Delingpole: Woke ‘Hug a Chinese Person’ Propaganda Didn’t Age Well

A hospital employee wearing a protection mask and gear, escorts a patient towards the radi
Getty Images
James Delingpole

“I’m not a virus. I’m human. Eradicate the prejudice.” This was the message of videos released in northern Italy in February this year, urging Italians to hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the coronavirus.

Here is one of the videos, showing a Chinese girl in Milan exchanging hugs with passers-by.

Here is another, set in Florence this time, in which a Chinese man wearing a surgical mask (which he later removes) also offers himself up for hugs by Italian people in the street.

These videos — as the saying goes — have not aged well.

Northern Italy is now the home of the Coronavirus’s deadliest cluster, with hospitals overwhelmed, approaching 2,000 dead and the entire country in lockdown. Pity the poor fools who were seduced into giving out hugs when, really, the sensible money was on scaling back close physical contact with strangers.

The videos were put out by Associazione Unione Giovani Italo Cinesi, a local organisation, funded by the Chinese government.

What’s clear now, is that they belong to an era which no longer exists.

Imagine the response the Chinese government would get now if they tried to make such a propaganda video on the streets of Italy. (If the streets weren’t on lockdown, that is). Those friendly Chinese folk in the video would be more likely to get lynched than hugged — not least because Italians have now woken up to the fact that being discriminating about who you get up-close and personal with can sometimes be beneficial: a life-saver even.

Until quite recently the Chinese Communist Party — ably assisted by its useful idiots in the liberal Western MSM — has fought a largely successful propaganda war. It has persuaded the media to focus on how amazing it is that China can put together a series of jerry-built hospitals in six days — and ignore the fact that we wouldn’t be in this mess if the Chinese authorities hadn’t covered up the outbreak for so long in the first place.

It has persuaded idiots on CNN — and elsewhere — that it is somehow racist to use phrases like Wuhan Flu, or Wu Flu, even though Wuhan (that’s in China, by the way) is where this Chinese contagion originated. And, for a time, it even managed to persuade some gullible fools to swallow politically correct guff like the message in those flagrant and dangerous propaganda videos.

The Mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, actually lent his support to that ‘hug a Chinese person’ campaign.

Woke culture has imbued us with the notion that ‘racism’ is the worst crime in the world, and that pushed a lot of people into a mad dash to virtue-signal about how good and wonderful they are by putting themselves at risk. But you’d have to be frankly suicidal to give out free hugs in certain Italian cities now — to Chinese tourists or anyone else.

It is a simple and observable fact that woke culture is becoming an unmourned casualty of Coronavirus.

When your relatives are dying, when your country has closed down, when your economy is collapsing, woke identity politics suddenly becomes a luxury you can no longer afford. Everyone has many, many more important things to worry about.

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