The world has been battling the mayhem that has been unleashed by China in the form of Coronavirus. With over 34 million cases all over the world and over 1 million deaths, the Wuhan Coronavirus is one of the worst pandemics the world has seen. It is also a pandemic that could have been stopped or at least controlled had China not lied and misled the world in the early stages of the outbreak in Wuhan. While the dead bodies mount and India fights a dual battle with the communist regime in the form of their unprovoked aggression at the LAC, Leftist paper, The Hindu, is making money from China and furthering its propaganda for its readers.

On the 1st of October, The Hindu ran a full page advertorial paid for and planted by China. The paid content appeared on the 3rd page of the paper.

Interestingly, the paid content by China that has been published by The Hindu on Page 3 today does not appear on the digital website of The Hindu. The beauty of the paid content is that to an untrained eye, the full page article would seem like just that – a feature on how the world is wrong about mighty China and how, on the National Day of the People’s Republic of China, it is time to re-evaluate what “bhakt media” is saying about the country and look towards all its achievements.

However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the full-page feature was content paid for by China.

If some looks closely at the right corner of the banner, one can see “A space marketing initiative” written in tiny white letters.. big enough to be visible upon closer scrutiny and tiny enough to get missed easily.

An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. Essentially, it is a method in which an advertisement is placed in a newspaper after paying the publisher, but, the advertisement is presented as an editorial column to make people take the advertisement seriously. The disclaimer that the content is a paid placement is hidden somewhere in tiny font.

There is nothing essentially unethical with publishing advertorials if the necessary disclaimers are in place and the reader is not being fooled into thinking that the advertorial is the publisher’s measured opinion, however, it becomes problematic when the paid content is placed in a national daily by the enemy of the nation.

While the world battles the Wuhan Coronavirus and India fight China’s unprovoked aggression at the Line of Actual Control, the advertorial in The Hindu is like giving a lifeline to a syphilitic dog.

At the beginning of the advertorial, there is a message by the Chinese Ambassador to India where he talks about how bravely China has helped the world battle a disease that China unleashed on unsuspecting humans. Further, after exonerating China of responsibility for the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus and instead, painting them as the saviours, the Ambassador goes on to talk about India-China relationship and the recent tension.

The Hindu thus gives space for China to pontificate and take the high road as far as the stand-off with India is concerned when, in fact, it was China that started the aggression. In the above portion of the advertorial, China, thanks to The Hindu, gets the opportunity to talk about how responsibility, cooperation and communication is the need of the hour when it is China that breached all protocol and unleashed aggression against Indian soldiers at the LAC.

Then, in publishing praises on China in the paid content, the advertorial says that China ranked 78th in the Doing Business report of 2018 and has improved to position 31 in Doing Business report of 2020.

If The Hindu was an actual newspaper and not a space for hire for the enemy, on the simply basis of factual inaccuracy, they would have not published this paid content.

Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the World Bank was putting a halt to the publication of the Ease of Doing Business report due to irregularities in the data and it would be reviewing the reports of the last 5 years. According to the report, data of 4 countries – China, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – were manipulated and altered to show a higher ranking than they deserved. 

The WSJ report quoted World Bank officials saying, “It is beginning a systematic review of the data, launching an independent audit of the process, and that it would correct the data”. 

The World Bank has reportedly said that the reports that were released in October 2017 and October 2019 could have been affected with these data manipulations and that owing to the audit, the report that was set to release in October 2020 would be delayed.

In August, a WSJ had reported that the Ease of Doing Business report has been delayed for 2020 since data manipulation had been caught. One of the countries whose rank was unethically modified to be made higher was China.

The WSJ said: 

“For three of the countries affected, China, Azerbaijan and the U.A.E., the World Bank had reported a marked improvement in their business environments in recent years. Five years ago, China ranked 90th in the report. Last year, its ranking climbed to 31st. Azerbaijan rose from 80th to 34th over that time. In last year’s report, the U.A.E. was ranked the 16th-best business environment in the world, up from 22nd five years ago. Saudi Arabia’s ranking slipped from 49th to 62nd in the past five years“. 

Essentially, The Hindu gave space to China to tout its rank in a manipulated report while its reporters were mocking India with half-baked information for the very same report.

Suhasini Haider had tweeted at the time, “World Bank suspends `ease of doing business’ report: According to the now-withdrawn WB report, the economies with the most notable improvement in Doing Business 2020 were KSA, Togo, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, China, India and Nigeria”. And then, she plugged a report that supposedly insinuated how India lobbied with the World Bank. 

However, the WSJ report did not even mention India. In fact, it mentioned most of the countries that Suhasini has quoted, like Togo, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, India and Nigeria. The report did not point a finger at the countries whose ranking improved notably but 4 specific countries – China, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. That Suhasini felt the need to drag India into it only points towards the fact that she was trying to peddle an agenda without really telling people what the report actually says.

So while The Hindu reporters lied about India based on the same report, the paper gave space to China to brag and gloat on the basis of the manipulated ranking.

