China outraged after Brazil minister suggests
Covid-19 is part of 'plan for world domination'
Beijing demands explanation after ‘highly racist’
tweet by Abraham Weintraub suggests it is part of a geopolitical plan
Brazilian education minister Abraham Weintraub has
sparked a row with China after suggesting coronavirus was linked to its ‘plan
for world domination’.
Agence
France-Presse
Published
onTue 7 Apr 2020 01.47 BST
China has
demanded an explanation from Brazil after the far-right government’s education
minister linked the coronavirus pandemic to Beijing’s “plan for world
domination”, in a tweet imitating a Chinese accent.
In the
latest incident to strain ties between the two nations, minister Abraham
Weintraub insinuated China was behind the global health crisis.
“Geopolitically,
who will come out stronger from this global crisis?” he wrote on Twitter
Saturday. “Who in Brazil is allied with this infallible plan for world
domination?”
In the
original Portuguese, his tweet substituted the letter “r” with capital “L” -
“BLazil” instead of “Brazil,” for example - in a style commonly used to mock a
Chinese accent.
China’s
embassy in Brazil condemned Weintraub’s “absurd and despicable” tweet, calling
it “highly racist”. “The Chinese government expects an official explanation
from Brazil,” tweeted ambassador Yang Wanming.
The row
comes as Brazil, like many countries, is hoping to source more medical
equipment from China to deal with Covid-19.
Weintraub
said in an interview he stood by his tweet and called on China to do more to
help fight the pandemic. “If they [China] sell us 1,000 ventilators, I’ll get
down on my knees in front of the embassy, apologise and say I was an idiot,” he
told Radio Bandeirantes.
Health
minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta said last week Brazil was struggling to source
ventilators and other vital health supplies from China, saying some of its
orders were cancelled without explanation.
The issue
erupted online on Monday. The top trend on Twitter in Brazil was the hashtag
#TradeBlockadeOnChinaNow.
Brazil,
whose biggest trading partner is China, is the Latin American country hit
hardest by the new coronavirus, with nearly 500 deaths and more than 11,000
confirmed cases so far.
Since the
pandemic emerged, Brazil-China ties have been strained, notably by a series of
tweets by President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a federal lawmaker. Eduardo
Bolsonaro criticised the Chinese “dictatorship” for its handling of the
outbreak in March.
Last week,
he tweeted about the “Chinese virus”, a phrase that infuriates Beijing and that
the World Health Organization has advised against. It has also been used by US
president Donald Trump.
That
prompted China’s consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Li Yang, to ask Eduardo
Bolsonaro in an opinion column in Brazilian newspaper O Globo: “Are you really
that naive and ignorant?”
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