Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Leonid Slutsky:
“Republican Senator Ted Cruz introduced a bill on US sanctions against the PRC on COVID-19. He obliges the US president to draw up another” black list “of people who impede freedom of speech and social networks in the PRC, including in the context of epidemiological information. Recruitment restriction standard: asset blocking and visa restrictions.
The bill introduced by Ted Cruz was another sign of the possible preparation of a plan to confront China. And the pandemic here, unfortunately, is not a contraindication, on the contrary, a perfectly turned up occasion. The United States is actively looking for evidence – albeit artificial – of China’s guilt, not only in the spread of coronavirus, but also in its hypothetical manufacture. And behind all this, Washington’s economic and domestic political interests are well traced.
Trump has already publicly doubted the reliability of Chinese data on the consequences of the spread of the infection. “There are a lot of strange things, but a lot of investigation is underway. And we’re going to find out … If they deliberately hid, then yes, there should be consequences, ”he said at the last briefings in the White House.
At the same time, the American authorities at the end of March announced their intention to sue the PRC and recover damages caused to the US economy by the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, Beijing was suspected of underestimating both the total number of cases of infection and the number of deaths from infection. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on China and other countries to be transparent regarding coronavirus statistics.
Presidential Advisor on Economic Affairs Peter Navarro, in turn, argued that the Chinese authorities not only hid information about the spread of coronavirus, but also profited from the sale of medical equipment to other countries. “Firstly, the virus originated in China. Secondly, they hid the virus, hiding behind the World Health Organization, like a shield. Thirdly, they have accumulated personal protective equipment and now profit from their sale, ”he said.
Against this background, an assumption appeared in the expert community about the possible preparation of informational ground for blocking Chinese assets in the USA and a number of other NATO countries. And it may well be justified, as recent events show.
However, there is one more, non-economic reason for the escalation of anti-Chinese hysteria overseas: the presidential elections in the United States, scheduled for November, have not been canceled yet. The rival of the incumbent Republican president, Democrat Joe Biden, is using his might as an argument in his favor the situation in which the country and Trump himself found himself due to a pandemic. And here, obviously, in contrast to the owner of the White House, it was clearly necessary to shift the attention of voters from epidemiological and economic problems to the next “main enemy of America,” whose role this time, apparently, was assigned to Beijing.
In a global struggle for people’s lives, a similar Washington policy obsessed with finding the guilty looks especially selfish and cynical. “
