EU-China: Drop the Masks, Back to Real Diplomacy. Egmont Commentary 8 January 2021.

Diplomacy in 2020 was mostly about shifting the blame and creating distraction. China’s “mask diplomacy” sought to portray the People’s Republic as benign and effective. The world and, more importantly, its own citizens were to forget its careless disregard for human life and its initial obfuscation of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. Russia too engaged in “mask diplomacy” at first (and the usual disinformation) before discovering that a pandemic is a symmetric crisis: it spares nobody