SteveMedina said:
One Belt One Road. Don't forget chartered corporate flights. Private Jets.
Estimated 300,000 Chinese workers in and out of Italy.
Steve, this is a theory funneling around largely right wing political commentary outlets and their followers. Very little attempts of providing evidence has been presented and much of the evidence offered, such as all these flights, are simply untrue.
There's, by best count, maybe about 400,000-500,000 overseas Chinese and people of Chinese descent in Italy. That's less than both the United Kingdom and France, by the way. Its maybe 2/3rds of 1% of the Italian population. For comparison's sake, the Chinese population makes up about 1.5% of the United States population.
A lot of people have made a big deal about all the Chinese workers supporting the garment industry. One problem with that is most of that is in Tuscany. More specifically, in and around Prato which is
not in the northern epicenter of the outbreak.
The OBOR theory originated, as far I can tell, with the Helen Raleigh article on the far right Federalist e-magazine. Raleigh is a financial advisor in Colorado with very, very strong opinions about China. It was an opportunistic hit piece. There is a lot about OBOR to be concerned about, but it was a garbage article.
It is true that Italy has economic strengthened ties to China via the OBOR initiative. Nevertheless, China has significantly more investment in a number of other European countries, and countries around the world.
The bottom line is if we're tying this to Chinese immigrants and economic ties, then a number of other places in the world, including west coast cities such as San Francisco (which had a non-stop flight to Wuhan, by the way), should be absolute **** shows.The rest of Asia should be devastated.
Northern Italy was an unfortunate perfect storm of domestic factors. There was a densely populated, ageing, social society in the middle of winter. They didn't respond well, and you saw what happened. Other places will likely get there, too, sadly enough.
