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China Is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World
Beijing is successfully dodging culpability for its role in spreading the coronavirus.
The different coronavirus families living in bats were provided their own classification (Group 2b) in 2007 and were known to cause acute intestinal and respiratory distress. A 2019 Chinese scientific paper offered greater detail. Despite the warnings, Beijing refused to close China's "wet markets" which feature live animals for sale/slaughter in bazaars. In early/mid December 2019 Beijing arrested and muzzled Chinese scientists and doctors who attempted to warn the world of the danger of the Wuhan coronavirus. If Beijing would have been honest and forthright from the very beginning; sharing the genome, closing its borders, and allowing foreign specialists to visit Wuhan, the world would have had seven additional weeks to prepare for COVID-19. Beijing's behaviors can accurately be called a crime against humanity.
Beijing is successfully dodging culpability for its role in spreading the coronavirus.
3/19/20
The evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a matter of public record. In suppressing information about the virus, doing little to contain it, and allowing it to spread unchecked in the crucial early days and weeks, the regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks. More perniciously, the Chinese government censored and detained those brave doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm and warn their fellow citizens when they understood the gravity of what was to come. China has a history of mishandling outbreaks, including SARS in 2002 and 2003. But Chinese leaders’ negligence in December and January—for well over a month after the first outbreak in Wuhan—far surpasses those bungled responses. The end of last year was the time for authorities to act, and, as Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times has noted, “act decisively they did—not against the virus, but against whistle-blowers who were trying to call attention to the public health threat.” This is what allowed the virus to spread across the globe. Because the Chinese Communist Party was pretending that there was little to be concerned about, Wuhan was a porous purveyor of the virus. The government only instituted a lockdown in Wuhan on January 23—seven weeks after the virus first appeared. As events in Italy, the United States, Spain, and France have shown, quite a lot can happen in a week, much less seven. By then, mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted that more than 5 million people had already left Wuhan.
But is this a time for blame? Yes, it is. Accounting for responsibility when a disaster happens—particularly one likely to devastate entire countries, leaving thousands dead—is not beside the point, particularly as Chinese officials move to take advantage of the crisis and launch a disinformation campaign claiming that the U.S. Army introduced the virus. Of course, Americans will have to be vigilant against scapegoating Asians in general or the Chinese people in particular. With one of the highest infection rates and death tolls, Chinese citizens have suffered enough. The Chinese leadership, however, is another matter. Those American critics who raise the racism canard are themselves inadvertently collapsing the distinctions between an authoritarian regime and those who live under it. Too many also seem comfortable drawing moral equivalencies between the Chinese regime and Donald Trump. This attitude is hard to take seriously. Trump didn’t block the media from reporting on the coronavirus; he did not disappear his critics. The nature of a regime matters. And this is why I, for one, am glad to live in a democracy, however flawed, in this time of unprecedented crisis. After the crisis, whenever after is, the relationship with China cannot and should not go back to normal. Nothing, in any case, will go back to normal after the sheer scale of destruction becomes clear. Of course, the rest of the world will have to live with the Chinese leadership as long as it remains in power. But this pandemic should, finally, disabuse us of any remaining hope that the Chinese regime could be a responsible global actor. It is not, and it will not become one.
The different coronavirus families living in bats were provided their own classification (Group 2b) in 2007 and were known to cause acute intestinal and respiratory distress. A 2019 Chinese scientific paper offered greater detail. Despite the warnings, Beijing refused to close China's "wet markets" which feature live animals for sale/slaughter in bazaars. In early/mid December 2019 Beijing arrested and muzzled Chinese scientists and doctors who attempted to warn the world of the danger of the Wuhan coronavirus. If Beijing would have been honest and forthright from the very beginning; sharing the genome, closing its borders, and allowing foreign specialists to visit Wuhan, the world would have had seven additional weeks to prepare for COVID-19. Beijing's behaviors can accurately be called a crime against humanity.