Speaking at a “virtual summit” of G20 leaders on Tuesday, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping gave a speech stressing the “shared future” of humanity and demanding leadership in the “global war” against the Wuhan coronavirus.

Needless to say, Xi’s speech did not address the origins of the virus or the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) role in spreading it. Instead, Xi framed all such questions as petty squabbling that distract from the urgency of controlling the pandemic.

The CCP’s party-controlled People’s Daily went overboard hammering Xi’s themes home by mixing lines from his speech with quotes from other speeches, exchanges with world leaders, and open letters he has written. This had the unintended effect of spotlighting how Xi and other CCP officials keep repeating the same lines over and over again, all of them effectively translating to “stop blaming China for the virus, stop questioning our absurd claims to have beaten it after only a few thousand infections, and give us a position of global leadership as the world’s top coronavirus fighters.”

“Viruses do not respect borders, nor do epidemics discriminate between races. Humanity is a community with a shared future. Only by cooperating and responding together can the international community overcome this pandemic,” Xi said, a pure distillation of the CCP’s narrative that quarantining China at any point during the pandemic was tantamount to mindless xenophobia.

People’s Daily followed up this snippet by quoting Xi repeating the same line, with only minor variations in wording, to everyone from billionaire Bill Gates to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“Guided by the vision of a global community with a shared future, the Chinese government has maintained an open, transparent, and responsible attitude and held no reservations about sharing its best practices in prevention, control, and treatment of the virus with the WHO and the international community. It has actively engaged in international cooperation on fighting the pandemic to resolutely protect the lives and health of the Chinese people as well as the lives and health of the people of the world,” Xi claimed, unintentionally reinforcing criticism of the World Health Organization’s irresponsible parroting of false information from China during the early stages of the pandemic.

This, again, was followed up by the People’s Daily with quotes of Xi making the same claims of transparency to various world leaders despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and mountains of dead bodies from the virus China exported.

“In these times of adversity, China appreciates the understanding and support of the international community. The Chinese people shall not forget this, and the Chinese nation is grateful and knows how to reciprocate. China will always provide as much support as possible to the international community in combating the pandemic,” Xi said.

This was both an effort to push the CCP’s narrative of a grateful world swooning in appreciation for China’s leadership and a subtle warning that Beijing will remember and reward its allies while punishing its enemies.

“China has taken timely, decisive, and effective measures in the fight against the virus, and it has not only been responsible for the health of its own people, but also contributed to global public health. China has made tremendous sacrifices to fight the pandemic, a fact that has been recognized by the global community,” Xi concluded, polishing off the narrative the CCP requires the rest of the world to accept.

The CCP is banking heavily on a frightened world facing an avalanche of secondary crises arising from the coronavirus pandemic, led by nervous executives who lack the degree of absolute control over disgruntled citizens that Xi enjoys.

For example, at the same G20 virtual meeting, the United Arab Emirates warned about a massive hunger crisis, and the United Nations on Tuesday feared famines of “biblical proportions” would sweep across the impoverished nations of the world, nearly doubling the number of people living in hunger.

China’s not-so-subtle message is that no one can afford the cost of holding the CCP accountable for its deadly mendacity, and indeed other nations would suffer far more damage from a political and economic conflict than the brutal authoritarians in Beijing, who are presenting themselves as the only major industrial power to have largely recovered from the pandemic at present.