Based on Financial Times Asia editor Jamil Anderlini’s article published in the Nikkei opinion section, this article examines how the Chinese government attempted to have the Wisconsin State Senate pass a resolution praising China’s response to COVID-19.
It discusses the CCP’s global influence operations, defective medical supplies, discrimination against Africans in China, conspiracy theories blaming the U.S. military, and the way Beijing’s domestic nationalist propaganda has backfired internationally, deepening China’s isolation.

April 24, 2020
A single email from the Chinese government arrived in the inbox of Roger Roth, president of the Wisconsin State Senate.
It was a request asking him to introduce a resolution in the legislature praising China’s efforts in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Today’s Nikkei opinion page carried, in a large space, an article by Jamil Anderlini, Asia editor of the Financial Times.
The reality of China revealed by that article proved the correctness of my arguments 100 percent.
At the same time, this article also reveals the reality of the operations China is conducting throughout the world.
A friend of mine, an avid reader, said that it also makes clear that under Democratic administrations in the United States, China continued to carry out operations and that they were easily manipulated by China.
I completely agree.
China’s operations do not work at all on President Trump.
I will be the first in the world to state that this is the real reason why the people controlling the news departments of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK are anti-Trump.
China’s self-defeating coronavirus diplomacy.
Risk of isolation in the world.
“Domestic priority” backfires.
A single email from the Chinese government arrived in the inbox of Roger Roth, president of the Wisconsin State Senate.
It was a request asking him to introduce a resolution in the legislature praising China’s efforts in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The Senate president thought it must be a prank.
The email even had a draft resolution attached.
Its contents listed points about how wonderfully the Chinese Communist Party had responded, along with unbelievable claims, and the proposal was filled with material far too suspicious to put to a resolution.
“I have never heard of a foreign government contacting a state legislature and asking it to pass a bill.
That simply cannot happen,” Roth told the writer in mid-April.
It was then discovered that the email had been sent by the Chinese consul general in Chicago.
“I was astonished.
So I replied as follows:
Dear Consul General, go to hell.”
The Chinese government has repeatedly tried to raise its international standing by taking advantage of the novel coronavirus crisis, only to score painful own goals instead.
This episode must be called one of them.
There are many Africans living in cities in southern China, and those African residents have been treated deplorably because of rumors about infection.
Many of the medical supplies and medical devices China sent to various countries have been defective.
Senior Chinese government officials have publicly endorsed a conspiracy theory claiming that the infection began with the U.S. military.
In these and other ways, most of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control China’s reputation in the world have backfired.
Omission.
This crisis is the greatest crisis since Xi Jinping took the post of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and seized power in 2012.
The legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party rule has been damaged by the mistakes made in the early stage of the outbreak and by the subsequent coercive suppression.
Xi realizes that the economic crisis now beginning will further erode public support.
During the 2008 financial crisis, the Chinese government recognized that it needed an annual growth rate of at least 8 percent in order to contain social unrest.
However, China’s gross domestic product, GDP, for the January-March quarter of 2020 fell by 6.8 percent from the same period of the previous year.
Greatly strengthening nationalism that turns other countries into enemies can distract the Chinese people, even if it lowers China’s standing in the world over the medium term.
That is why Chinese diplomats took an action that could turn against them people such as Wisconsin State Senate President Roth, who until now had stood in a neutral position and might have been on their side in trade and diplomacy.
The Chinese government aimed to use such resolutions in foreign legislatures as propaganda to justify Communist Party rule at home.
But Roth is now preparing the exact opposite resolution.
While praising the Chinese people, it is said to be a resolution that will “strip the Chinese Communist Party bare and reveal to the world its brutality and the damage it has inflicted on the entire world by concealing the novel coronavirus infection.”
It will probably be passed by an overwhelming majority.
Dated the 20th.