'It's so disingenuous for Chinese officials now to say we are the ones who are helping the Italians'

Key Highlights 'China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak' China's 'disinformation campaign' of lying to the world about the seriousness of its COVID-19 outbreak further delayed the response by countries China has also claimed no new deaths from the virus, even as thousands of ash urns are shipped to local hospitals

New Delhi: Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer Niccolo Machiavelli once described human beings as ungrateful, fickle, disingenuous and greedy beings.

In the current scenario, China perfectly fits into this category.

Beijing’s ungratefulness can be gauged from the fact that it sold Italy the same PPE it had received from it when it was in dire need of the personal protective equipment while coronavirus outbreak was peaking in the communist country.

According to a report in the Spectator magazine, at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Italy had donated Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to China and now when Italy is in dire need of PPE, China wants to sell them to Italy.

Business in the garb of humanitarian gesture

The China-originated virus has decimated Italy’s older population and has wreaked havoc on its people, especially the frontline warriors- the doctors and nurses.

Once the Wuhan Virus was controlled, as China claims, it started to cultivate its humanitarian image through mask diplomacy. However, it was clear from the start that it not a humanitarian gesture but business as usual for the Chinese.

While it projected to the world that it would donate PPE to Italy it was later revealed that Beijing had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy.

A senior Trump administration official was quoted by The Spectator as saying that it is much worse than that and China "forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak."

"Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population," the administration official explained adding that later Beijing dispatched the Italian PPE and charged them for the same.

Defective testing kits and choreographed Chinese propaganda

Despite all the choreographed images and videos of Chinese jets arriving in foreign countries with dramatic music in the background, most of their supplies and testing kits sold to other countries have turned out to be defective.

Turkey, Spain, Netherlands and the Czech Republic were some of the countries which received faulty kits from China.

However, instead of issuing an apology China’s mouthpiece the Global Times blamed end-users for using the kits incorrectly and one spokesperson said that China too had received some supplies which were not up to the mark but it never made any hue and cry over it.

The US official further said, “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 the whole world.”

China failed to stop nearly half a million people from travelling to the US and has also been accused of underreporting the number of deaths due to the deadly virus in the mainland.