After telling the world that it would donate masks, face guards and testing equipment to Italy, China quietly backtracked and sold the Mediterranean country desperately-needed medical equipment, according to a report.

What’s worse is that the personal protective equipment (PPE) China forced Italy to buy was actually the same PPE Italy donated to China before coronavirus rushed its own shores and killed nearly 16,000 people.

“Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population. China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it,” a senior Trump administration official told The Spectator.

Beijing taking advantage of Italy’s generosity and then flipping it into something more sinister is just the latest example of the country’s misdeeds amid the global outbreak.

Thousands of other supplies and testing kits China has sold to other countries at marked-up prices have turned out to be defective.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. Last week, the Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling to the world.

Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic have also spoken out about kits it purchased from China as being less than adequate. In some cases, instead of fixing the issue, China has blamed user error.

The claims of faulty devices come as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge around Europe and the United States, underscoring the dependence many countries have on Chinese imports.

“It’s so disingenuous for Chinese officials now to say we are the ones who are helping the Italians or we are the ones who are helping the developing world when, in fact, they are the ones who infected all of us,” the senior administration official said. “Of course they should be helping. They have a special responsibility to help because they are the ones who began the spread of the coronavirus and did not give the information required to the rest of the world to plan accordingly.”

The official said China’s decision to delay and suppress critical data has turned a bad situation worse.

On Thursday, Vice President Pence said that had China been truly transparent about COVID-19, there would be “no question” the world would have been in a better place to respond to the monster virus that has infected more than a million people and killed more than 70,000 worldwide.

“There’s simply no question that China’s lack of candor to the world impacted the way the world was able to respond,” Pence said.

In fact, as China downplayed the outbreak within its borders, nearly half a million people traveled to the United States, possibly carrying the virus with them.

“The disinformation that China has put out is crippling responses around the world,” the administration official said. “We were a month behind because the Chinese did not share information. It’s hard for the world to accept that even the information that they’re putting out now is accurate and acceptable from an epidemiological standpoint. We’re operating on some level with a hand tied behind our back.”

Since the outbreak began, China has been accused of multiple cover-ups and deliberately lying about its coronavirus infection and death rates. Beijing has tried to rebrand itself on the international stage as a leader in tackling the virus but the drumbeat of complaints has been getting louder in recent days and the faulty kits, delivered to the likes of Britain, Spain and the Netherlands, is only exacerbating the problem.

In a blog post on Monday, John Bell, the coordinator of coronavirus testing for Public Health England, said that none of England’s 17 million antibody kits — including the ones bought from China — have performed well.

“We see many false negatives and we also see false positives,” he wrote. “…This is not a good result for test suppliers or for us.”

He added that the antibody tests bought had only able to identify immunity accurately in people who had been severely ill. The antibody tests will be crucial in helping essential workers get back to work.

Ideally, the finger-prick tests would be able to confirm who had already built up immunity to COVID-19 and perhaps let them leave lockdown and return to work.

John Newton, Britain’s new testing chief, told the Times of London that the antibody tests from China were not good enough because they were only able to identify immunity accurately on people who had been severely ill.

“The test developed in China was validated against patients who were severely ill with a very large viral load, generating a large amount of antibodies . . . whereas we want to use the test in the context of a wider range of levels of infection including people who are quite mildly infected. So for our purposes, we need a test that performs better than some of these other tests.”

In response to the news that all of the kits fell short of expectations, the Prime Minister’s Office announced it would push to get a refund.

“If the tests don’t work then the orders that we placed will be canceled and wherever possible we will recover the costs,” the PMO said.

Britain is the latest place that has had issues with equipment and kits bought from Beijing.

Last week, the Netherlands joined Spain, Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic in their concerns over masks and test kits. The claims of faulty test kits and other devices came as the number of COVID-19 cases continued to surge in the United States and Europe.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. The Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling — at marked-up prices — to the world.

“China creates the poison and sells the solution to it,” foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang told Fox News.

The Trump administration has blasted China’s authoritarian leadership for trying to conceal what it knew about COVID-19 during its earlier days when the virus it is believed could have been contained.

RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.

RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.”

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.

Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.

Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive.

“He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”

According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.

The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.

“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen. In the West, doctors have begun experimenting with several drug mixtures, one of which — a combination of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and malaria — has generated optimism in American hospitals.

The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.”

Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten to forty times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city. Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.

When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.

“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”

Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.

“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”

Lijian Zhao, a Chinese politician serving as deputy director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department, is heading a propaganda campaign to shift the blame for the worldwide coronavirus onto the United States, Italy and other countries.

He made headlines last week after taking comments from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of context, claiming the U.S. Army purposefully brought the coronavirus to China.

The State Department has vehemently denied that claim, and the World Health Organization’s investigative report on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in February, found the novel disease originated in meat markets the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China in November.

Zhao’s latest effort to spread misinformation was highlighted Wednesday after a woman identified only by her first name, Beatrice, told the Daily Beast she wrote a three-tweet series about her “shower thoughts” earlier this month.

She is not a doctor, nurse, or epidemiologist – and said she wrote as a young mother from Albuquerque simply wondering aloud whether coronavirus had arrived in the U.S. earlier than initially detected.

“This isn’t a conspiracy tweet but I really think COVID-19 has been here in America for awhile. Do you guys remember how sick everyone was during the holidays/early January? And how everyone was saying they had the “flu” and the flu shot “didn’t work”?” the woman, whose Twitter name is “the lizard king” @mamaxbea, wrote on March 14, in the first of three tweets.

That message went viral a week later. Zhao retweeted and quoted Beatrice on March 22, sending her Twitter following skyrocketing.

Beatrice’s other two tweets in the series said:

“Most people did have flu-like symptoms combined with respiratory infections. Also I remember a lot of healthcare workers (both here and on Facebook) posting about how awful RSV was this year and how there were lots more respiratory cases than in years past.”

“Idk. I’m not an expert. I’ve just been thinking about it since a lot of people tested negative for the flu and there wasn’t a test for COVID-19 yet. Obviously it’s serious either way and please stay home/wash your hands/stop panic buying the toilet paper/etc.”

Last week, President Trump received pushback for repeatedly saying at press conferences that it was a “Chinese virus” that caused the pandemic, which prompted the Chinese state-run media to dub the worldwide outbreak the “Trump plague.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summoned the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi, for a conference call last week to rebuke Zhao and several other Chinese diplomats taking his lead for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus’s origin on Twitter.

Sharing a video from a congressional hearing with the CDC, Zhao wrote: “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

In response to his message, Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah condemned the Chinese Communist Party for using American media to spread conspiracy theories.

“As a global crisis, COVID-19 should be an area of cooperation between nations. Instead, the Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false & absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members. #ChinaPropaganda,” she said.

Chinese state-run media also reportedly has taken comments made by Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi out of context. Remuzzi spoke to both NPR and Italian broadcaster La7 Attualità about the outbreak of the coronavirus in the northern Lombardy region in Italy, which is now the worst-affected country in the world. His quotes were then translated and posted to Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, to place the blame on Italy for the outbreak.

The regional health official in Wuhan City, the epicenter of the pandemic, demanded the destruction of the lab samples, which established the cause of an unexplained viral pneumonia since January 1, 2020. China didn’t acknowledge that there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

Caixin Global provides the clearest evidence yet of the scale of this fatal cover-up in the very crucial early weeks, when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak — a contagion that spread throughout the world thereafter, and has caused a global shutdown, literally.

Warfare Beyond Rules

It is only apposite to go back and trace the many notable military research writings that have advocated for more than two decades that China should prepare itself to wage warfare beyond rules put in place by the Western powers.

In 1996, two Chinese military officers (colonels in the People’s Liberation Air Force (PLAAF), Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, took part in military exercises conducted by China for the purpose of coercing the island nation of Taiwan. This was the period when Taipei was getting ready for its presidential elections. Soon enough, East Asia witnessed the return of great power rivalry to the region when the United States dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the area.

This became the backdrop in which these two colonels met in a small town in southeastern China’s Fujian province and began their research. The end product was a co-authored book, Chao Xian Zhan: Dui Quanqiu Hua Shidai Zhanzheng yu Zhanfa de Xiangding (Warfare Beyond Rules: Judgment of War and Methods of War in the Era of Globalization), published by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Art Press.

The central premise of Warfare Beyond Rules is that China should be prepared to conduct “warfare beyond all boundaries and limitations to defend itself.”

In the book, Qiao and Wang argue that the existing rules of war, international laws, and agreements were developed by the Western powers, and that the United States leads the race in new-age military technologies and weapon platforms. Writing more than two decades ago, Qiao and Wang stated that, because of higher costs, cutting-edge weapons’ platforms could trigger a national economic collapse.

