BUSINESS INSIDER – Images on social media posted by two official Chinese government accounts have drawn rebuke for appearing to mock India’s catastrophic battle with COVID-19.
An account linked to the ruling Communist Party posted an image on Saturday contrasting the country’s successful launch of its Tianhe module into space with lines of burning cremation pyres in India.
The image, posted by the government’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission on its Weibo account, was captioned “China lighting a fire versus India lighting a fire.” It carried a hashtag noting India’s coronavirus cases had topped 400,000 a day. Multiple other government accounts run by the police and law enforcement agencies shared the image too, CNN reported.
The official account of China’s Ministry of Public Security posted a separate image on Friday that compared the country’s “fire god mountain” — the name of its makeshift hospital built to combat COVID-19 in Wuhan — with another mass cremation in India, according to Bloomberg. Some social media users reportedly commented saying the posts were “morally problematic.”
Both posts were deleted after many Chinese Weibo users expressed anger at the insensitivity expressed …
India reported more than 300,000 new COVID-19 cases for a twelfth straight day on Monday, taking its total caseload to near 20 million. Fatalities rose by 3,417 to more than 215,000, but medical experts believe the number could be five to 10 times higher than the official tally. Click here to read more.
