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China outraged after German newspaper accuses it of 'exporting' coronavirus and demands $162 bn in damages

On Thursday, the editor-in-chief of popular German newspaper Bild launched an attack on Chinese President Xi Jinping over his regime's mishandling of the contagion
UPDATED APR 20, 2020
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

China's communist regime is feeling the wrath of several countries after allegedly lying about the coronavirus outbreak that has claimed over 166,000 lives across the globe. 

On Thursday, April 16, the editor-in-chief of popular German newspaper Bild launched a no-holds-barred attack on Chinese President Xi Jinping over his regime's mishandling of the contagion as well as alleged human rights violations carried out by the ruling Communist Party. 

Julian Reichelt is demanding at least $162 billion for Germany in damages as a result of China's actions.

"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 coronavirus is inflicting worldwide," the German editor wrote to the Chinese president in a scathing article titled "What China Owes Us."

"You, 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," he continued. "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."

Members of Germany's coronavirus emergency task force sit down for a work session while a monitor shows the global spread and human toll of the virus at offices of the Ministry of Health on February 28, 2020, in Berlin, Germany (Getty Images)

He went on to attack Jinping by saying he "wouldn't be president" without ruling "by surveillance."

"You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country," Reichelt alleged. "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."

The journalist also noted that “surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative," before accusing the president of making China "the world champion in intellectual property theft." 

“China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own,” Reichelt wrote. "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 the corona[virus].”

It recently emerged that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. However, this is yet to be confirmed.

Prior to Reichelt's impassioned editorial, the Bild calculated that China owed Germany a whopping $162 billion for damages due to the outbreak. The newspaper said the compensation amounts to at least $1,940 per German citizen if the country's GDP dropped by 4.2 percent.

This triggered an angry response from Tao Lil, the spokeswoman for the Chinese embassy in Germany, who wrote an open letter on their website.

“I followed your reporting on the corona pandemic in general and China's alleged guilt in particular today," she said, addressing the paper. "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," she claimed.

Lil unabashedly asserted that many countries who are now struggling with COVID-19 "have had time to prepare for the cross-border spread of the pathogen after China reported its outbreak under IHR [World Health Organization] guidelines."

Finally, offering no credible defense, she slammed the article saying it "stirs up xenophobia and nationalism."

The vendor sells vegetables in front of a makeshift barricade built to control entry and exit to a residential compound on April 17, 2020, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China (Getty Images)

That said, the Bild editor-in-chief also cited a recent Washington Post article in his rant against the Chinese president.

"Your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching coronaviruses in bats, but without maintaining the highest safety standards," he wrote. "Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners? Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of corona victims all over the world?"

In conclusion, Reichelt wrote that the CCP's power is "crumbling" as they had created an "inscrutable, non-transparent China."

"Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease. That is your political legacy," he declared.

President Trump on Saturday, April 18, warned that China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for unleashing the coronavirus onto the rest of the world.

"It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it," he told reporters. "If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, then there should be consequences."

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