The Chinese Communist regime continues its push against free press/reporters, with the regime expelling the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post in a back/forth with the United States over the presence of foreign reporters:

China banned all American nationals working in the country for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, as part of an escalating media war with the United States that follows restrictions placed by the Trump administration on Chinese media companies operating in the U.S., its foreign ministry announced Tuesday.

“The U.S. government has placed unwarranted restrictions on Chinese media agencies and personnel in the U.S., purposely made things difficult for their normal reporting assignments, and subjected them to growing discrimination and politically-motivated oppression,” the ministry said in a statement, published in English. …

The U.S. move in March came in the wake of a decision in late February by authorities in Beijing to revoke the press credentials and order the expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters in retaliation for a headline on an opinion column about the coronavirus outbreak that China said was racist. That Feb. 3 column was written by Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College. It argued that “Chinese authorities are still trying to conceal the true scale of the problem” of the virus that has now sickened more than 170,000 people and killed more than 7,000 worldwide. “China’s initial response to the crisis was less than impressive,” Mead wrote, an assessment that China has now accepted.

China’s move in February, in turn, came a day after the Trump administration said it would begin treating five major Chinese state-run media entities with U.S. operations – Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily and Hai Tian Development – as foreign embassies. These media companies are now required to register their employees and U.S. property with the U.S. State Department. A similar U.S. Justice Department measure is in place for some Russian state-backed media working in the U.S. such as Russia Today, an English-language TV network. …

“The Chinese government’s decision is particularly regrettable because it comes in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis, when clear and reliable information about the international response to covid-19 is essential,” he said in a tweet.

Fascinating to watch the Chinese Communists co-opt the language of the woke activists by learning to denounce even mild criticism of the regime as “racist”. It’s possible that the global impact of this virus may take more lives and hit the global economy harder than something like the Chernobyl disaster. And China would have us believe that any criticism of their slowness in response or of their allies for parroting falsehoods through the WHO and others that everything would be fine, etc. is racist. Regimes like this are hurt more by laughter than argument, and laughter is precisely what Beijing deserves for its posturing through this crisis.

This is a regime that is allowing no international investigators into Wuhan, tolerates no serious investigative reporting from either domestic or international reporters, and calls an opinion column racist for noting its incompetence. Literally laughable, if it weren’t for the very real body count it continues to produce.