A Revolution in Warfare By All Means

The book — termed Unrestricted Warfare in the English translated version — went on to state that geographical security is an outdated concept. Threats to national security may not come from cross-border invasion, but from non-military actions. Qiao and Wang articulated that definitions of security must include geographical, political, economic, resource, religious, cultural, data, environmental, and near-earth space security.

While commenting on the bans on chemical, biological weapons, and landmines, the authors argued that for a country to accept rules which regulate war depends on whether the laws and rules are favorable to its own national interests. They contended that powerful nations use the rules to control others, for instance “by banning chemical and biological weapons.”

The essence drawn out from these arguments is that China should freely decide and opt for the means of warfighting by disregarding agreements and codes of conduct developed over the past decades by the West. Basically, in theory, the book Warfare Beyond Rules highlights thinking out of the box.

Most significantly, with an aim to target the adversary’s vulnerable targets in unexpected ways, Warfare Beyond Rules underlined the concepts of “asymmetric warfare.” This included guerrilla war, terrorist actions, and cyber-attacks against data networks.

Qiao and Wang called for a “revolution in war,” which combines conventional with non-war actions, and military with non-military actions. In an alarming opinion, they stated that war may include a blend of stealth planes and cruise missiles, along with biochemical, financial, and terrorist attacks.

War for Biological Dominance

More than a decade later, a 2010 publication titled War for Biological Dominance (制生权战争) emphasized the impact of biology on future warfare.

The book, published by Xinhua Publishing House in October 2010, was authored by Guo Jiwei (郭继卫), a professor and chief physician at the Third Military Medical University, Army University. The book highlighted the decline of traditional military thinking and focused upon emerging trends in military thinking, the invisible battlefield, and unexpected changes.

Subsequently, in 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu (贺福初) argued in an essay that biotechnology would assume the shape of a new strategic commanding height in national defense. These will range from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons.

He Fuchu went on to become the vice president of the PLA’s Academy of Military Sciences the highest-level research institute of the PLA, headquartered in Beijing.

Chinese writings over the past two decades have amplified that cross integration of biotechnology, engineering, and information technology will become the new strategic doctrine for future military revolutions, as cited in the October 2015 edition of the Liberation Army Daily. These writings consistently put forth that weaponization of living organisms shall become a reality in the future, with non-traditional combat styles taking center stage.

Biology Among the 7 New Domains of Warfare

Foremost among the new-age defense high frontiers will be the biological frontier. Biodiversity and technology innovation will redefine biological military revolution. Since 2016, China’s Central Military Commission has been funding projects on military brain science, advanced bio-mimetic systems (that mimic biological systems), biological and biomimetic materials, and new-age biotechnology.

Further and more significantly, biology has been demarcated as “one of the seven new domains of warfare” in a 2017 book titled New Highland of War (National Defense University Press) authored by Zhang Shibo. Zhang is a retired general and former president of China’s National Defense University. In the book, Zhang argues that modern biotechnological development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability, including the possibility of employing “specific ethnic genetic attacks”.

More recently, the 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy an authoritative textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University — has introduced a new section on “biology as a domain of military struggle.” This section discusses new potential kinds of biological warfare, including “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

Contemporary advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering hold worrying implications for military affairs. The Chinese military’s interest in these gets reflected through its strategic writings and research, which consistently have argued that advances in biology are contributing to changing the form or character (形态) of conflict.

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan

China’s national strategy of military-civil fusion (军民融合) has highlighted biology as a priority. As a result, as per the September 2017 Thirteenth Five-Year Special Plan for Military-Civilian Integration Development, the Party Central Committee, the State Council, and the Central Military Commission have put in motion the full implementation of the development strategy of military-civilian integration in the field of science and technology. This was done in accordance with the 13th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China.

Among the key tasks of this 2017 plan are the implementation of key technology-military-civilian integration projects.

In accordance with the requirements of the key national research and development (R&D) plan for the design of the entire chain and implementation of integrated organizations, a number of deployments have been made. These include the fields of biology, among others, with dual-use features to accelerate the formation of new productivity and combat effectiveness in scientific and technological achievements.

The plan also aims to strengthen the capability of military and civilian science and technology collaborative innovation and coordinate the layout of basic research and cutting-edge technology research. Accordingly, a special fund for basic research military-civilian integration has been set up to focus on supporting basic national defense research projects and promote the transformation of the results of basic civil research into military applications — more specifically, in the fields of biological crossover and disruptive technologies.

