Bild is Germany's largest newspaper and they fired an excellent shot across the bow of Communist China. They want reperations. China replied. The Editor of Bild replied. William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a nice compilation:
Editor of Germany’s biggest newspaper to China’s President: You are endangering the world
Bild is the largest circulation German newspaper. (English language website here.) It ran an article calling on China to make reparations for the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. The totalwas 149 billion Euros:
China’s Embassy in Germany wrote Bild’s editor, Julian Reichfelt, castigating him.
Had the Chinese Ambassador sent such a letter to almost any U.S. major publication, the reaction would be one of capitulation for fear of being shut out of the Chinese market. That’s what Bloomberg did when it spiked its story about corruption by senior Chinese officials.
Fortunately for Germany and the world, Reichfelt reacted with an open letter back to China’s President Xi Jinping. There are so many plain truths that the U.S. mainstream media, obsessed with getting Trump, refuses to say.
William has links to the whole thing including the text of the Editor's final five-point reply. Here is the opening and first three points:
Dear President Xi Jinping
Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper BILD whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the corona virus is inflicting worldwide.
Let me respond:
1. 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.
2. Surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything . 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.
3. You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that Corona is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. 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.
Excellent writing and pretty damning. Go and read the whole exchange - our own media would never do anything this direct, factual and to the point. Must not deviate from the narrative - Orange Man Bad. I wonder what Angela Merkel is thinking right now - she has quite the history of communism.
Oh, and by the way, when we talk about the Chinese "President" - there are no elections in China. There are no term limits for the office of President. That office is filled by whomever can grab it and hold on. Their term of office lasts until someone else can grab power from them. The word Dictator comes to mind.
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