France summons Chinese envoy over virus remarks
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian attends a weekly session of questions to the government at the National Assembly in Paris, on March 31, 2020.
PHOTO: AFP
PARIS • The French Foreign Ministry said that it had summoned the Chinese Ambassador to protest against a string of controversial comments by Beijing's embassy in Paris on the coronavirus.
"I made clear my disapproval of certain recent comments when the ambassador... was summoned this morning," Agence France-Presse quoted Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian as saying in a ministry statement, adding that the remarks were not in line with the "quality of the bilateral relationship" between France and China.
China's embassy to France has been leading a high-profile public relations campaign in recent weeks to vaunt the country's success in largely quelling the coronavirus while criticising the handling of the crisis by Western countries.
On Sunday, the Chinese embassy published on its website a long text titled Restoring Distorted Facts - Observations Of A Chinese Diplomat Posted To Paris.
The diplomat, who was not named in the text, sharply criticised the Western response to the coronavirus outbreak as laggardly.
But most pointedly, the diplomat accused workers at nursing homes in France of "abandoning their posts overnight... and leaving their residents to die of hunger and disease", AFP said.
That comment sparked fury across the political spectrum, with people leaping to the defence of nursing home workers.
The row comes as another Chinese envoy and the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka had their Twitter accounts suspended.
According to China's state-owned Global Times, the Twitter accounts of Chinese Ambassador to Cyprus Huang Xingyuan and the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka were suspended without any specific reason.
Mr Huang told the Global Times on Tuesday that "suspending accounts just for their different voices is a face-slapping act in a country boasting for 'democracy' and 'freedom of speech', and exposes the US' narrow mindset and lack of confidence".
According to the Global Times, Mr Huang had opened his account last month and it quickly proved popular.
The account of the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka was restored after it made representations to the platform, the embassy said in a statement on its Twitter account on Tuesday.
"The embassy made solemn representation to Twitter twice, requesting to clarify and correct their decision. This morning, Twitter replied for a 'systematic mistake', apologised and unsuspended our account."
The embassy added in its statement: "Freedom of speech must be honoured, while not be misused to spread groundless, racist or hate speech, nor be treated with 'double standards'."
