More than 35,000 people were killed by a strong earthquake, of magnitude 7.8, in Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023. Many buildings collapsed due to the tremors, but ten days later the bridge of the strait of the Dardanelles is still standing. The Chinese Embassy in France says it’s thanks to her. But this is completely false.
The Chinese Embassy touts “China Tech”…
In a tweet published on Monday and deleted today but which can be traced in the Internet archives, the Chinese Embassy in France wrote that “The bridge built by China in Turkey withstood the earthquake” and added the hashtag “ChinaTech”, to tout Chinese technology. The text is accompanied by a video showing the different stages of construction of the building.
At the same time, an article was published on its website, which assures that the building was “built in partnership with the Chinese company Sichuan Lu Qiao” and that he “was able to withstand this severe test thanks to its earthquake-resistant design as well as its quality of construction”. This article has also since been deleted but has also been saved to the net archives.
… but the bridge is not Chinese and it was not threatened
So of course, the bridge shown in the video does indeed exist – it connects Europe and Asia by passing over the Dardanelles Strait – but in truth no Chinese company has been involved. According to Structurae.net, an international database for bridge and civil engineers, the plans for the building were drawn by the Turkish company Tekfen Insaat Ve Tesisat AS, the Danish consulting firm Cowi studied their feasibility, and four construction companies have joined forces to build the bridge: Turkey’s Limak and Yapi Merkezi and South Korea’s DL E&C and SK ecoplant, as indicated on the bridge’s website. The pavement joints were made by the German-American company Maurer.
The second false information, in the tweet from the Chinese embassy, concerns the risks that the bridge incurred. It is more than 1,000 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter and hundreds of kilometers from the last areas that were affected by the tremors. Too far, so he didn’t have to “resist” to the earthquake.
The Chinese Embassy in France finally took down his tweet and unpublished his article after a few hours.
A customary embassy of false information
This is far from the first time that the Chinese Embassy in France has been pinned down for spreading false information. It has been several times during the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular. Ambassador Lu Shaye was even summoned by Jean-Yves Le Drian in April 2020, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs, to respond to insults against an independent researcher and French parliamentarians who criticized the Beijing’s handling of the virus.
In an article published on its website in April 2020 – also since deleted but whose traces have been found – titled “Restore the distorted facts”the embassy asserted that China was “victorious exit from its fight against the epidemic” but that “media who take themselves for paragons of impartiality and objectivity, experts and politicians from certain Western countries [semblaient] more concerned with slandering, stigmatizing and attacking China” saying she was lying.
The Chinese embassy has also already published anti-Semitic and conspiratorial tweets, before saying, once, that its account had been hacked, as franceinfo already explained to you in May 2020. The embassy also permanently denies that Uyghurs were sent en masse to re-education camps in China, despite the evidence.
All of these tweets serve to spread Beijing’s propaganda and fuel China’s communications war against the West on social media.