Chinese Communist Party (CCP) media rushed to score political points against American “racism” during the weekend riots, even though a month ago one of the big stories out of China was restaurants and hotels refusing to serve black customers, inviting formal protests from African leaders.
China’s state-run Global Times, for example, gleefully portrayed the riots as proof that America does not truly believe in the values it espouses.
“The line ‘All men are created equal’ articulated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence is difficult to picture as a reality in the U.S.,” the CCP paper sneered.
The Global Times clumsily worked the CCP’s narrative about America’s supposedly poor response to the coronavirus into its editorial screed:
Why didn’t the death toll of more than 100,000 from the coronavirus pandemic send shockwaves? Why was it the killing of a single black man that triggered such sweeping protests?
While viruses doe not differentiate people (regardless of their rank, race and age), racism does. Despite that the US is dubbed as a “melting pot,” disparities exist among different races in the country. Although racial equality is guaranteed in law, from the social level and from people’s mindsets, potential racial conflicts are brewing.
Long-standing disparities in health and inequalities in access to medical care have also become prominent divisions during the coronavirus pandemic in the US. According to data released by several states and big cities, African Americans are more likely to die from COVID-19, prompting US media to lament, “When white America catches the novel coronavirus, black Americans die.” Job losses also tend to be higher among people of color during the pandemic.
The Global Times invoked former President Barack Obama’s response to riots during his second term, completely letting Obama off the hook for everything that occurred and claiming none of the street clashes under Obama ever evolved into “large-scale violent protests,” so it could take potshots at current President Donald Trump, who is coincidentally far tougher on Communist China than Obama ever was.
“In 2016, Trump won the popular support from the low- and middle-class white people who felt they were reversely discriminated under the Obama era. Trump himself is a racist president, as Democrats call him. The latest protests may just lead to ever stronger white supremacy,” the Global Times asserted.
Beijing is currently shredding Hong Kong’s autonomy to impose a “national security law” that will wipe out the protest movement, one of the big stories in Hong Kong has always been police brutality, and China cannot get through a week without threatening a military attack on Taiwan, but it has no shame about lecturing other nations for taking a tough stance against riots, looting, and outright terrorist violence.
Some of the CCP’s more adventurous propagandists are digitally editing photos to make it look like the demonstrators in U.S. cities are begging China to help them:
Pro-China disinformation campaign in which images of protests in America are being photoshopped to make them look like they were appealing for help from China.
Please fact-check images posted online by doing reverse image search. https://t.co/QQxM6VRgoS
— Mandy Lee 😷 (@MandyLeeDUBHKG) June 1, 2020
Reuters reported on Monday that the U.S. protests are “a hot topic on state and social media” in China, with state-run television airing clips from MSNBC interviews and embedding Chinese reporters into protest crowds.
“On China’s social media platform Weibo, at least five news items on the protests were among the top 20 trending topics by midday, led by reports Trump had been temporarily taken to a bunker as protesters surrounded the White House,” the report said.
Reuters noticed that Chinese state media coverage of the protests is closely following the CCP’s coronavirus political narrative.
“The number one thing they want to show is that the Communist Party is doing a better job in terms of fighting the coronavirus and managing society,” said Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. “That’s the main message: the U.S. is not doing good.”
Some Chinese media have made comparisons between the U.S. protests and those in Hong Kong, the latest flashpoint in U.S.-China tensions. Trump has begun the process of eliminating special U.S. treatment for Hong Kong to punish Beijing’s decision to impose new national security laws on the territory.
The state-run China Daily posted a political cartoon showing a coronavirus patient saying “I can’t breathe” – the dying words of Floyd – as a figure resembling Trump walks away after cutting the line to an oxygen tank labeled “W.H.O.” (a reference to Trump cutting ties to the World Health Organization).
Fox News found the Chinese Foreign Ministry reposting attacks on the U.S. government from Russian state media, whose alleged influence used to be a loudly professed topic of great concern for the Democrat Party in the United States, and saw Iranian media joining in the pile-on as well. In each case, the authoritarian regimes touted the unrest in American cities as proof that U.S. human-rights complaints against them have been hypocritical and insincere.
A major international incident occurred in April when hotels, restaurants, and apartment buildings in southern China were caught banning black customers, forcing many African immigrants to sleep on the streets. Chinese state propaganda blamed Africans for bringing a second wave of coronavirus infections to China, so Chinese businesses began refusing to serve them.
A group of African ambassadors in China wrote a letter to the Communist regime asking it to stop the “stigmatization and discrimination” of immigrants from their nations, and protesting reports of “forceful testing, quarantine, and other inhuman treatments meted out to Africans.”
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