Study of the Chinese military’s interest in biology as an emerging domain of warfare becomes increasingly relevant in the current COVID-19 context, particularly when viewed against the two-decade-old backdrop of emphasis on biological frontiers of warfare put forth by Chinese military thinkers.

It is well-established that Chinese military strategists have been arguing about potential “genetic weapons” and the possibility of a “bloodless victory.” The task becomes all the more challenging, owing to the lack of transparency and uncertainty of ethics in China’s research activities.

Thus, the research writings cited above defend China’s move, if it were to come to that, of not hesitating to use as many means of warfare as possible. Clearly, those include weapons that are “not permitted by international law and the rules of war,” such as chemical and biological weapons.

The dangerous recommendations of most of these writings raise alarm bells about China’s future commitment on banning chemical and biological weapons.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Banks led the drive to round up co-sponsors for the resolution Monday which so far has seen Reps. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., Austin Scott, R-Ga., Trent Kelly, R-Miss., Brian Babin, R-Texas, Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Greg Steube, R-Fla., Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., Mike Rogers, R-Ala., Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., and Jason Smith, R-Mo., sign on.

This resolution comes as tensions between the U.S. and China are running high over the Chinese government’s high-powered propaganda campaign seeking to paint itself as the global coronavirus savior while several U.S. officials and politicians, including President Trump, have taken to calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” in reference to its origins in Wuhan, a city in China.

The resolution argues that the Chinese government “made multiple, serious mistakes in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak that heightened the severity and spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which include the Chinese government’s intentional spread of misinformation to downplay the risks fo the virus, a refusal to cooperate with international health authorities, internal censorship of doctors and journalists and malicious disregard for the health of ethnic minorities.”

Specifically, the resolution suggests that China was aware of a novel coronavirus strain in mid-December, with multiple doctors raising the alarm among the Chinese medical community before the new year. But, the resolution says, Chinese authorities muzzled those doctors, including on Jan. 3 forcing one to “sign a letter confessing that he had made ‘false comments’ that ‘severely disturbed the social order.'”

The largely Republican group of representatives also condemns China for its treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, a religious minority from which U.S. government officials believe China has rounded up between 800,000 and 2 million people, placing them in reeducation camps that function largely as forced labor camps.

They condemn “the detention of over 1,000,000 [Uyghur] Muslims and other ethnic minorities in ‘re-education camps’, whose crowded and unsanitary conditions makes the camps hotspots for viral disease and leave prisoners at an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Finally, the resolution lays out the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign to paper over its responsibility for the rapid spread of the coronavirus, specifically mentioning its lack of cooperation with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a foreign ministry spokesman who “claimed that COVID-19 originated in the United States and that the United States army brought the virus to Wuhan to wage biological warfare” on China; and China’s move to expel journalists with the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times.

The move to expel journalists caught the attention of the highest levels of the U.S. government last week, with the National Security Council responding with harsh words and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is not a co-sponsor of the Banks resolution, rebuking the Chinese government.

“This brazen assault on the free press by the Chinese Communist Party is appalling,” Schiff tweeted March 17. “That it occurred in the midst of a public health crisis, when the flow of unbiased information to the public is critical, is also dangerous. China’s attempts to silence the truth must not stand.”

Banks himself has also weighed in on the expulsion of the American journalists.

“The Chinese Communist Party are masters at disinformation,” he tweeted last week. “They’ve lied about coronavirus before. They kicked out American news outlets this week because they know we don’t help push their propaganda. News outlets should be wary of ‘facts’ they’re pushing.”

It also mentions a study from the University of Southampton which claims “if China had taken action 3 weeks earlier, the spread of coronavirus would be reduced by 95 percent globally.”

The resolution demands that China backtrack on its decision to kick out the American journalists, free the Uyghur Muslims in its camps, and asks for a retraction from the World Health Organization, which has been accused of carrying China’s water over its coronavirus response, over comments made by its leaders praising China for “leadership” and “transparency.”

It is unclear when or if the resolution will receive a vote on the House floor.

ntinue cracking down on “illegal evangelism,” institutions in charge of cyberspace take control over the public opinion, state security units strengthen the collection of information about religious groups, and publicity departments intensify propaganda campaigns.

Even the cross-removal drives didn’t stop amid the spreading coronavirus. As per reports on Twitter, a cross was dismantled from a church in Woyang county of Anhui’s Bozhou city on March 13, and another one in the Huaishang district of Bengbu city.

