World against the CCP: BILD Editor-in-Chief Response to Xi Jinping

On April 15, BILD, a German newspaper, published an article, ‘What China Already Owes Us,” presenting an “accounting” for the German “corona invoice,” (which the German government did not endorse and called “illusory”) with an amount of nearly €150 billion (US $163 billion) to China, including a €24 billion bill for lost tourism, €1 million per hour for Lufthansa and €50 billion for small businesses affected by the standstill.

The Chinese embassy responded with a furious letter which accused the paper of “stirring up nationalism” and prejudice towards China.

(reference #1)

Your report is not only missing crucial facts and exact timings but also any modicum of journalistic diligence and fairness.

Anyone who makes calculations like this is stirring up nationalism and prejudice as well as xenophobia and animosity towards China.

It does not live up to either the traditional friendship between our people or to a serious understanding of journalism.

Against this background, I ask myself where in your newsroom this dislike of our people and our country has come from?”

BILD editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt responded to the Chinese embassy’s accusation with an open letter addressed to Xi Jinping, titled “You are endangering the world”

(reference #2)

Dear President Xi Jinping

Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper BILD whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the corona virus is inflicting worldwide.

Let me respond:

1. You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.

You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.

2. Surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.

China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own. The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is Corona.

3. You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that Corona is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan.

You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.

4. The “Washington Post” reports that your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching corona viruses in bats, but without maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?

Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of Corona victims all over the world?

5. In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.

That is your political legacy.

Your embassy tells me that I am not living up to the “traditional friendship of our peoples.” I suppose you consider it a great “friendship” when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship. I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse.

You plan to strengthen China through a plague that you exported. You will not succeed. Corona will be your political end, sooner or later.

Yours sincerely

Julian Reichelt

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