The Chinese government has been playing the West for fools. First, they plundered all our personal protective equipment items, knowing full well we were going to need them. Then they turned around and offered to send us PPE. But wait. Not the PPE they plundered from us, the crappy stuff they made themselves. Andrew Green from Australia’s ABC explains.
Authorities have begun seizing Chinese-made faulty face masks and other protective clothing that is being exported to Australia to help halt the spread of coronavirus.
The ABC has learnt that in recent weeks, Australian Border Force (ABF) officers have intercepted several deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE) that have been found to be counterfeit or otherwise faulty.
One law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, estimated the ABF had already seized 800,000 masks with a combined value of more than $1.2 million on the Australian market.
“We started seeing this stuff arriving roughly three weeks ago when news of the pandemic was really taking off,” the official told the ABC.
[…]Several European governments have rejected Chinese-made equipment designed to combat the coronavirus outbreak in recent days.
Thousands of testing kits and medical masks are below standard or defective, according to authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands.
As anyone who has bought junk from a $2 shop or from an online Chinese retailer knows, stuff made by Chinese companies is crap. The reasons for this are many but not least is that fact the China is a totalitarian communist country and the Chinese government has its tentacles in everything. There’s simply no incentive for a Chinese company to do things like quality control or obey pesky copyright and patent laws, especially if that means some Party official having less money in his pocket.
The Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 face masks on March 28.
The equipment arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on March 21 and had already been distributed to frontline medical teams.
Dutch officials said the masks did not fit and their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate.
The Chinese government must be made to pay for all of this. One thing is for sure though; COVID-19 is the longest anything made in China has ever lasted.