China is pushing ahead with a propaganda campaign critical of Western democracies and their handling of the coronavirus
"China considers Europe the soft belly of the West," said Antoine Bondaz, a research fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research think tank who is focused on China."In their logic, there is the West, and in it the U.S. that will oppose China for structural and ideological reasons, and their European allies that need to be neutral in case of conflict between China and the U.S.
Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy think tank, said that China will be the first country that gets out of the economic"tunnel." "The objective is to show that it’s not a summoning [of the ambassador] that will change anything, that they own up to what they’re doing, that they’re not wrong and that they were never wrong."Lu was known for a similarly aggressive stance in the Canadian press when he was Beijing's ambassador in Ottawa during a diplomatic spat in 2019 between Canada and China. The Chinese embassy in Paris did not respond to a request for an interview with the ambassador.
French officials deny they have been soft in their handling of Chinese propaganda, pointing to the unusually public summoning of the ambassador.
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