According to the work plan for 2020, issued by the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission of Tianjin, one of the four China’s centrally governed municipalities, the control over religion will intensify throughout the year. The plan foresees further integration of socialist ideology with religion, suppression of “foreign religious infiltration,” and increasing oversight of state-approved religious venues.

On January 24, all places of worship in Shangqiu, a prefecture-level city in the central province of Henan, were shut down to curb the epidemic. Still, local governments continued inspecting people’s homes, removing religious couplets. Officials were warning residents through loudspeakers that their pensions would be suspended if such couplets were found in their homes.

On February 27, the Two National Christian Councils of Yuzhou, a county-level city in Henan, notified all churches that a provincial inspection team was visiting the area to check how the no-assembly measure was being implemented. Those who resumed services were threatened to lose their religious activity venue registration certificates, and clergy members would have their preaching permits revoked.

After the inspection team found some religious couplets and calendars in a local Three-Self church, its director was reprimanded and told to write a self-criticism statement. He was also ordered to collect all religious calendars from congregation members within three days.

“Religious persecution is not alleviated because of the epidemic,” a house church preacher told Bitter Winter. “The CCP regards religious groups as a threat to its regime. The more unstable its power is, the more frequently these groups are suppressed.”

On February 11, the twelfth national conference of China’s officially approved religious groups was organized through video. Representatives of the five authorized religions were encouraged to collect donations for the epidemic relief but were warned that “religions could not be promoted or evangelical activities allowed” in the process. The prevention of evangelism is one of the primary tasks assigned to Religious Affairs Bureaus across the country amid the epidemic.

According to the information released by the UFWD in Hubei Province’s Wuhan city on February 20, “people handing out face masks as part of missionary work” were discovered on February 5 in the city’s Hanyang district. Subsequently, the authorities “immediately assigned all sub-districts and communities to cooperate with the Public Security Bureau and local police stations to make arrests and curb any likelihood of recurrence.”

Such bans on religious groups during disaster relief efforts in China have a long-standing tradition. The CCP always tightens control over charitable activities carried out by believers, attempting to prohibit them from promoting their faith. No religious information or symbols are allowed to be included among disaster relief materials or charity items. Members of religious groups that are not approved by the state have been arrested for organizing charitable activities.

First, there is an effort to magnify the scale and scope of China’s mitigation efforts. Hitherto, China had used its economic might and political heft to ensure that the World Health Organization (WHO) kept Taiwan out of the membership of the world body. After the virus outbreak, Beijing has also been able to prevent any WHO criticism of China’s actions. A joint WHO-China report on the coronavirus disease was practically hagiographic in tone, talking about how China had “rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history” and that the measures China has adopted are “the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission chains in humans.”

As impressive as all this sounds, it is the case that as with the SARS epidemic of 2002-2004 that originated in China, the global spread of Covid-19 is directly attributable to the fact it was not contained within China in the early stages. Chinese political exigencies initially dictated a cover-up of the outbreak of the disease was the best way forward. China’s ‘report card’ is therefore, ‘mixed’ at best and it is probably too early even to say yet that China has completely stopped the spread of the virus.

Second, even if it might not be schadenfreude, China has in recent weeks highlighted the struggles of other countries in dealing with their own outbreak and attempted to pay back in kind for the criticism it copped in the early days of the epidemic.

For instance, it quoted the WHO Director-General’s March 14 comment that more coronavirus cases were being reported each day outside of China than the latter had reported at the epidemic’s peak, and that Europe had become the new global epicentre of the disease. Chinese media has highlighted the US’ “overconfidence and lack of knowledge on the virus” that stopped it from preventing the virus from spreading. Part of this exercise reflects also in the highlighting of cases of Covid-19 now entering China from overseas.

Third, there is an increasing effort to advertise China’s contribution to helping other countries fight Covid-19. China has sent medical aid and offered training to several countries from Iraq to Italy, and Iran to the Philippines. It has also highlighted without fail the gratitude each of these has apparently expressed to China for such aid.

Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s philanthropic foundation as well as the company’s own foundation have planned donations of medical equipment to every country in Africa. Ma had earlier also announced a donation of 500,000 coronavirus testing kits and 1 million masks to the US.

