The April 14 letter pinpointed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) authoritarian rule as the root cause of the global pandemic and urged for a review of what its draconian policies may have cost the world.
“The current global crisis has been caused by the regime so many of you have been tolerating or supporting for decades,” stated the letter addressed to Chinese citizens and friends of China worldwide. Politicians who have signed on the letter include multiple parliament members from Britain, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and the European Union.
“Totalitarian governments rule by fear and lies,” said Jakub Janda, executive director at Czech-based think tank European Values Center for Security Policy.
After decades of the communist occupation in his own country, Janda saw “many similarities between Soviet communists and current Chinese communists,” he said in an email.
‘Roots of the Pandemic’
Chinese authorities knew there were human-to-human transmission risks for the virus, but hid the information from the public, initially telling the World Health Organization (WHO) there was no clear evidence of such risks. It was only on Jan. 20, three days before the epicenter of the virus, Wuhan, went under lockdown, that the regime publicly confirmed it.The latest open letter called the CCP cover-up the “roots of the pandemic” and urged people to “never forget that China’s Chernobyl moment was a self-inflicted wound.”
“The global pandemic forces us all to confront an inconvenient truth: by politicizing all aspects of life including people’s health, continued autocratic one-party rule in the People’s Republic of China has endangered everyone,” the letter said.
A growing body of U.S. lawmakers and international experts have also highlighted the Chinese regime’s role in the global health disaster.
The letter makes a point of drawing a distinction between the CCP and the Chinese people, who are most victimized by the regime, and shows solidarity with them.
“I think that the Chinese people are a wonderful and great people,” Wisconsin Senator Roger Roth told The Epoch Times. “They’ve just been held hostage by this brutal, oppressive regime for the last 70 years.”
“China is so much larger than the regime that occupies its halls of power,” said Shuvaloy Majumdar, director of the Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad at Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“The people of China, and friends of the people, deserve to know that the propaganda their government is disseminating is patently false, that the world shares in the aspirations and fears of the Chinese people,” he said via email.
Zhang, the recently disappeared student, is one example of a greater awakening in China “beyond government propaganda at schools and wider control of information,” Majumdar said.
“The Chinese people are discovering the truths of the Communist Party legacy.”