France entered into a political battle against China and claimed that Beijing is imposing aggressive diplomacy across the globe. The French ministry of foreign affairs summoned the Chinese ambassador for articles published on the Chinese embassy's website and expressed his deep disapproval for the sentiments shared on those posts.
According to the Economic Times, France entered into a political battle with China and shared its disapproval of Beijing's aggressive diplomacy. The issue started when a series of posts on the Chinese embassy's official website in Paris said that residents of retirement homes in the country were made to sign certificates of 'waiver of emergency care.' The post was written by a Chinese diplomat who also shared that nursing staff on the Ehpad abandoned their workplace overnight, deserted collectively, and rendered the residents susceptible to disease and hunger.
There were also public statements by Chinese representatives of the Chinese embassy in France that did not conform to the quality of the bilateral relationship between the nations, the French foreign ministry noted.
On the other hand, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Bild in Germany criticized the Chinese Communist Party leader and China's President Xi Jinping for allegedly failing in containing the pandemic. In his letter to the Chinese president, the editor said that the Chinese embassy in Berlin addressed him in an open letter for questioning the accountability of China for economic damage caused by the pandemic globally.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Berline Tao Lil then published the open letter to Bild on the embassy's official website. He wrote that the article ignored essential facts and that China should not be made accountable for a pandemic that affected the entire world, including its own.
Similarly, Chinese ambassador to Cyprus Huang Xingyuan also expressed his distaste for local newspaper Volkskrant when a content expressed how the world was embarrassed on how quickly China recovered from the pandemic and resorted to blame-shifting and lies. The ambassador wrote on a separate post that the country was saddened when Boris Johnson tested positive and that the UK cases surpassed the 100,000 thresholds. He also noted that he hoped the incident was not a cause of herd immunity policy.
China also received several backlashes in social media disputes in Europe, Khazakstan, Singapore, and Iran. Regardless, China argued with some of the scrutinizers, including Brazilian education minister who claimed that Beijing planned for world domination.
In Sri Lanka, the Chinese embassy's official Twitter account was restored after it was shut down for being inflammatory. According to The German Marshall Fund, Twitter accounts linked to Chinese embassies, consulates, and ambassadors garnered more than 250 percent increases in audience volume since March 2019. He also noted that since the last quarter of 2019, China's diplomatic corps even created more than 40 new accounts to contain the negative backlash and share the country's sentiments about the issues.