Fourth, is a desire to underline the robustness and legitimacy of the Chinese political system. The earlier WHO-China report, for instance, highlighted the “sincerity and dedication” of not just the medical personnel and scientists but also of Chinese “Governors and Mayors”, thus indirectly absolving the CCP leadership of its mistakes. Criticism of the US, while often warranted, has also involved references to the Chinese central government’s “decisive measures” as well as advice to the US — one of the first modern federal states — on “strengthen[ing]… coordination” between the US federal and state governments.

References in the report to the “community grid management system in China” and its role in fighting the 2019-nCov while accurate, also elide over the fact that it is the same system that also aids and abets draconian surveillance and control measures over minority ethnic populations in Tibet and Xinjiang.

The pandemic is also seen as offering an opportunity for China to push CCP General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rhetoric of a “community of common destiny” — part of the narrative of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — as a way of framing China’s help to the outside world. Calling Xi, “commander-in-chief of China’s war against COVID-19” now that the epidemic is apparently within control inside China is also about reinforcing not just his leadership supremacy at home but offering him as a model for other leaders and peoples around the world.

Finally, there is now an active Chinese effort to deflect blame and spread misinformation. The most prominent part of this campaign has been the effort to somehow pin the blame for the origins of the virus on the US. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, formerly Deputy Chief of Mission in Islamabad, has unashamedly pushed the narrative that the novel coronavirus was introduced into China by the US military and has incoherently — but successfully, going by the number of retweets — linked proceedings in the US Congress to his conspiracy theory. China has even gone after Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s most prominent writers and the 2010 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, saying that his claim of the novel coronavirus “coming from China” was “inaccurate”.

The sophistication and spread of the Chinese propaganda campaign shows how seriously its rulers take their country’s image abroad and the importance of this image to maintaining their hold on power at home.

“Generally countries like China have sovereign immunity and governments cannot be brought to regular courts or held liable regardless of their conduct,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israel-based attorney who has long specialized in suing terrorist regimes and state sponsors who orchestrate human rights abuses on behalf of victims, told Fox News.

“However, an argument could be made that just like support for terrorism, which is legally actionable, a government that engages in such reckless disregard and negligence and covers up an epidemic which has the potential to spread worldwide could be held legally liable ,” Darshan-Leitner said. “Cover-ups and deliberate acts to conceal a deadly medical crisis are not [among] the protected acts of a sovereign state or of responsible leaders.”

According to Darshan-Leitner, if a private party like a hospital or health care worker of a chemical company had learned of a dangerous and highly contagious disease and then deliberately covered its existence up and concealed it from the public they would clearly face criminal and civil liability.

“Why should a local or national government be any different? Clearly, China signed treaties and had a duty under international law to report the virus and not cover it up,” she continued. “China is not to blame for creating the virus but for not sounding the international alarm and trying to conceal it from the world.”

The lawsuits are already starting.

On Thursday, Florida’s The Berman Law Group filed a class-action lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), alleging that the government’s failure to report the disease and subsequently move to quickly contain it created a “giant Petri dish.”

“The PRC and the other defendants knew that COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up for their own economic self-interest,” the complaint states. “The defendants’ conduct has caused and will continue to cause personal injuries and deaths, as well as other damages.”

A study released this month by the U.K.’s University of South Hampton indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the geographic proliferation of the pathogen would have been significantly smaller, and the number of cases would be reduced by 95 percent.

According to a timeline compiled this week by Axios, it was Dec. 10 that the country’s first known patient started contending with strange symptoms.

Six days later, health officials in Wuhan made a connection between the unique condition – resistant to common flu medications – and a wildlife market in the city. On Dec. 27, authorities were told about the new virus, and three days later, two doctors in Wuhan were reprimanded by the Communist Party for spreading information about the SARS-like contagion in a WeChat group..

Later, an announcement was made that authorities had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus,” which was repeated by the World Health Organization (WHO), even as cases outside China’s border slowly started being identified.

The following day, the first known U.S. case from Wuhan arrived.

On Jan. 18, a massive Lunar New Year banquet was permitted to take place in Wuhan, in which tens of thousands of people gathered and potentially spread the virus exponentially. And as the disease spiraled beyond control over the ensuing days, the city – and three others – were put on lockdown, even as other regions continued to celebrate the New Year in large groups over the proceeding few days.

However, a slew of other voices have said that reports were made about the novel virus several weeks before that, but effectively silenced. The Sunday Times of London also reported that several genomics companies tested samples from ill patients in Wuhan late last year, and alerted the Chinese government to their findings on Jan. 3, only to be given gag orders.

