UK's Dominic Raab And France's Emmanuel Macron To Cut Ties With China After Coronavirus Mishandling?

China is likely to suffer strained relations with France, Britain and a volley of other developed countries, owing to its muddled approach and handling of the global health crisis.

While things are yet to settle with regards to the COVID-19 outbreak, Britain’s foreign secretary and acting leader Dominic Raab maintained that it won’t be “business as usual” with China even when the pandemic is over.

Implying how there were “hard questions” to be answered by China, the acting leader asserted that there is a need for a deeper probe into myriad events—including the outbreak of the virus. “There’s no doubt we can’t have business as usual after this crisis,” Raab said to a media outlet. “We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it could have been stopped earlier,” he added.

Raab’s stance has been supported by several senior members - William Haag, a former Tory leader stressed the need to break away from bigger ties with China, as the country doesn’t “play by our rules.” The British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee also accused China of presenting a distorted picture of the novel coronavirus outbreak—putting millions of British lives at risk.

Lawmakers alleged that China put out obscure claims denying where the outbreak began instead of using the time to collect relevant information in order to mitigate the viral spread.

The latest reports record that China’s economy shrank for the first time in decades owing to the coronavirus outbreak. The GDP contraction is likely to result in massive lay-offs and bankruptcies across small-scale industries.

Thinking along similar lines, France’s Present Emmanuel Macron asserted that there were “grey areas” to the sequences of the events and mentioned about there being things that “happened that we don’t know about” in an interview with the Financial Times that was run on Thursday, April 16. Making it certain that the world leaders aren’t going to take things in a superficial manner as far as China’s management of the pandemic is concerned, he said, “Let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this. We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.”