China Spins Coronavirus, Blames US and Seeks to Use It as Economic Weapon

After badly bungling and then covering up its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, China is now in full spin control mode, blaming the United States and trying to take advantage of this global epidemic.  

At his press briefing Wednesday, President Trump again called coronavirus "the Chinese virus," in response to the latest moves by China. "I would like to begin by announcing some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus," Trump said.

And while he is being criticized for it, China knew about the existence of coronavirus as early as last November, but the communist regime stopped Chinese labs from testing for it and even threatened health care workers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, who tried to warn the outside world, and later died from the virus.

By January, China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television that the risk of transmission was low, and the government was arresting citizens who were trying to sound the alarm. Then with the coronavirus outbreak in full swing, Chinese officials allowed a lunar new year banquet to go ahead in Wuhan province – the epicenter of the pandemic – with tens of thousands of people sharing food dishes; then let millions travel out of Wuhan and China, spreading the disease across the world. 

There was no quarantine in Wuhan until a week before February.  

"The Chinese are directly responsible for all we are confronting right now," says Frank Gaffney, executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy, "for having both precipitating this, for having taken actions that have made this worse, and now for lying about the fact that it was anybody other than them that was responsible."

Beijing is now trying to rewrite the narrative of how coronavirus started. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman suggested in a tweet last week that visiting American soldiers brought the coronavirus to China. 

And a new report by the open source intelligence organization Horizon Advisory says China intends to profit from the chaos it has sown into the world economy. Nate Picarsic of Horizon Advisory says a post-virus economic strategy by Chinese leaders is already underway. 

"It's clear that there are thinkers in China who see this as an opportunity," Picarsic says. "Having gone through this crisis already, they're thinking about where there are opportunities to get an unfair advantage, vis-à-vis global competitors." 

With western economies still in free fall, the Horizon report says Chinese leaders see a chance to replace the US as the top economic power and control the world economy. 

And in the blame game, China has doubled down. 

It's now kicking out American journalists. And a Chinese tycoon who called Chinese President Xi a "clown" for making the coronavirus a pandemic through his ineptitude, has disappeared. 

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