This article criticizes the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman’s claim that the U.S. military may have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan. It discusses why President Trump called it the “Chinese virus,” China’s initial concealment of information, and the historical Chinese jinx known as “disorder in years ending in nine.”

March 19, 2020
It seems that a stern protest alone was not enough to settle his anger.
President Trump of the United States has named it the “Chinese virus” on Twitter.
I have repeatedly stated that, at present, the most decent newspaper in Japan is the Sankei Shimbun.
In particular, the writer of Sankei-sho represents that fact.
The following is from today’s Sankei-sho.
The international community has been troubled many times by the Chinese government’s logic of talking black into white.
This, however, is surely too unreasonable.
Last week, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry tweeted about the new coronavirus that “it might have been brought to Wuhan by the U.S. military.”
It seems that a stern protest alone was not enough to settle his anger.
President Trump of the United States has named it the “Chinese virus” on Twitter.
In last week’s column, I wrote that “China’s deception, in which it obscures the source of the outbreak and pretends to be a victim, cannot be tolerated.”
Once the momentum of infections in mainland China began to subside, it went far beyond merely “pretending to be a victim.”
Through state-run media, China has been sending out assertions that almost say Japan and Western countries should learn from the exercise of coercive power that only a dictatorship can wield.
China has dispatched a medical support team to Italy, where the explosive spread of the virus continues.
However, no matter how much it pretends to be a “savior,” the fact that the virus spread from China will not disappear.
If the Chinese authorities had disclosed information at the initial stage, the global epidemic should have been avoidable.
In China watcher Kaori Fukushima’s recent book, “Xi Jinping’s Defeat,” I learned of a jinx called “disorder whenever nine appears.”
It means that in years whose last digit is nine, disorder or disaster always occurs in China.
Indeed, the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 after a civil war.
In the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama went into exile.
In 1969, a conflict with the Soviet Union occurred, and in 1979, a conflict with Vietnam occurred.
The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 shocked the world.
In 1999, there was the suppression of Falun Gong.
In 2009, riots occurred in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and severe repression of the Uyghurs continues even now.
And then came last year’s new pneumonia.
No matter how much the Chinese government denies it, the jinx was not broken.