Germany’s largest newspaper responded with a scathing video Saturday after China wrote an open letter saying it’s “pretty bad style to blame” them for the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The feud began after Bild asked “whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide,” German journalist Julian Reichelt said in the video.
Bild determined, in an article titled “What China Owes Us,” that the country owes Germany the equivalent of almost $162 billion USD, the Jerusalem Post reported.
“I followed your reporting on the corona pandemic in general and China’s alleged guilt in particular today,” Wednesday’s open letter from China’s embassy spokeswoman Tao Lil read according to the Jersusalem Post. “Apart from the fact that we consider it a pretty bad style to blame a country for a pandemic that is affecting the whole world and then to present an explicit account of alleged Chinese debts to Germany, the article ignores some essential facts.”
Reichelt, Bild’s editor-in-chief, responded to Chinese President Xi Jinping with a video that ripped apart the country’s communist leader and how the virus has been handled by them.
“You [Xi], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it,” Reichelt said in the video. “Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace, and which now became a global disaster.”
“You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”
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Reichelt continued on to accuse China of being the “world champion in intellectual property theft.” He said that because the country surveils, it is not free, “and a nation that is not free, is not creative.”
“A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything,” Reichelt said. “This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft. China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own. The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely.”
“China’s greatest export hit – that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world – is corona.” (RELATED: The CIA Is Trying To Find China’s Real Coronavirus Data)
Reichelt added that China is now “known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease” and that this will be Xi’s “political legacy.” He pointed to a Washington Post report that said labs in Wuhan, China were researching coronaviruses without adhering to the highest standards of safety.
“Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?” Reichelt asked. “Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of corona victims all over the world?”
The German journalist even bashed Xi by noting that his “power is crumbling” and that those in his own country are beginning to question his rule.
“In your country, your people are whispering about you,” Reichelt said. “Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China.”
“Corona will be your political end, sooner or later.”