[Breitbart] The coronavirus pandemic took nearly two million lives worldwide and caused unprecedented economic devastation this year, but 2020 had at least three big winners who came out stronger in spite of — or perhaps because of — the pandemic: the world’s billionaires, Silicon Valley’s tech lords, and communist China, where the virus originated.COMMUNIST CHINA
China’s communist regime is sounding increasingly triumphalist in the wake of the economic destruction wreaked by the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and could have been prevented by Beijing. China’s communist dictator Xi Jinping boasted in his New Year’s Eve address that China is "the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth" in 2020, while the rest of the world’s economy shrank.
"China’s economy is projected to grow by 2% in 2020 and by another 8.4% in 2021. By the end of next year, its economy is expected to be 10.6% larger than it was at the beginning of this year," Axios reports. "By contrast, after shrinking by 3.6% this year and growing by a projected 4% next year, the U.S. economy is going to end 2021 just 0.25% larger than it was at the beginning of 2020."
Much of this is due to China’s dominance of global manufacturing; and with the whole world still reeling from the pandemic, China is moving to solidify its monopoly on the world’s supply chains through expanded free trade agreements, including a new agreement with the European Union. The pandemic’s economic damage has also allowed China to buy influence in the Third World through its international infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. government has criticized as imperialist colonization via a predatory debt scheme.
As Breitbart’s Frances Martel reported: