The European Union diluted a report detailing Chinese government disinformation about the spread of the coronavirus after Beijing threatened the 27-country bloc, the New York Times reported on Friday.
“China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image,” the report initially said. “Both overt and covert tactics have been observed.”
The report also noted that China had falsely accused French officials of making racist statements against World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. China, a major trading partner of the EU, blocked the report just before it was released.
“The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, a European Union diplomat, wrote to other officials last week in an email seen by the Times. The sentence on Chinese disinformation, and as well as the mention of China’s false accusations against France, were missing from the published version of the report.
The EU was “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party,” an analyst in the EU administration wrote to her superiors.
China has attempted to spread conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, insinuating that the U.S. army brought the illness to Wuhan. U.S. intelligence has concluded that China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak within its borders.