The PPE donation from China they tried to mask
THE first rule of PPE donations is: don’t talk about PPE donations – especially if they come from China.
I discovered this while enquiring about the million facemasks quietly provided to the UK Government during the pandemic by Tencent, the Chinese tech giant close to the Beijing government.
The firm also has a streaming arm, China’s largest, which put out a censored version of the 1999 film Fight Club last month, with Big Brother mandarins altering the cult film’s subversive ending. Its version had authorities stopping Project Mayhem from blowing up capitalism and sending the free-thinking alter ego of the narrator (played by Brad Pitt) to an asylum.
Chinese audiences are also being treated to Tencent’s censored version of TV sitcom Friends. All references to lesbians and gays are cut and the line ‘women can have multiple orgasms’ is changed to ‘women can have endless gossips’. What an anti-climax.
It took three weeks and threats of a complaint for pen-pushers at the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office and Health Department to come clean that ‘senior officials’ in a ‘centralised team’ in the latter had signed off the Tencent PPE donation, and that smaller amounts of protective equipment were sent to individual NHS trusts in April 2020. The Bank of China also helped out. Now, former
Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith is planning to back an amendment to ban PPE procurement from anywhere linked to genocide.
‘Health practitioners in this country are wearing government-issue, tainted PPE,’ he told me. Tencent
says it was happy to have ‘saved lives at a critical time’, which is no doubt why three peers – Lords Carter, Glendonbrook and Mance – proudly declare shareholdings in the Chinese firm.
As any observer of soft power and
decades of Russian and Middle Eastern money sloshing through the London laundromat know, foreign largesse often ties politicians and political parties to regimes they soon find committing evil crimes against humanity.