Some reports have also underscored that the government was aware of the virus as early as November. According to the South China Morning Post, the first case was recorded on November 17 in Hubei province, with five new cases reported on average per day in the weeks thereafter.

Juliya Arbisman, an international disputes expert and partner at the New York-based Diamond McCarthy law firm, indicated that there are broad possibilities under international law, especially trade law, for State-to-State and individual investor claims against countries.

“These might boil down to the ability of preexisting legal mechanisms to deal with these sorts of modern questions,” she said. “There is also a pretty clear case for countries insisting on China to honor its obligations under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) to stop people from trading in and eating endangered species, which is likely how Covid-19 infected humans in the first place.”

It is believed coronavirus was born out of a seafood wholesale market in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, whereby poorly regulated, live-animal markets mixed in with illicit wildlife trade, creating the environment for viruses to morph from animal hosts into the human populous.

U.S. National Security advisor Robert O’Brien, referring to the doctors who were censored, has claimed that the Beijing concealment in the early phase “cost the world community two months” and aggravated the international fallout. Moreover, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, has termed it “one of the worst cover-ups in human history.”

“The International Health Regulations (IHR) are rules that should prevent domestic public health emergencies from becoming international problems. This global health law requires member states to notify the WHO of events that may constitute ‘a public health emergency of international concern,'” concurred Ivana Stradner, international law and national security expert at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “China’s delay in reporting the outbreak violated international law.”

From her lens, states can sue China before international tribunals for violating its obligation to report the coronavirus outbreak under the IHR.

“Chinese behavior is a threat to global security and constitutes a violation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which authorizes the U.N. Security Council to take action to ‘maintain or restore international peace and security,'” Stradner continued. “States, and the U.S. in particular, can react to the coronavirus outbreak by invoking the principle of self-defense.”

And David Matas, a Canada-based international human rights, refugee and immigration lawyer who was appointed as a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, emphasized that China, as a State Party, is additionally subject to the Biological Weapons Convention.

“The Convention states in Article I that each state party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to retain microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes,” he said. “In my view, non-reporting is a form of retention in violation of the Convention. The United States is also a state party to the treaty. If the U.S. found China acted in breach of its obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention by its delay in reporting the coronavirus, the U.S. could lodge a complaint with the Security Council.”

Chinese leaders have embarked on a fervent campaign to place blame elsewhere – even going so far as to insinuate the virus was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. military.

Requests by the United States and other global bodies to investigate the origins of the deadly outbreak in China have thus far been dismissed by Beijing, who have staunchly denied any wrongdoing or mishandling of the outbreak.

Darshan-Leitner further stressed that in her view, it is “a massive breach of duty and customary international law,” and that a case could potentially be made in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) if it is proven that a cover-up was perpetuated by high-level individuals.

“The ICJ was created as a forum for countries which believe they have been grievously injured and have causes of action against other states to be able to seek redress. This would be a classic case of the reckless actions of one government impacting and severely harming nations around the world,” she explained. “The problem is China would have to agree to have the case heard by the ICJ, and with so much loss of life, so many trillions of dollars in damage and the global economic destruction the coronavirus caused Beijing would never agree to have a case heard there.”

Titus Nichols, a federal attorney, and professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, contended that, under international custom, foreign governments are immune to lawsuits from citizens. However, individual families could potentially bring a lawsuit against the Chinese government under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA).

“The act is the primary means for bringing a lawsuit against a foreign sovereign or its agencies and instrumentalities,” he said.

But even if families were successful, and financial compensation was ordered, claiming the money from China would be a steep challenge.

“Suing a government for mishandling something like the coronavirus is not likely to be a winning lawsuit in just about any country in the world,” surmised Dan Harris, the founder of the international law firm, Harris Bricken, affirming that payment collections regardless would be tough. “The Chinese government does not have much in the way of assets outside China and courts there are not going to let you pursue China government assets in China. Chinese state-owned companies have assets outside China, but most countries count that differently.”

Moreover, the issue of who and who isn’t at fault for the exacerbation of the coronavirus is still up for debate.

“There is evidence that China took steps to prevent knowledge about the virus from being shared,” Nichols added. “However, China cannot be held accountable for the actions of Americans who refuse to take heed of the government and continue to spread the virus.”

China’s strategy to fight COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, though later praised by the World Health Organization and scientists worldwide, consisted of cover-ups, lies, and repression. It also failed miserably, exposing the world to this deadly sickness.

