If you believe a new survey, Germans are turning to China in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Younger Germans now prefer China over the United States as an ally, the poll conducted by Kantar Public pollsters for Germany’s Koerber Foundation found.
“Germans view the United States less positively since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis while their attitudes toward China have improved,” the German public broadcaster DW News reported citing the survey. The broadcaster added that “73% stated that their opinion about the United States had deteriorated due to the current health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus,” compared to only 36 percent who looked more unfavorably towards China since the outbreak. “Coronavirus turns Germans more critical of US,” the DW News concluded.
Overall, thirty-six percent of Germans want their country to have closer ties with China, as opposed to 37 percent who still prefer the United States. But the pro-China sentiment was much higher among young Germans.
“Young Germans are turning into China fans,” German weekly Der Spiegel wrote.
The magazine reported the critical finding of the survey:
More than a third of the Germans view China today as the number one partner outside Europe. It is a steep rise as compared to September 2019: at that time only 24 percent of respondents said that China is more important than the United States. Now 36 percent are of that opinion.Looking at it the other way around: now only 37 percent hold the opinion that America is more important than China. That number was 50 percent in September. Those who want to hold on to a strong transatlantic bond now only have a very narrow lead.The share of China fans is largest with those between 18 to 34 years. Nearly half of them, 46 percent, expect more from Beijing than from Washington (as opposed to 35 percent who are undecided). Apparently, for young Germans the power of the future lies in the east. [Translated by the author]
“Germans’ skepticism about the United States is growing, a worrying trend that should give political decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic food for thought,” Nora Mueller of the Koerber Foundation told media.
The trend comes as China wages a massive global propaganda campaign in the wake of the coronavirus. Beijing is doing everything to cover up the media manipulation it is carrying out on foreign soils.
“The European Union toned down part of a report about Chinese state-backed disinformation because it feared Beijing would retaliate by withholding medical supplies,” the Hong Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post disclosed on April 25.
Chinese diplomats are at the forefront of this campaign, bullying and threatening foreign journalists, policy experts, and politicians. I reported on this intimidation campaign in my recent article for the Gatestone Institute.
The changing public attitudes can also come from the relentlessly negative coverage of U.S. politics in recent years. A study by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center in 2017 found that during U.S. President Donald “Trump’s first 100 days in office, 98 percent of [Germany’s state-run] ARD‘s news coverage that assigned value to a story about him was negative,” a figure higher than that of CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times or any other media outlet included in the survey. In 2018, a leading German journalist working for Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading political magazine, was caught making up fake news stories portraying the supporters of President Trump in America as racists and bigots. Not surprisingly, the now-disgraced journalist was previously named the ‘CNN Journalist of the Year.’
For decades, Germany’s left-wing media elite have been at war with the United States. Even before President Trump appeared on the scene, anti-Americanism was a well-established tradition in the left-dominated German mainstream media. Many on the German left have not forgotten or forgiven, the role the U.S. played in the collapse of the Soviet Eastern bloc, their beloved utopian socialist paradise.
‘China Pushing Coronavirus Disinformation,’ say U.S. Intelligence Officials
[Cover image via YouTube] [Excerpts from German media reports translated by the author]
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