NEW DELHI/BERLIN: The Coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan city of central China last December, continues to wreak havoc across the world affecting millions of people. However, experts believe that since the very beginning, the mainland has been hiding facts regarding pandemic outbreak and now shielding its premier Xi Jinping from global criticism.

Dr Suvrokamal Dutta, a political and foreign policy expert, who is also an external advisor with PV Savani University, Surat, told ANI, "Had China warned the world beforehand, perhaps the situation today would have been different across the world."

Over 2.3 million people in some 210 countries are corona positive, while over 1 lakh others have succumbed to the deadly infection.

"Several suspicions have been raised against China in relation to this dreaded virus across the globe which are not just assumptions but have substance behind it. Now that China is getting cornered due to the outrage, it is quite obvious that the Chinese administration is trying to save its president and make small leaders at local level scapegoats in the process which it has already started," the analyst said.

He added, "This is being done with a two-pronged strategy; one by shielding the Chinese president from global criticisms and, 2; by deflecting the blame game on China at the global level. In this mission, the mainland has been using the western press as a soft toy."

Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of BILD, a German Newspaper, responding to the Jinping's response over the contagion spread, said, "You (Xi Jinping), your government and your scientists had known that the virus is highly infectious. But you still left the world in absolute darkness about it."

Raising questions, Reichelt wrote, "You have created an inscrutable and non-transparent China. China was known as a surveillance state and is now using it to infect the world with the deadly disease. That is your political legacy."

Earlier, western experts had warned that the administration in the mainland is trying to absolve Jinping by using a section of the western media to influence public opinion globally.

"There are clear indications that China is conducting activities in a persistent and systematic manner to influence public opinion-making, academia, think tanks and political decision-making among the member states of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in general and western capital cities in particular," Siegfried O Wolf, Director of Research at Brussels-based think tank South Asia Democratic Front, told ANI.