Many people didn’t realise that wars were fought during COVID. From the book, The Weaponisation of Everything by Mark Galeotti:
“Beijing, by contrast, seemed unsure whether to be good cop or bad, and too quickly abandoned the former. It too launched a campaign of strategic and performative medical assistance, very much directed towards clients and those whom it wanted to woo, from Spain to the Gulf States, Kazakhstan to Colombia. (Again, it found itself competing with Taipei: Palau received nothing from China, but masks, thermometers and test kits from Taiwan.) Yet the Chinese government seems quickly to have given up on this approach. Instead, it demonstrated itself to be touchy to the point of hypersensitivity about its likely status as the original source of what Trump variously described as ‘the Wuhan Virus’ or, in a triumph of boorishness, ‘Kung Flu’. When Australian prime minister Scott Morrison made the seemingly mild suggestion that there should be an international enquiry into COVID-19’s origins, the Chinese state media pillo-ried him for ‘panda bashing’, one of the more bizarre invectives in Beijing’s political lexicon. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism claimed there had been a ‘significant increase’ in ‘racist attacks on Chinese and Asian people’, and sanctions were imposed on a range of Australian imports. In a more sinister turn, an Australian who had been arrested fully seven years ago for smuggling drugs into China was suddenly sentenced to death, and a cyberattack presumed to originate in China hit a wide range of Australian government and business systems.”
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