French Senators Slam Chinese Diplomat's Article

A diplomatic spat between France and China widened as members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website.

The French language article, entitled "Restoring distorted facts – Observations of a Chinese diplomat posted to Paris", first appeared on Sunday, the latest in a series of posts and tweets by the embassy that has defended Beijing's response to the coronavirus pandemic, while criticising the West's handling of the outbreak.

In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes – using the French term EHPAD – had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die. It came just days after France had raised its death toll substantially to include nursing homes.

The diplomat also suggested that some 80 French lawmakers had co-signed a disparaging statement about World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and had accused Tedros, an Ethiopian, of pro-Chinese bias.

"The Taiwanese authorities, supported by more than 80 French parliamentarians in a co-signed declaration, even used the word 'negro' to attack him. I still do not understand what could have gone through the heads of all these French elected representatives."

During a parliamentary hearing with Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Wednesday, several senators expressed their dismay at the diplomat's comments.

They denied such a declaration existed and demanded to know what the minister had told the envoy and why the article was still on the embassy's website.

Le Drian sidestepped the questions, citing the remarks by China's Foreign Ministry spokesman on Wednesday.

"You have a new brand of Chinese diplomats who seem to compete with each other to be more radical and eventually insulting to the country where they happen to be posted," said François Godement, a senior adviser for Asia at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

"These diplomats are behaving as if they were trolls, or bots, and putting outrageous texts on their own social media, which happen to be the embassy website, not quite necessarily noting the distinction between an official embassy website, which represents the government." (Reuters)