Thursday, April 30, 2020

China must be held to account


(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, April 29.)

When – or should that be if? – the world gets on top of the Covid-19 pandemic, attention must turn to the issue of Chinese culpability.

In an ideal world, President Xi Jinping and the government of the People’s Republic of China would be presented with a bill for reparations, but that’s not going to happen. No amount would be big enough to atone for the massive economic and social harm done internationally, and China wouldn’t pay anyway.

Nonetheless, China – or more specifically the Chinese Communist Party, since the Chinese people are blameless – must be held to account. Beijing must be made to realise there are consequences for allowing the coronavirus to leak across China’s borders and for silencing courageous people who tried to alert the world to the looming catastrophe.

The first of those consequences is the loss of trust. The world must now see that the image China has assiduously cultivated over several decades – that of a benign emerging power willing to play by the rules – is a sham. To put things bluntly, China has played us for suckers.

Chinese culpability for Covid-19 starts with its tolerance of “wet” markets, where captive live wild animals are a potential breeding ground for lethal diseases.

At a stretch, wet markets – cruel and unhygienic though they are – might be condoned on the basis that they’re a long-standing cultural practice. But nothing could excuse China’s failure to warn the World Health Organisation about the disease, as it was obliged to do, or its punishment of whistle-blowers.

In the meantime, travellers were allowed to carry the contagion around the globe. If China’s aim was to cripple Western economies, it couldn’t have done a better job. Just saying.

And it wasn’t the first such time. In 2002, China allowed vital weeks to pass before notifying the WHO of the Sars pandemic.  As with Covid-19, the communist regime’s obsession with secrecy and self-protection outweighed its concern for even its own citizens, who were kept in the dark.

Countries that have previously courted Chinese favour, including New Zealand, should now be appraising their relationships with Beijing in a much more critical light.

Not only has China revealed itself to be untrustworthy, but its aggressive global ambitions can no longer be disguised or ignored. These are most apparent in the South China Sea, where China has put military installations on artificial islands, originally created for supposedly peaceful purposes amid strategic shipping lanes.

In a recent discussion on America’s National Public Radio, US foreign policy specialist Michele Flournoy, who’s tipped as a possible Secretary of State in the unlikely event that Joe Biden wins the presidency, said China for decades had pursued a policy of “hide and bide” – hiding its real agenda while waiting for the right time to drop its mask, as she put it.

Xi’s ascendancy to the Chinese leadership was the moment the mask fell, Flournoy said. To which she might have added that the coronavirus pandemic was the moment the West took off its blinkers and realised that China is interested in behaving as a good international citizen only when it suits it to do so. 

Meanwhile, China’s ascendancy continues. In trade, it’s using the so-called Belt and Road Initiative to extend its economic influence over a large swathe of the globe. Less conspicuously, and by means that are often incompatible with the way things should be done in transparent democracies, it is exploiting political, diplomatic, business, academic and cultural channels to acquire influence in other countries’ affairs – a trend highlighted by Professor Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University, a courageous lone voice on Chinese interference.

Regrettably, there seems to be no shortage of high-profile New Zealanders happy to be schmoozed by Beijing. John Key had an audience last year with Xi, who said he hoped the former prime minister would continue to enhance the friendship between the two countries. The state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Key as praising Xi for his “vision and leadership”. All very chummy.

Another former prime minister, Jenny Shipley, served until last year (when she was implicated in the disastrous collapse of Mainzeal, of which she was a director) on the board of the state-controlled China Construction Bank, one of the world’s biggest financial institutions. 

New Zealand, like many countries, has allowed itself to become economically reliant on China and cannot easily disentangle itself.

Even America took a fatally complacent view of Chinese expansionism, allowing China to steal millions of manufacturing jobs and build a vast technology sector based largely on American innovation.

Chanting the mantra of globalisation, Western leaders encouraged China to take an active role in world trade. America even sponsored China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation. 

