Many progressives in the West have condemned rising racism and stereotyping towards Chinese people, especially after a Chinese man in Sydney died of a heart attack when Australian bystanders, afraid of being “infected,” declined to provide CPR. Yet fewer have recognized the far greater role that Western geopolitical animus towards China has played in proliferating misinformation, distortion, and deception in Western news media’s response.

Various viral hoaxes—claiming that police are shooting patients in the streets of Wuhan, a hospital construction site in Wuhan is a cover up for a mass grave, and that the Chinese government itself had manufactured the virus—have gained enormous traction on the internet. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage has insisted that the Communist Party is mismanaging the crisis, covering up information, and imposing authoritarian restrictions on citizens. In particular, the media has focused on reports that eight doctors in Wuhan predicted the virus weeks before it was announced publicly, but were silenced by party officials. This anecdote—an admitted error by the local Wuhan mayor and party secretary, both of whom have been resoundingly criticized by the Party upper echelons, including China’s Supreme People’s Court—has been represented as an indictment of the entire Chinese political system, proof of the illegitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff put it, the world was now “pay[ing] for China’s dictatorship.” The Washington Post similarly called China’s efforts to contain the virus “brought to you by authoritarianism.” With complete lack of empathy for Chinese suffering, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross hoped that the outbreak could “help” bring jobs back to the United States. Interestingly, none of the Western coverage has mentioned that the mayor and party secretary of Wuhan have openly admitted their mistake in press briefings and popular TV interview shows, and the Party has made clear under no uncertain terms that they are mandating total transparency and information sharing.

In stark contrast, the World Health Organization has had nothing but effusive praise for the Chinese response. As W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared, "The Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak, despite the severe social and economic impact those measures are having on the Chinese people." For daring to commend China, the Director-General has faced relentless accusations of being paid off by the Communist Party, accusations which began when the World Health Organization simply declined to declare the outbreak a “global health emergency” on January 23 instead considering it primarily a domestic risk in China. As new transmissions of the virus have been confirmed in the U.S., Japan, and other countries, the W.H.O, revised its designation to declare a global health emergency. Even then, the Director-General stressed that the declaration “is not a vote of no confidence in China. On the contrary, the W.H.O. continues to have confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak.” Instead, he emphasized that the speed and effectiveness with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome and shared it with the world were “beyond words,” as were the country’s “commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries.” He continued: “In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”