Posted on 03/23/2020 2:14:19 AM PDT by nickcarraway
In Italy, China is no longer thought of as the origin of COVID-19, but as a friend in a time of dire need.
Medics and paramedics from China salute as the board a Red Cross vehicle upon arrival at the Malpensa airport of Milan, March 18, 2020.
Italy has been an alluring geopolitical prize throughout the ages because of its strategic location in the middle of the Mediterranean, its wealth, and the useful skills of its people. Now it’s the turn of today’s rising power, China, to seek to extend its influence there.
Last year, Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China on participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Italy was the first and so far the only G-7 country to do so. Laboring under many years of economic stagnation, Italy hoped to bring about a much-needed stimulus to growth thanks to business with China. The move was sneered at by Italy’s Western allies and was also contentious domestically, with one part of the government coalition of the time (Matteo Salvini’s right-wing Lega) opposing it. At the end of the day, however signing the MoU did not bring Italy more contracts from China compared to other countries that had not done so — for instance, France.
Fast-forward to March 2020. Italy is in the grip of the coronavirus crisis. As of March 20, the disease has killed more than 3,400 Italians – more than the death toll registered in China, where the pandemic began in late 2019. At the beginning of March, Italy asked for help from its European Union partners though the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. No EU member state responded. In addition, France and Germany imposed a ban on the export of face masks. Many Italians feel deceived and humiliated by their European partners.
Beijing, however, responded bilaterally and promptly airlifted 30 tons of medical supplies to Rome. Italy’s Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio posted a video of the arrival of the supply-laden aircraft on his Facebook page. It was an information and public diplomacy triumph for China — when Italy needed help, Europe dithered while the PRC was portrayed as Italy’s savior. Germany subsequently pledged to provide face masks to Italy, but it was too late. The simple narrative in social media had already been shaped: the European Union deserted Italy and China saved the day. Di Maio took credit for China’s help, which he linked to his China policy and to his phone call with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 10, two days before the delivery of supplies from China.
In reality the supplies had been sent by agreement between the Chinese and the Italian Red Cross. As is customary between branches of the Red Cross in different countries, the Chinese Red Cross reciprocated for the help received from the Italian Red Cross only one month earlier, when Italy sent 18 tons of supplies to Wuhan. The call between Di Maio and Wang Yi concerned not the Red Cross donation, but the purchase by Italy of a large quantity of much-needed ventilators (artificial respiratory devices) for intensive care units. Several European countries were competing with each other to receive this equipment first, and Di Maio pleaded with Wang Yi to put Italy at the top of the list. The ventilators have not yet been delivered to date.
The Chinese propaganda machine was quick to seize the opportunity and posted videos of grateful Italians praising China for its generosity. One video even showed Italians singing China’s national anthem from their balconies (it was, however, a fake). These videos have Chinese subtitles and were probably made with a Chinese audience in mind. It has been reported that the inhabitants of Wuhan refused to express their gratitude to China’s leader Xi Jinping for handling the crisis successfully; now at least the authorities could show that they had worked well abroad and that foreigners were grateful.
In addition to the first shipment of medical supplies, which landed in Rome on March 12, China also sent a second shipment to Milan on March 18. This was sent by Chinese provinces including Zhejiang, which has a large immigrant community in Italy. Other donations by Chinese companies went to Italian regions and towns that host their Italian counterparts.
One of the companies in question is ZTE, which donated 2,000 face masks to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy, where ZTE runs a joint 5G innovation and technology center with the local university. In addition, Huawei offered to set up a cloud computing network to connect Italian hospitals among themselves and with hospitals in Wuhan — which raises serious issues for the control of critical infrastructure and data protection.
Thanks to this outreach, China in Italy is no longer associated with the origin of the pandemic or blamed because of its poor regulation of wet markets and suppression of information that could have helped eradicate the disease at an earlier stage. Chinese online propaganda has worked tirelessly to dissociate the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, where it first emerged, and from China, and in Italy that effort has largely succeeded. China in Italy is now seen as a country that provided concrete help when needed, while other, geographically closer partners behaved selfishly, despite the rhetoric of European solidarity, and did not provide any help.
In a recent telephone call with Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, China’s Xi Jinping seized the moment and proposed launching a new “Health Silk Road,” to go together with the existing Belt and Road Initiative. Under this initiative, China would use the lessons learned in its successful fight against the virus and share them with its partners around the world. Since the pandemic is likely to last several more months worldwide and since a similar pandemic may happen again, many countries would be interested.
The perception among many in Italy is that China succeeded in conquering the virus in a short time thanks to the rigorous and decisive measures it adopted. Italy is compared unfavorably to China in this respect. Implicitly, China’s governance is admired as a more effective system that helps save lives and reduce economic loss in case of an emergency.
China has plans for Italy: it is interested in Italy’s ports and infrastructure in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative; in its quality food, design, and tourism potential; in its high-technology hubs like L’Aquila; and in the development of 5G in the country. It is also a good place to chip away at Western unity and U.S. influence. The help provided amid the coronavirus pandemic should help strengthen Sino-Italian relations and pave the ground for an appropriate celebration of 50 years of diplomatic relations in November.
Theresa Fallon is the founder and director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies (CREAS) in Brussels and a nonresident senior fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In 2015-2016 she was a member of the Senior Advisors Group to the NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR). Her current research is on EU-Asia relations and great power competition.
China covered up the outbreak and didn’t want foreign nations looking at the crisis up close
>>In a recent telephone call with Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, China’s Xi Jinping seized the moment and proposed launching a new “Health Silk Road,” to go together with the existing Belt and Road Initiative. Under this initiative, China would use the lessons learned in its successful fight against the virus and share them with its partners around the world. Since the pandemic is likely to last several more months worldwide and since a similar pandemic may happen again, many countries would be interested.
