NEW DELHI, Dec 26: Suspected of leaking out the Corona virus beyond its borders and spread the pandemic in the world and the World Health Organisation finally agreeing to send a team of experts to China to probe the origin of the virus, China has indulged in self back-slapping for the country’s “extremely extraordinary success” in handling the pandemic domestically.
Ignoring the barrage of criticism it faced at home and abroad over its initial handling of the virus, which emerged in the central city of Wuhan last December, China’s ruling Communist Party leaders have congratulated themselves on their “extremely extraordinary” success in handling the Covid-19 outbreak.
China’s Politburo, the top decision-making body of the Communist Party, said late Friday that the party leadership “played a decisive role in leading … China in prevailing over the rare risks and challenges this year.”
“At the critical moment … the Party Central Committee took a long-term view …achieving an extremely extraordinary glory in this extremely unusual year,” state news agency Xinhua reported, citing a statement issued after the two-day meeting of the Politburo.
China has largely curbed the spread of the virus, and was one of the only major economies to report growth this year. But it has been accused of covering up the initial outbreak, and so contributing to the virus’ spread internationally.
At home, Beijing has attempted to stifle criticism by punishing at least eight whistleblowers.
A Chinese citizen journalist who reported on Wuhan’s outbreak, Zhang Zhan, has been detained since May. His trial is likely to begin next week.
Zhang is a former lawyer who travelled to the city in February to report on the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak, through live streams and critical essays widely shared on social media platforms banned in China.
The two-day Politburo meeting comes shortly before an international team of WHO experts is expected to arrive in China to investigate the animal origins of Covid-19, during which trip they will visit Wuhan.
As experts in the team explained, the WHO, which was alleged to had been blocking all anti-China tirades for creating the pandemic situation, was still not looking for “finding a guilty country or a guilty authority.” The team’s visit to China was only “about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future,” the expert said.
Beijing has recently attempted to cast doubts on the origins of the virus — the state-run People’s Daily newspaper said in a Facebook post in early November that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan.” In fact, it has always tried to blame other counties including even India as the “origin” of the deadly virus.
(Manas Dasgupta)
