Senior Catholic prelate insists we should blame the Party, not the Chinese people, for spreading the virus throughout the world.
by Massimo Introvigne
On April 2, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo from Myanmar, the Archbishop of Yangon and a prelate highly praised by Pope Francis for his advocacy of human rights, has published on UCA News an article where he suggests that we should hold accountable the CCP for the coronavirus epidemics. This is a position Bitter Winter has consistently advocated. This epidemics is about a “CCP virus,” rather than a “Chinese virus.” The Chinese people is a victim of the crisis. The CCP is largely responsible for it.
Cardinal Bo reminds his readers that his country, Myanmar, is “extremely vulnerable. Bordering China, where Covid-19 first began, we are a poor nation without the health and social care resources that more developed nations have. Hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar are displaced by conflict, living in camps in the country or on our borders without adequate sanitation, medicines or care.” Tragedy may easily follow.
Christians should pray and help, the Cardinal states, but should also ask who is responsible. Of course, several governments made mistakes, but “there is one government that has primary responsibility for what it has done and what it has failed to do, and that is the CCP regime in Beijing. Let me be clear — it is the CCP that has been responsible, not the people of China.” Citizens of China are the “primary victims,” while “it is the repression, the lies and the corruption of the CCP that are responsible.”
Cardinal Bo summarizes the persecution of the doctors and the citizen journalists who blew the whistle. “There is deep concern, he adds, that the Chinese regime’s official statistics significantly downplay the scale of infection within China. At the same time, the CCP has now accused the United States Army of causing the pandemic. Lies and propaganda have put millions of lives around the world in danger.”
The CCP’s reaction to the epidemics, comments the Cardinal, is not coincidental. Rather, it is “symptomatic of its increasingly repressive nature. In recent years, we have seen an intense crackdown on freedom of expression in China. Lawyers, bloggers, dissidents and civil society activists have been rounded up and have disappeared.” In particular, “the regime has launched a campaign against religion, resulting in the destruction of thousands of churches and crosses and the incarceration of at least one million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps,” not to mention organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
“Through its inhumane and irresponsible handling of the coronavirus, the Cardinal concludes, the CCP has proven what many previously thought: that it is a threat to the world.” And, since there is evidence that the CCP “is responsible, through its criminal negligence and repression, for the pandemic sweeping through our streets today,” then “Xi Jinping and the CCP — not [China’s] people — owes us all an apology and compensation for the destruction it has caused.” As Christians, “we must not be afraid to hold this regime to account.”