, they have constantly been spreading misinformation about China’s moves to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lately, China has optimized its measures to manage and control the pandemic once again and lifted almost three-year-long Covid restrictions. The government has scrapped quarantine and PCR test requirements for foreigners to arrive in China. Even the country now considers the virus just an infection, not pneumonia. China has also become the first country to bid adieu to the pandemic by downgrading the Covid management to class B.
As a result, China has witnessed a surge of positive cases. But Chinese people and experts hailed the latest optimization as timely and scientific moves. They are of the view that China acted at a proper time when the virus is not that much deadly, though more infectious.
However, several media are sparing no efforts to depict the optimization moves as a massive failure of the Chinese government. They are leading the world to confusion that millions might die from the virus, the ground reality is different though.
I have come to know the opposite information about fatalities by talking to my foreign doctor friends working in hospitals in Beijing. They even told me that fever clinics at their hospitals no longer see crowds as the city has already passed Covid peak, let alone the death of numerous people from coronavirus.
This is nothing new for some leading media when it comes to covering China. At the beginning of the outbreaks of coronavirus in Wuhan of China, they showed their true color to the world. They acted out of their old habits of demeaning China and its people. But China took swift, effective and successful measures to curb the outbreaks.
The world witnessed that China stopped at nothing to prevent the further spreading of coronavirus and safeguard the world from the contagion of the then-deadly virus. The most comprehensive and rigorous prevention and control measures of China to contain the spread of the virus helped the world take necessary preparations for the prevention and control of the feared pandemic.
On many occasions, people around the world, therefore, came up with messages of encouragement to the Chinese people in their fight against coronavirus. The leaders of different nations from across the world also expressed condolences, sympathy, and solidarity with the leadership and the people of China for their unprecedented battle against the epidemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that China deserves the international community's gratitude and respect for having taken very serious measures to contain the novel coronavirus outbreak and prevent exporting cases overseas. The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome, and shared it with WHO and the world is very impressive, and beyond words.
But some specific media have never become happy with the Chinese measures to fight the epidemic. They always try to fish in troubled waters and blame China for what the country is not responsible for. This is nothing but an unfair effort to stigmatize China and the Chinese in the world.
The entire world knows that China has always been on the right track to fight the pandemic. The country has updated and optimized its measures to control and manage Covid-19 based on science and common sense from time to time, saving the lives of millions of people at a huge economic cost.
But these media are pulling out all the stops to create confusion and panic about China and demean the Chinese. Thus they would like to hamper the trade and business of China with other countries, making the second-largest economy isolated from the rest of the world.
- Musundali Bhuiyan is a journalist
