Coronavirus: The Chinese Communist Party should not be forgiven
From a complacent pre-virus fairy tale, we are now very much in the midst of a nightmare. But there is a definite intellectual upside to crises, for they clarify reality wonderfully.
In this column in January, I baldly and rightly forecasted that the coming year would see the emergence of a Sino-American Cold War as the defining characteristic of our new era. What we did not know, could not know, was that it would take a global pandemic (of all things) to make this crystal clear.
For we now know in detail that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wilfully withheld evidence about the scope, extent, and ease of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus. If the Chinese government were a person, a jury would be hard pushed not to deliver a guilty verdict for at least manslaughter.
Once it became apparent to the CCP that the coronavirus was a plague visited upon it, all the subsequent actions of the leadership have only one real explanation. ‘If we are going to take a massive hit from this virus, to save our geopolitical position, so must the rest of the world. We will take the world down with us.’
And so they did.
This purposive strategy was propagated by obfuscating, delaying the dissemination of accurate information about the virus (through the use of useful idiots like the World Health Organisation). A University of Southampton study estimates that 95% of global cases could have been avoided if Beijing had come clean just three weeks before they finally did on January 20th.
In December 2019, when the now martyred Dr. Li Wenliang and his medical colleagues first raised the alarm about the coronavirus, the Party—in typical autocratic mode—is believed to have censored the emerging facts and repressed the whistle-blowers, forcing them to ‘confess’ to anti-social behaviour. In doing so they lost a precious month when they could have alerted the world to the impending danger.
Likewise, Taiwanese officials warned the WHO on December 31st that they had seen evidence that the virus could be transmitted human-to-human. Despite this, entirely in the pocket of Beijing, on January 14th, the WHO parroted, ‘Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities found no clear evidence of human to human transmission.’ It took the agency another critical week to correct this falsehood.
We now know that there were at least 104 confirmed cases of the coronavirus at its epicentre, Wuhan, on December 31, 2019, along with 15 deaths. Yet as late as January 20th, the CCP was falsely insisting that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, despite obviously knowing better.
The leadership in Beijing were being no more forthcoming with its own people than it was with the outside world. On January 18th, despite the great danger, the dictatorship allowed a large public festival in Wuhan to go ahead, with tens of thousands of people attending. Obviously, keeping the virus secret from the world was more important than the lives of its own citizens.
After finally admitting the extent of the virus on January 20th, the CCP now used it as a biological weapon. On January 23rd, Paramount Leader Xi Jinping locked down all traffic in Hubei province, the centre of the plague, to the rest of his country, even as he allowed planes to fly to the rest of the world, infecting it. After this wickedness, a global pandemic was inevitable.
Even after coming clean about the virus’ existence, the Chinese obfuscated its extent. The basic criteria the Chinese used in assessing how many people contracted the virus has changed constantly, as many as eight times.
While Chinese authorities assert that 3200 of their people have died due to the plague, locals estimate the genuine number is more like 42,000. Just last week, the CCP grudgingly admitted that their fatality numbers were off by fully 1290, a rise of 50%. Indeed, MI6 is understood to have told the British government that China was significantly underreporting both the number of cases and the death toll in both January and February of this year.
We in the West cannot simply pretend none of these inconvenient facts matter; we must not return to normal. Normal meant the West viewed China as a friendly competitor, a status quo power, an integral part of the Chimerica duopoly that would provide global governance for the rest of the world in our new era. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s naïve intent to ‘do a deep dive’ into the UK’s relationship with China seems a quaint relic of a more innocent age.
After the mountain of evidence of Beijing’s callous duplicity in encouraging the spread of the virus, anyone still believing this is either blind, a tool of Chinese economic might, or living on another planet. China knows it is in a strategic battle with the West; it is time we realised this basic realist fact, too. A good place to start is for the UK to immediately reconsider its disastrous decision to include the Chinese state-sponsored multinational Huawei in developing its 5G network. The world is now simply too serious a place, due to China’s behaviour, for such wishful thinking.
Dr. John C. Hulsman is senior columnist at CityAM, a life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and president of John C. Hulsman Enterprises. He can be reached for corporate speaking and private briefings at https://www.chartwellspeakers.com.