Condoleezza Rice: China Wants To Shift The Narrative On COVID-19, Don’t Let Them

“…Hoover Institution Fellow Condoleezza Rice speaks with Hoover’s Tom Gilligan about the “reckoning” the Chinese Communist Party is likely to face over its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak and both the public and private conversations U.S. officials should have with them.

Rice primarily accuses China of a coverup of the early outbreak of the virus, which cost the world time that could have been used to prepare. It is “very hard to get answers from China,” she said.

“The Chinese did what authoritarians do,” she said. “They silenced those who were trying to sound the alarm, they wanted time to create the narrative that would be blessed by the Communist Party of China, which means it probably had to go to Beijing before you could say anything. It is just the nature of the system. It is a real problem.”

“Can you imagine those people being silenced in the United States or Germany or Brazil?” she asked. “No… it would have been known that there was a problem.”

“The Chinese and trying to create a counter-narrative… to shift the narrative from their initial responsibility for not fessing up to what was happening, to ‘We got on top of it and this is how we helped the world.’ That’s how they’re going to shift the narrative. Don’t let it happen.”

She concluded: “If you keep the focus on how this started, and China’s role in that, they will be embarrassed by that. If you let them shift the narrative to all they’ve done sending out PPE, you’re probably not going to make progress.”…”