Beijing is now acting against countries for just stating a fact, however, it is not the first time. This time, it is Taiwan and China is asking them to stop using the term ‘Wuhan Coronavirus’ as Beijing does not want to be shown a mirror. As per the Chinese flag carrier, Air China, the visitors from Taiwan (ROC) to China could face problems if their COVID-19 test certificates carry the term ‘Wuhan coronavirus’.
The Chinese were largely successful in convincing the world to move away from the standard practice of naming the diseases and viruses prefixed or suffixed with the country or city of origin. The fact that the last pandemic of this scale and effect, ‘Spanish flu’, had the name of the origin country, and the current pandemic does not use it, makes it a clear success for the Chinese. However, countries like Taiwan are trying their best to not play by the Chinese law book and Beijing surely doesn’t seem happy about it.
Air China said in a notice to the travel agents of Taiwan, “Regarding passengers who are taking cross-strait flights and need to provide a Covid-19 negative polymerase chain reaction certificate issued within 72 hours, they are reminded to provide the certificates that bear the official term ‘Covid-19’ or ‘novel coronavirus’.”
The statement also clarified that “If their certificates carry the words ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ they will be deemed void,” if any missing or invalid paperwork could result in passengers from Taiwan being refused entry on arrival.
This is because the Chinese Communist Party is trying its best to create a conspiracy theory to change the narrative entirely and make people believe that the virus never originated in Wuhan in the first place.
The CCP mouthpiece Global times quoted Zeng Guang, Chief Epidemiologist of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who claimed, “Wuhan is the place where the first infection cases were formally recorded, but it does not prove that the coronavirus originated from Wuhan.”
In addition to this, Chinese state media outlet CGTN went to the extent of citing German virologist Alexander Kekule’s findings that suggested the virus probably originated outside China’s territory.
But Kekule also found that the virus strain in many COVID-19 patients around the world can be genetically traced to a variant that mutated and spread in northern Italy, however, all of this, does not even talk about the origin and instead beats around the bush, all the while.
The Chinese can currently deny the people travelling from Taiwan if they do not have a certificate that proves that they have tested negative for the coronavirus within the past 72 hours. Taiwan’s response to the pandemic and its handling of the coronavirus have been widely praised around the globe.
Even at the beginning of the health crisis, the small island nation had reported just 759 cases and seven deaths. It has not reported a local infection since April. This is because they have not been influenced by false political correctness and had a truthful understanding of where the epicentre of the pandemic was and this might have been an important reason why it was able to deal with the virus so efficiently.
However, China still can’t take the facts at face value and keeps banning the nations who can show it the mirror, degrading its relations with such countries in the process.