After claiming yesterday to have no new cases of the virus, China is now trying to take a victory lap, emphasizing the strength of its response—and the United States’ apparent failures—while spreading conspiracies that the U.S. government manufactured the virus. And while U.S. President Donald Trump’s sluggishness toward the outbreak merits criticism, China’s endangering of the world with its initial incompetence is certainly more to blame. Some of Trump’s fiercest public critics, however, have in their condemnations of the president remarkably ignored China’s faults or even praised the Chinese Communist Party’s response. In doing so, they are propagating falsehoods—and Chinese propaganda.

The details of China’s critical missteps are long-running and have been widely reported. When academics in 2007 and 2019 warned that a SARS-like virus could emerge from China’s wet markets, the CCP allowed these markets to stay open.

A February Washington Post analysis of Chinese statements, leaked accounts, and interviews with public health officials and medical experts concluded that China’s “bureaucratic culture that prioritizes political stability over all else probably allowed the virus to spread farther and faster.”

A March study by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Southampton showed that if China had acted three weeks earlier than it did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95 percent and its geographic spread limited significantly.

Wuhan health officials by the end of December had confirmed nearly three dozen cases of the virus and closed a market they thought was related to its spread. And yet Chinese authorities spent January denying the virus could spread between humans—something doctors had known was happening since December—and allowed a Lunar New Year banquet involving tens of thousands of families to take place in Wuhan as planned. The Chinese government later let some 5 million people leave the city without screening.

Remarkably, according to even the CCP’s own account, Xi knew about the virus for two weeks before saying anything to the public. The CCP’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, mentioned the epidemic and Xi’s actions to fight it for the first time only on Jan. 21—the same day the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first coronavirus case in the United States.

China’s failure to contain the virus can be explained by the divergence between the country’s modernized public health system and its outdated autocratic political structures. The ills of the draconian latter negated the potential benefits of the former, allowing the virus to spread from Wuhan to Thailand and South Korea and beyond.

Trust for Xi’s regime is now waning within China and across the public health world. Some global leaders are increasingly doubting the reliability of China’s data and the usefulness of its guidance on combating the virus, but others, like Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, continue to praise Chinese assistance.

Seemingly hoping to preempt any potential loss of foreign trust, China’s propagandists have gone into overdrive, spectacularizing their country’s purported altruism and leadership: The Chinese Embassy in Italy, in a statement laden with South China Sea–related propaganda, claimed to be “donating” ventilators and sending experts to that country; journalists reported that China is sending similar “aid” to Spain; Chinese experts have carried out training sessions for 10 Pacific Island countries and dispatched medical experts, along with supplies of masks and virus detection kits, to Iran and Iraq.

This is all part of Xi’s wide-scale propaganda effort to gaslight the world into believing that China is not only not responsible for but is responding best to the pandemic, ultimately portraying his country as a magnanimous and trustworthy global leader.

But many of China’s claims are easily refuted. China did not stop the virus from spreading; Beijing’s negligence allowed the outbreak to go global. China is not donating but selling ventilators, face masks, and other goods to Italy and Spain. According to Italian media, an array of other European countries are also planning to purchase ventilators from China.

Xi’s regime, even amid a crisis it enabled, is just applying the same simple economic strategy as it does through the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s Marshall Plan–like state-backed global investment and marketing campaign: exporting domestic overcapacity abroad. China, home to too many unemployed workers and industrial firms, generally sends both to the global south through the initiative.

And now, as the world—thanks to Chinese state failure—gasps for air, China is there to sell us its excess ventilators and face masks. These sales will both serve as fodder for propaganda and help the country rejuvenate its shellshocked business sector.

While China charges the world for its assistance, it is, in fact, Trump’s United States that has already provided up to $100 million of aid to China and other countries affected by the pandemic.

And yet, despite all of this, more than a few Western thought leaders have aped Chinese falsehoods to critique Trump’s apparent failures and praise Xi’s purported successes.

Rachel Maddow on her show hosted New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, who opined that China had “enormous success in beating down its epidemic.” Maddow then thanked McNeil for detailing the “distance between” China’s response and “what we’re preparing for.” Her show, highlighting Trump’s failures compared with China’s supposed victories, later shared a clip of the segment on Twitter with the headline “How coronavirus testing works in a country that takes the problem seriously.”

Maybe she should move to China?