China sought to block an EU report alleging that Beijing was spreading disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, according to four sources and diplomatic correspondence reviewed by Reuters.
The report was eventually released, albeit just before the start of the weekend in Europe and with some criticism of the Chinese government rearranged or removed, a sign of the balancing act Brussels is trying to pull off as the pandemic scrambles international relations.
The Chinese Mission to the EU was not immediately available for comment and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to faxed questions about the exchange.
An EU spokeswoman said: “We never comment on content or alleged content of internal diplomatic contacts and communication with our partners from another countries.”
Another EU official said that the disinformation report had been published as usual and denied any of it had been watered down.
Four diplomatic sources told reporters that the report had initially been scheduled for release on Tuesday, but was delayed after Chinese officials picked up on a Politico news report that previewed its findings.
A senior Chinese official contacted European officials in Beijing the same day to tell them that “if the report is as described and it is released today, it will be very bad for cooperation,” EU diplomatic correspondence reviewed by Reuters showed.
The correspondence quoted senior ministry official Yang Xiaoguang (楊曉光) as saying that publishing the report would make Beijing “very angry” and accused European officials of trying to please “someone else” — something that the EU diplomats understood to be a reference to Washington.
The four sources said that the report had been delayed as a result, and a comparison of the internal version of the report obtained by Reuters and the final version published late on Friday showed several differences.
For example, on the first page of the internal report shared with EU governments on Monday, the EU’s foreign policy arm said: “China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image. Both overt and covert tactics have been observed.”
The public summary posted on Friday to the bloc’s disinformation portal (euvsdisinfo.eu) attributed the disinformation to “state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and — to a lesser extent — China.”
The public summary did note “significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media,” but the reference was left to the final six paragraphs of the document.
Disinformation about the pandemic is emerging as a flash point between the US and China, and officials on both sides have traded allegations of hiding information.
The disputes have sometimes caught the EU in the middle. With more than 1 billion euros (US$1.08 billion) per day in bilateral trade, the EU is China’s top trading partner, while China is second only to the US as a market for EU goods and services.
In a Webcast on Friday with the Friends of Europe think tank, Chinese Ambassador to the EU Zhang Ming (張明) said: “Disinformation is an enemy for all of us and it should be addressed by all of us.”
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS