Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has said he will donate one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits to the US.
In Twitter and Weibo posts, the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma said he has sourced one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits that he will donate to the US and are ready to be delivered.
Ma said: "Drawing from my own country's experience, speedy and accurate testing and adequate personal protective equipment for medical professionals are most effective in preventing the spread of the virus."
"We hope that our donation can help Americans fight against the pandemic!" he added.
Ma's statement came several hours after US President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to free up $50 billion in federal resources to address the coronavirus outbreak amidst criticism that the government was too slow to test and respond to the disease.
According to his Weibo posts, Ma has donated one million masks to Japan as of March 2 and had been attempting to ship one million masks to Iran as of March 6. On March 11, he posted that 1.8 million masks and 100,000 testing kits would go to Europe, with the first batch arriving in Belgium this week.
Christina Xu, a ethnographer who studies tech adoption and internet culture in the US and China, tweeted: "This is an A+++ passive aggressive Chinese flex that will come up at least 2x every conversation with an uncle from now on, but we will take what we can get!"
As the spread of the coronavirus slowed down dramatically in China, the Chinese Communist Party argued that people should be more thankful for how it handled the outbreak.
In addition, Wang Zhonglin, the party chief of Wuhan, said it was necessary "to carry out gratitude education among the citizens of the whole city, so that they thank (President Xi Jinping)."
