Actor and WWE star John Cena apologized on Chinese social media on Tuesday for having referred to Taiwan as a “country” in recent remarks that he made to promote “Fast & Furious 9.”
“On May 8, TVBS released a video of Cena excitedly promoting the film ‘Fast & Furious 9’ in Mandarin for Taiwanese audiences,” Taiwan News reported. “In the video, Cena emphasized that ‘Taiwan will be the first country to see Fast & Furious 9,’ and speaking to Taiwanese viewers, he reiterated, ‘You are the first to see this movie.'”
Online backlash ensued and Cena rushed to apologize to communist China for offending them. According to the South China Morning Post, Cena said:
Hi China, I’m John Cena. I’m in the middle of Fast and Furious 9 promotions. I’m doing a lot of interviews. I made a mistake in one of my interviews. Everyone was asking me if I could use Chinese – [movie] staff gave me a lot of information, so there was a lot of interviews and information.
I made one mistake. I have to say something very, very, very important now. I love and respect China and Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry about my mistake. I apologize, I apologize, I’m very sorry. You must understand that I really love, really respect China and the Chinese people. My apologies. See you.
John Cena apologized in Chinese on Sina Weibo after calling Taiwan a country during an interview promoting Fast & Furious 9 pic.twitter.com/dzRKIYgEzL
— Joe Yizhou Xu, PhD (@JoeXu) May 24, 2021
Cena’s remarks that he “really loves” and “really respects” China comes as the world is still recovering from the worst pandemic in more than a century that erupted in Wuhan, China, and that more and more experts and scientists are beginning to believe likely came from a Chinese lab.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, some of the actions taken by the Chinese communist government to hide the truth about the coronavirus pandemic that started in their country include:
- Silenced doctors and journalists that tried to alert the world to the pandemic.
- Shut down the Shanghai laboratory where the coronavirus genome was first shared with the world.
- Repeatedly lied that the coronavirus was not transmissible from person-to-person. This includes lying to World Health Organization on January 14 when it claimed that the coronavirus could not be spread from person-to-person when it had evidence that it could back in December.
- Threatened numerous nations that have been critical of its propaganda campaign and who have called for international investigations into China.
- Clamped down on allowing any coronavirus research from being made public.
- Spread false information in the U.S. that was intended to cause panic inside the U.S.
- Repeatedly lied about the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in their country, according to top U.S. intelligence officials, estimates from top think tanks, and other foreign governments including China’s own allies. China also has a history of lying about the extent of outbreaks that originate in their country. U.S. officials say that China did this because it bought them time to hoard medical supplies from around the world, which is a well documented fact. China also reportedly blocked U.S. companies that manufacture in China from shipping medical supplies outside of China. China then shipped faulty medical supplies all over the world.
- Refused to allow CDC and WHO officials into China for months to learn about the coronavirus and to help contain the outbreak.
- The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance — which is comprised of intelligence agencies from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand — concluded in a research document that China engaged in “the suppression and destruction of evidence” and pointed to “virus samples ordered destroyed at genomics labs, wildlife market stalls bleached, the genome sequence not shared publicly, the Shanghai lab closure for ‘rectification’, academic articles subjected to prior review by the Ministry of Science and Technology and data on asymptomatic ‘silent carriers’ kept secret”.
- Have falsely claimed that the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to Wuhan.
The Daily Wire additionally reported:
U.S. officials have indicated that they believe that China “intentionally” underreported their true numbers “by at least a factor of 50.” British officials reportedly told Prime Minister Boris Johnson early in the pandemic that China could have underreported their numbers “by a factor of 15 to 40 times.” The Washington Post reported in April that “evidence” coming out of Wuhan suggested that the real death count was over 40,000, which comes as China still claims that it only has a little over 4,600 deaths total nationwide. A conservative estimate in April from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — which gave China every benefit of the doubt when coming up with their calculations, and then some — suggested that China severely and “deliberately” underreported their numbers and that China’s true numbers at the time had to be at least 2.9 million infections with well over 100,000 deaths.
Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in December that the Chinese Communist Party, when they knew about the coronavirus’s transmissibility, “allowed it to go from China to the rest of the world.”
“They intentionally and deliberately downplayed it in their country, pressured World Health Organizations, and allowed it to spread to the rest of the world,” Ratcliffe added. “And that didn’t just have the effect of wrecking the global economy. It didn’t just have the effect of killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. It also had grave political consequences.”