As quickly and globally and “locally” as this thing has spread, it is suicide not to share solutions to eradicate it globally.
If it is that big of a lethal threat the options are “kill it everywhere” or forever be seasonally dealing with it and mutated strains for all eternity.
Polio was eradicated hr but “thanks” to immigration is coming back
Without actual transparency from either China or Italy, as it stands, Italy’s Covid 19 death toll is higher than China’s (a country with a pop over a billion people...go figure). Italy has issues, real issues.
As the great grandson of one of Garibaldi’s Thousand Red Shirt Volunteers of Marsala. And the great grandson of another Italian Garibaldino who came to America after the Emancipation Proclamation, for the sole purpose of fighting to free blacks from slavery, and led a black regiment (39th U.S.C.T.) at the Battle of Petersburg (including the Battle of the Crater) and who was killed after the Battle of Ft. Fisher in 1865; and the grandson of one of the the Italian combat soldiers of the the Piave/Carso/Isonzo front lines of the Great War, including the Battles of the of Gorizia, Montegrappa, Caporetto, and Vittorio Veneto, who lost a brother in that war, and another grandfather who was an anti-Fascist Italian Partisan in WW2, who was marked for death along with his whole family by the Nazis; my ancestors would be turning over in their graves if they knew how easily Italy can be manipulated and sell out to the Red Chinese. The very country that caused their suffering and misery (as they have done to the entire world). They learn nothing. It makes me sick.
eager to get along, go along or give up
The Chinese PR on the Italy outbreak has been impeccable. They are raising their image.
the globalist writer, Fallon, has a very globalist twitter feed. she re-tweets the following from University of Melbourne, Australia’s Wyeth, who gets published in much of the FakeNewsMSM:
Tweet: Grant Wyeth, Research at the Asia Institute @unimelb. Contributing author @Diplomat_APAC. Very keen on India and Canada
The architects of the post-WWII order “understood that international cooperation is a way of creating strategic depth...Collaboration gives early warning of problems before they become exorbitantly dangerous and expensive to address” @KoriSchake
LINK The Atlantic
20 Mar 2020
reply:
Steve Smith: China ‘being generous’?! Like nationalizing the N95 mask factory of American company 3M so they could selfishly hoard them for themselves? China ‘generosity’ is a PR stunt and most people realize this outside those with a political motive.....
https://twitter.com/grantwyeth/status/1241133018279903232
this is the article Wyeth links to:
20 Mar: The Atlantic: The Damage That ‘America First’ Has Done
A self-interested strategy will not help the U.S. fight the coronavirus outbreak.
by Kori Schake
(Kori Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and leads the foreign and defense policy program at the American Enterprise Institute)
While there have been reasons previously to question the approach, the coronavirus has posed the first real international crisis of Trump’s presidency. And judging by the administration’s actions, America First foreign policy in action isn’t restoring confidence in American leadership, and it isn’t serving the American people particularly well.
Rather than lead a cooperative international response, Trump has sought to blame the outbreak on China and then on Europe...
China’s leaders are gleefully running up their score in the great power competition by being generous where we are stingy...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/america-first-is-making-the-pandemic-worse/608401/
more evidence how these globalist, pro-China types spread their memes:
Tweet: Grant Wyeth
There’s a possibility that the entire 2020 election in the U.S will need to be done by postal votes. Doable, but a huge task that will require planning to begin soon.
LINK NYT
21 Mar 2020
of course, he links to:
21 Mar: NYT: The 2020 Election Won’t Look Like Any We’ve Seen Before
Voting by mail is key to ensuring the integrity and accessibility of November’s vote.
By The Editorial Board
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-vote-mail.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur
LOL! If you really believe that, sheesh...
Apparently, reading is difficult, yeah? What exactly did I comment? Here, let me help you:
“Without actual transparency from either China or Italy.....”
China has had a large presence in Italy since the late 1990’s. Much of Italy’s textile/leather industry is Chinese with close and continuous contact with China, including the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of caronavirus. There were daily non-stop flights there. It would have been a miracle if Italy had not suffered a Wuhan-type epidemic.
I notice there have been no published data about how many of the carinavirus deaths were Italian/Chinese. I’ll bet the answer is “many.”
I suspect that in November the quarantine period will be over and people will be going back to work; and the polls will be open.
I agree:
With crises….I believe there is something in the mob mentality that makes subservience positively irresistible.
In unexpected and unavoidable crises, even totally literate and advanced populations are gripped with the idea that surrendering their autonomy and other hard-won and long held freedoms, will solve everything.
Otherwise rational and objective people, demonstrate some dormant weakness for a dangerous and authoritarian paternalism.
It reminds me of the quote: “Adversity introduces a man to himself.”
When the dust settles on THIS one (and it’s by no means singular in human history) some of these people will be ashamed of the ‘man’ they met.
Yes the DNC want this so the unionized Post Office can ensure our votes are properly counted.
This reads like a Central Committee press release from Beijing.
Milan... that’s interesting because, if memory serves me, it was Milan where al Qaeda was plotting to attack the US consulate after 9/11 using a WMD hidden in tomato cans.
Here is the incident...the plotters were going after the embassy in Rome and had connections to a terror cell in Milan:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/25/september11.usa1
One of the companies in question is ZTE, which donated 2,000 face masks to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy, where ZTE runs a joint 5G innovation and technology center with the local university. In addition, Huawei offered to set up a cloud computing network to connect Italian hospitals
>> Would a country do that if it thought its opportunity to remodel the world was at stake?
Stalin starved people as do other dictators in Africa.
Yrah, an Islamic terrorist group did the same during Katrina as part of ita PR.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.