Successive US administrations, both Republican and Democrat, thought that if China was opened up to the world, the country’s leaders would reciprocate by playing a responsible part in international affairs, just as Germany and Japan did after America aided their revival following World War II.
 
In hindsight, it now looks a bit naïve. But to use an epidemiological metaphor, the lessons of the past few months may at least serve to inoculate the world against future delusions about China’s trustworthiness.

7 comments:

Scott said...

United States Sen Tom Cotton on Sunday morning futures on Fox News alleged that China deliberately allowed their infected people to travel overseas. Sen Cotton alleges that China deliberately spread the pandemic. They did this because they knew that their economy was going to go down and if they were going to go down, they were gonna take the rest of the world with it. So this was a calculation based on the status of China and their place in the world economy. If this is true then this was tantamount to an act of war by China.
What we can say is that this virus came from China and that China allowed their people to go overseas thereby spreading the virus to the whole world.
What we know is that many countries are reliant on Chinese manufacture of PPE and pharmaceuticals.

We should drastically re-examine our relationship with China and hold them accountable. One way to do this is to call this thing the China virus instead of studiously avoiding any reference to China with the name. We have the Spanish flu, we have the German measles, why not the China virus?
Unfortunately our government appears to have no inkling of holding China to account. As you have rightly pointed out, the political elites of our country, both right and left, appear to be totally sold out to China. This is a huge mistake.

Simon Cohen said...

Hi Scott.Welcome to the world of spreading fake news.If you believe Tom Cotton you are a seriously self deluded person.
Trump shut down any Chinese entering the US on 31st of January.He did not stop US citizens returning from China.Estimates put this at 600,000+.
So WTF caused its entry into the US.Exactly the same as here in NZ when Adern refused to quarantine all returning NZers.

Trev1 said...

A strong case can be mounted that China not only engaged in a cover-up but also allowed and even facilitated the spread of the disease globally to ensure it was not left at a strategic disadvantage. The first case was diagnosed on 1 December 2019 according to the Lancet and many new cases quickly followed leading to the major epidemic in Wuhan. Yet China was telling the WHO in mid January that the disease could not be passed between humans and the WHO without questioning duly repeated this advice to the world. China allowed thousands of its people including from Wuhan to travel around the world including to northern Italy where there are many Chinese clothing factories and to the US (some 430,000 between 1 December 2019 and 31 January 2020) until Donald Trump shut down travel to the US from China. When New Zealand followed Australia's lead and shut down travel from China in February the Chinese Ambassador protested vigorously - no doubt she had our best interests at heart!

We need to take stock of the relationship as a matter of priority. We have allowed ourselves to become far too dependent. We must bring home our manufacturing and diversify our markets. We must identify and expunge Chinese Communist Party influence in our political system which has become a grave threat to our sovereignty. If that means the much vaunted FTA is torn up, it was a seriously unequal treaty for New Zealand in any case which Winston Peters was right to oppose back in 2008. These things will only happen if the public brings massive pressure to bear on the political establishment.

Trev1 said...

@ Scott. Not only are many countries reliant on China for the manufacture of PPE but in January and February this year Chinese organisations were hoovering up PPE supplies in hardware stores and pharmacies, particularly facemasks and sanitiser, both in New Zealand and Australia for sending back to China. While some were apparently keen to make a quick buck on Chinese auction sites others were doing it at the behest of Beijing.

Daz said...

So one question, if as you correctly state the issue is with the CCP then there is nothing the average citizen can do that doesn’t harm themselves as much as it does “China”. Do I stop by from AliExpress or not? Should I?

Odysseus said...

But according to the NZ media it's all Donald Trump's fault?

Brendan McNeill said...

Seems the French built the Chinese the P4 virus Lab at Wuhan expecting to engage in a joint venture 50/50 with Chinese scientists. Apparently this relationship abruptly ended when the Lab was completed. It is now in full use, but has never been certified as 'safe'.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/how-france-helped-build-chinese-biolab-linked-to-covid-19-and-then-got-burned-by-the-communists