Covid-19: Here’s The Letter A German Newspaper Wrote To China For Endangering The Whole World

Dear President Xi Jinping,

your embassy in Berlin sent me an open letter because we asked BILD whether China should pay for the gigantic economic damage that the Corona virus is currently causing worldwide.

Your message calls it “infamous” and accuses me of “fueling nationalism”.
Let me say a few things about this.

1. You rule by surveillance. You would not be president without surveillance. You can monitor everything, every one of your citizens, but you refuse to monitor the high-risk animal markets in your country. Any critical newspaper or website will shut you down, but not the stalls selling bat soup. You not only monitor your people, you also endanger them – and with it the whole world.

2. Monitoring leads to lack of freedom. Those who are not free are not creative. Those who are not innovative do not invent anything. That is why you have made your country the world champion in theft of intellectual property. China enriches itself with the inventions of others instead of inventing itself. The reason for this is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. The biggest Chinese export hit that nobody wanted, but that went around the world anyway, is Corona.

3. When you, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that corona is transmitted from person to person, you left the world in the dark. Your top experts did not answer the phone, did not answer an email when western researchers wanted to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud a nationalist to tell the truth that you felt was a national disgrace.

4. The Washington Post reports that laboratories in Wuhan have researched corona viruses in bats without meeting the highest safety standards. Why aren’t your toxic labs as secure as your political prison? Do you want to explain this to grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of Corona victims around the world?

5. People are already whispering about you in your country. Your power is crumbling. You have created an opaque, opaque China that once stood for an inhuman surveillance state and now stands for the spread of a deadly plague. This is your political legacy.

Your message tells me that I would not do justice to the “traditional friendship of our peoples”. I assume you consider it a great “friendship” if you now generously send masks around the world. I do not call this friendship, but smiling imperialism. They want to strengthen China through an epidemic that came from China. I don’t think you can save your power personally. I believe that sooner or later Corona will mean your political end.

Sincerely,

Julian Reichelt

China‘s embassy in Berlin wrote me an open letter because they weren‘t too happy with our Corona coverage. I responded.
Full version: https://t.co/BH1muj2hnh pic.twitter.com/Q62H2G9ZqA

— Julian Reichelt (@jreichelt) April 18, 2020