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A few days after China had announced it was sending medical supplies to Italy, Chinese state media aired pictures of Italians on balconies and streets applauding the Chinese national anthem. "In Rome, with the Chinese anthem playing, some Italians chanted 'Grazie, Cina!' on their balconies, & their neighbors applauded along", wrote Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China's foreign ministry who shamefully and wrongly suggested that the U.S. military had brought the Covid-19 to Wuhan.

China presented itself in the role of the savior, willing to rush to the bedside of the sick patient Italy.

Now a Financial Times investigation reveals that those videos were manipulated as part of Beijing's coronavirus propaganda. Hashtags #ThanksChina and #GoChina&Italy were further generated by bots. A report by the Carnegie Endowment called Italy "a target destination for China's propaganda".

An article called, "Why the Covid-19 epidemic is so politicized" and posted on the Chinese embassy website in Paris, said, "Some Westerners are beginning to lose confidence in liberal democracy" and "some [Western countries] have become psychologically weak".

Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at France's Foundation for Strategic Research, told Politico:

"China considers Europe the soft belly of the West. In their logic, there is the West, and in it the U.S. that will oppose China for structural and ideological reasons, and their European allies that need to be neutral in case of conflict between China and the U.S."

According to Lt. Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, in his new book Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, Chinese leaders "believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor".