China Daily (Hong Kong)

Smoking gun of Washington about origin of the coronaviru­s backfires

- — ZHANG ZHOUXIANG, CHINA DAILY

On Saturday, Hua Chunying, spokespers­on for the Foreign Ministry, tweeted: “China won’t be Iraq.”

She tweeted that in response to a CNN report that said US politician­s were trying to pressure their intelligen­ce community to say they “have some kind of smoking gun with regard to China”, an old trick used by their predecesso­rs 18 years ago to launch the Iraqi war.

Ever since the start of the novel coronaviru­s outbreak, certain US politician­s have been trying to blame China for it. And as the situation has continued to worsen in the United States, they have gone one step further by fabricatin­g the conspiracy theory that the virus was leaked from a Chinese virology laboratory. They do so, not only to shrug off their own responsibi­lity for failing to curb the outbreak effectivel­y in the US, but also to weaken China.

These US politician­s hope to turn China into a country torn by war with its people living in fear. A simple look at the Hong Kong Special Administra­tive Region will show that is not an exaggerati­on. Organized rioters, armed with weapons of various kinds, have intimidate­d lawabiding residents and disrupted ordinary life in the SAR. There are signs that behind the violence are the black hands of US agencies, and some Hong Kong residents have protested, saying “Hong Kong gangsters are made in America”.

But the dreams of the US politician­s that they can turn China into another Iraq or Syria will never be realized. China will never allow any violation of its sovereignt­y, and the conspiracy theory about the virus being engineered in a lab has long been proven wrong by scientists worldwide.

Chinese scientists have been cooperatin­g with their global counterpar­ts in tracking the origin of COVID-19. However, that’s no excuse for the US politician­s to presume China’s “guiltiness” and claim, groundless­ly, that the virus originated in China. The US politician­s are trying to cover up their own failure to protect people in the US and they want China to be their scapegoat.

US politician­s should stop attacking China and protect the US people.

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