You remember the Hamlet quote, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in response to severe protest and overreaction of a character in a play within the play? Welcome to the Chinese propaganda machine response to COVID-19.

In response to the world’s condemnation of China’s attempts to conceal its failures in controlling COVID-19, Beijing has ratcheted its propaganda machine to ELEVENTY!!11!!111!

China has issued a 30-page alleged “rebuttal” to US accusations about China withholding information about the virus, its misinformation about the disease, and censorship of scientists and of Taiwan as they tried to sound the alarm and warn the world about the coming pandemic. Beijing has been relentlessly hammering its victim screed both in writing and in other media, invoking everything from Abraham Lincoln to Jesus Christ.

The Chinese foreign ministry has dedicated most of its press briefings over the past week to rejecting accusations by U.S. politicians, especially Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that China had withheld information about the new coronavirus and that it had originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan.

A 30-page, 11,000-word article posted on the ministry website on Saturday night repeated and expanded on the refutations made during the press briefings, and began by invoking Abraham Lincoln, the 19th century U.S. president.

“As Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time and fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” it said in the prologue.

Erm… we actually don’t know if Lincoln said it or not, and the claims attributing the quote to him are tenuous, much like the rest of China’s pathetic efforts to use its propaganda machine to condemn the United States and the West.

China’s response was “timely, open, and transparent,” Beijing’s propaganda claims.

Not true.

China took its sweet time warning the world about the pandemic, according to media reporting. In the six days after China determined they had a problem on their hands, Wuhan – the dump in the epicenter of the outbreak – hosted a celebration and banquet for thousands of people, and thousands of likely infected individuals traveled abroad to help spread the new version of corona. The AP obtained internal documents confirming that by the time Chinese President Xi Jinping made a C-19 announcement a full week after China internally acknowledged the seriousness of the disease, the infection began spreading across the globe.

Worse yet, German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) – don’t try to pronounce it, you’ll break your tongue and possibly your brain – reporting indicates that China pressured the World Health Organization (WHO) to delay issuing a warning about the global pandemic and conceal information about human-to-human transmission of the disease.

Why? Probably because China has bought itself a WHO Director-General – a goon without a medical degree, who not only was the head of a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, but also was accused of covering up numerous cholera epidemics in Ethiopia.

The latest reporting from the BND only confirms what we already suspected: Beijing was terrified of being humiliated on the world stage after its bungled response to C-19, and now it is using its propaganda machine to deny allegations that it is ultimately responsible for the spread of the disease.

Thanks a pantsload, China!

Li Wenliang – the 34-year-old doctor who tried to spread the warning about C-19 on social media, was not a “whistleblower,” Chinese propaganda asserts. He was never arrested, China claims.

Funny how even the most liberal of newspapers – the LA Times – reported otherwise. Funny how other Chinese Internet users who uploaded information about C-19 to GitHub were arrested.

Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple’s families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under “residential surveillance at a designated place.” There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother.

Reports from all over the world about China’s efforts to silence individuals who have been trying to ensure that the global community receives timely information about C-19 contradict Beijing’s propaganda, but nevertheless, they persist.

Emerging from its “century of humiliation” as a global economic powerhouse, China is desperate to contain rumors that it stepped on its own dick in its C-19 response, and instead of acknowledging its errors, it is pressuring its corrupt little puppet in the WHO to parrot the Chinese party line.

I don’t know a whole lot of people who believe the Chinese propaganda party line. But maybe Beijing is following Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” strategy described by the Rand Corporation in 2016 – just inundate audiences with a barrage of false, misleading, and manipulated information until fatigue sets in and they can no longer distinguish truth from fiction. Some of them are bound to believe, right?

The Chinese are masters at using propaganda to silence criticism, and the world needs to respond forcefully and explicitly.

In late March, Congressman John Curtis of Utah introduced HR 6421 – the Li Wenliang Global Public Health Accountability Act of 2020, authorizing the President to “impose property- and visa-blocking sanctions on foreign individuals and entities involved in deliberate acts to conceal or distort information about a public health emergency of international concern.”

Let’s get this bill passed and ensure that those in China – and anywhere else – responsible for the lies, censorship, and manipulation of information about C-19 and other pandemics are barred from accessing the US Dollar, prohibited from traveling from the United States, and any assets they have in our country are frozen.

In a world as interconnected as ours, where global travel is simple and cheap, where goods are shipped worldwide within hours, and where information should be available to anyone who needs it with a few clicks of the keys, we cannot afford to allow a repressive regime to conceal information that impacts the health of every person in the world and then use its propaganda apparatus to inundate the rest of us with lies and manipulations.

Beijing thinks its “century of humiliation” was bad? Let’s show it what a century of the middle finger from the rest of the world looks like.

Featured photo by Victory Girl Darleen Click.