Chinese state officials have repeatedly urged global leaders to make positive statements about China in return for medical supplies, Axios reported Wednesday.

Nations which have received supplies and praised leader Xi Jinping’s communist regime include Serbia, Italy, Mexico, Poland and others. German newspaper Die Welt Am Sonntag has also reported that Chinese officials approached the country’s leaders with a similar offer.

The European Union allowed the Chinese government to censor part of an op-ed by the EU ambassador to China that was published in a state newspaper, China Daily.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) insisted on censoring an op-ed by the EU ambassador to China to remove a reference to COVID-19 originating in China, an EU spokesman said Wednesday, adding that the EU acquiesced to the censorship rather than withdrawing the op-ed.

The EU’s ambassador to China and the ambassadors of the 27 EU member states co-authored a China Daily op-ed touting the EU’s relationship to China.

The original version of the op-ed, which was published on the EU’s website, shows that the offending passage read “the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world,” before it was removed.