Further in the advertorial, while The Hindu gives space to China to pontificate about poverty allegiance and how it has succeeded in making China a prosperous society, it has no mention of Uighur Muslims and the atrocities being heaped against them by China. What is interesting is that The Hindu pretends to be a harbinger of minority rights in India to an extent that they often even peddle fake news to uphold “minority rights”. However, as is clear from their paid content, they have absolutely no problem whitewashing mosques being broken, Quran being rewritten and Muslims being thrown in re-education camps as long as it is all done by Communist State China which pays them to whitewash these human rights violations.

Hilariously, The Hindu also gave paid space to China to paint itself as the messiahs of peace in the world.

Essentially, The Hindu gave space to China to claim that it is a global power in counter-terrorism when it is, currently, one of the greatest allies of Pakistan, the mothership of terrorism across the world and an Islamic country that has been involved in a war with India ever since its birth. The Hindu gave China a platform to claim that while being the adopted father of Pakistan, it can legitimately claim that it is fighting terrorism without levelling any counter given that Indian soldiers are laying their lives down on a regular basis due to Pakistan’s terrorism.

It is rather evident that for The Hindu, it is the money that decides content and certainly not facts, forget national interest.

In fact, The Hindu has managed to put a price on the death of a million people globally by accepting money from China to paint the country as a hero that emerged during the pandemic instead of the country that exported disease to the entire world.

It has been established that China hid vital details from the rest of the world while Wuhan was battling Coronavirus. It is reported that 5 million people left Wuhan, the epicentre of the Chinese Virus and travelled to the rest of the world before restrictions were put in Wuhan by China.

While China’s government focuses its strength on deflecting the blame on others, its diplomats and media outlets are aggressively tossing out allegations of “racism” on those who link the virus’ origins to China. China has been peddling conspiracy theories to acquit itself from the blame of the contagion that has so far affected millions.

However, investigative reports reveal damning evidence that puts the blame of the spread squarely on China. While China has failed to determine the ‘Patient Zero’, from where the epidemic may have spawned, the data from the Chinese government suggest that the novel infection began spreading as early as November 2019. However, it was after several weeks, on December 31st that China acknowledged reports of a previously-unknown virus behind a number of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, a city in Eastern China with a population of over 11 million.

China took an eternity to act against the virus and it took measures only after the epidemic segued into a global pandemic, attracting the wrath of affected countries and fearing sanctions. After having detected the signs of an unknown virus in November, the Chinese officials were not only awfully lethargic in launching preventive measures to curtail the spread but were also viciously repressive against voices who dared to inform the Chinese officials about the emergence of coronavirus. In December, China reprimanded Dr Li Wenliang, who tried to alert his friends about the impending threat from coronavirus. Three months later, the Chinese Communist Party’s top disciplinary body, in an unusual move, admitted their mistake and sent a “solemn apology” to the family of Dr Weliang, who also lost his life due to the virus.

23 days after China recognised the threat of novel coronavirus, China announced on January 23, a complete lockdown of its Wuhan city, the central Chinese city at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in China and whose live animal markets are believed to be the source from where the contagion emerged. Ratcheting up its measures to control the epidemic that was threatening to rapidly engulf the whole of the country, the Chinese government announced a sweeping lockdown of Wuhan, in an effort to quarantine the centre of the outbreak.

However, the damage was already done as the data from reports suggest that the Chinese government’s laxity in dealing with the pandemic at the outset proved catastrophic for the rest of the world. 5 million out of the 11 million population in Wuhan city had already left the city before the stringent restrictions kicked in. The virus had been allowed to spread for several weeks, with millions of people travelling in and out of the city acting as potential carriers of the virus. 

Moreover, the spread of coronavirus happened amidst a major Chinese festival-Lunar New Year, a time when millions of people travel back home or go on a holiday. According to one estimates, the world’s biggest human migration happens during a Chinese New Year. As per some reports, Chinese tourists were expected to make 450 million trips this year, scheduled between January 24 to January 30. It is noteworthy to mention that the outbreak of the virus intensified in Italy, Spain and other parts of the world starting February.

There have been several instances where PPE kits and masks exported by China to other parts of the world have been defective. Moreover, there is evidence that the virus itself may have been cooked in a lab.

After all of this and more, The Hindu gave space to China to pontificate to the world, exonerate itself and paint itself as the saviours of the world amidst a pandemic that China itself unleashed on the world.

Not the first time that The Hindu has taken money to sell its soul to China

On the 2nd of April 2020, The Hindu had placed another paid advertorial by China.

While this was paid content by China, essentially where China had given money to The Hindu to sing its praises, the Chinese Embassy presented the feature in a very different light.

The Chinese Embassy, that paid The Hindu, basically presented the paid content as a “special page” that The Hindu had published on its own on the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and India.

The Hindu had done exactly the same in 2018 as well.

It is safe to say that if anyone wants to figure out what the price of betraying one’s country and the price to whitewash the death of a million people across the world is, one must get in touch with The Hindu.