Coronavirus: Truth, lies and consequences of COVID-19 pandemic
Coronavirus has caused chaos around the world and no one knows what the next wave of news will bring. And now China is playing a dangerous propaganda game as it seeks to avoid responsibility for the crisis, writes James Morrow.
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So, who’s going to pay for all this?
That’s the trillion-dollar question swirling around the globe as reserve banks fire money into their economies, countless millions of people hole up in varying degrees of isolation and quarantine, and the world comes to a standstill waiting for a cure or vaccine or some hopeful glimmer of a return to normality.
The impact goes way beyond the financial.
Around the planet careers are being shattered, businesses — particularly — are crashing out, educations are being delayed, lives are being put on hold, and no one knows what the next wave of news will bring.
And, tragically, more than 10,000 people have died, with an unknown number more potentially infected.
Not surprising then that as doctors are coping with tsunamis of patients or preparing for waves yet to arrive, lawyers and lawmakers are beginning to ask whether or not there is some way to make the Chinese government pay a price for mismanaging the coronavirus crisis and letting it be loosed upon the world.
In the US state of Florida the Berman Law Group has put in motion a class-action lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China, alleging the Chinese government “knew that COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up for their own economic self-interest.”
Speaking on Fox News this week, Indiana congressman Jim Banks said the US needed to “hold China accountable for their bad behaviour”, suggesting that “we need to start by forcing China to pay the burden and the cost incurred on the United States of America due to the coronavirus”.
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Experts are divided on whether such pushes have any chance of success but it signals a new phase in the coronavirus crisis in which the People’s Republic of China furiously attempts to rewrite history to portray itself as the hero of this story, rather than an institution whose baked-in recklessness has brought the world to a halt.
MADE IN CHINA
While there are a number of theories about how specifically the virus came to be, most leading experts believe the virus emerged from one of Wuhan’s so-called “wet markets” where exotic wildlife including pangolins are sold and slaughtered for human consumption — activity which has caused this sort of problem before.
After the 2003 SARS outbreak, which is thought to have originated in similar circumstances, “Chinese experts strongly recommended that those markets be shut down along with the wild animal trade”, Clive Hamilton, whose 2018 book Silent Invasion warned of the creeping influence and danger of Chinese Communist Party influence campaigns in Australia, told The Saturday Telegraph.
“But the people who benefit the most from the markets, the wealthy elite who like to eat these things, they lobbied against the closing,” says Hamilton.
There also remains darker speculation that the coronavirus may have escaped from China’s National Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan, the country’s only “biosafety level 4” lab — so certified because it is, supposedly, able to deal with the world’s most dangerous pathogens safely.
Though often dismissed as conspiracy mongering, adherents to this notion point to a New York Post report that a day after Chinese leader Xi Jinping held an emergency meeting in February on how to control the coronavirus, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
COMMUNIST COVER-UP
No matter where the virus originated, one thing virtually all experts agree on: The coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan and has now swept its way across every continent save for Antarctica was made exponentially worse by the Chinese government’s totalitarian culture of secrets and lies that puts the reputation of the party above the health of the entire planet.
What’s worse, now that the genie is out of the bottle, they’re trying to lie their way out of it. The government in Beijing is now, through an army of propagandists, working hard to spin the global pandemic not as a disaster, but rather a triumph, of the Chinese system’s ability to swing into action.
When this newspaper ran a report this week detailing allegations that the Chinese government censored reports and destroyed lab samples in an effort to cover up the virus, the People’s Republic’s Sydney Consulate General fired off a letter slamming the story as “groundless” and “seriously distorted.”
The letter went on to claim that “since the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, China has consistently put people’s safety and health first and adopted the most comprehensive, strict and thorough prevention and control measures” and that “the Chinese government has taken an open, transparent and highly responsible attitude in informing about the epidemic both domestically and globally in a timely manner”.
“There is already an information struggle going on with the Chinese government using its foreign ministry spokespeople and embassies to cast the Chinese model of government as uniquely successful because of their management of COVID-19”, says Michael Shoebridge, director of the Defence, Strategy & National Security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra.
“That would be a masterful piece of Orwellian history writing to achieve,
because without the Chinese government’s suppression of doctors reporting the novel virus, the world would have had a chance of containing it in Wuhan,” he says.
Paul Dibb, emeritus professor of Strategic Studies at ANU’s Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, agrees blame for the disaster can and should be laid squarely at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Let’s go back to the fundamental issue: China as an authoritarian communist country,” Dibb says.
“As usual (in this sort of system) they have lied about it or refused to face up to the facts.”
“The were warned well in advance by a doctor in Wuhan, who received the classic punishment of being told ‘how dare you spread lies like that’, and he subsequently died,” he adds, referring to ophthalmologist Li Wenliang who did his best to sound the alarm that a new severe respiratory disease was spreading, was reprimanded, and subsequently died in early February.
And by covering up – rather than dealing with – the problem Chinese officials made it exponentially worse.
A study released Thursday by the University of Southampton in the UK found that by the end of February, there were 114,325 coronavirus cases in China and that had officials leapt on the problem earlier, the spread of the disease could have been contained, by as much as 95 per cent.
According to the researchers: “If interventions in the country could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 per cent, 86 per cent and 95 per cent respectively — significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”
Rather than learn from their mistakes, this pattern of lies and deception is continuing today, says Dibb, as Chinese officials spread the lie that COVID-19 was actually a creation of the US Army, spread by American athletes who were in Wuhan in October last year for the Military World Games.
According to Dibb, the conspiracy theory has been pushed by Chinese officials as high ranking as the country’s foreign minister Wang Yi, whom Dibb points out also tried to heavy Julie Bishop when she was serving in the Turnbull government.
Last week China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian fired off a furious tirade on Twitter, ranting, “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
It was this suggestion that led US President Donald Trump to, this week, make a specific point of referring to “the China virus” in front of a roomful of reporters.
While this led some commentators to join with Chinese officials in charging Trump with racism, Trump’s comments remain accurate given the longstanding convention that new diseases bear the name of their place of origin.
“They are insistent that this should not be China coronavirus, fine, call it the Wuhan coronavirus”, says Dibb.
In all this the Chinese government has been aided and abetted in this by its seemingly surprising ally, the World Health Organisation (WHO), headed by director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, which in the early weeks of the crisis praised China’s efforts while downplaying the threat and refusing to declare a pandemic.
This, says Hamilton, is evidence of how the once-respected global public health body has slowly but surely been brought into Beijing’s orbit as just another propaganda mouthpiece.
“For some years the WHO has been under the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party and was in the early weeks of the crisis bending over backwards to keep Beijing happy” says Hamilton.
“As a result in the early weeks of the crisis the WHO was reproducing the misleading messages of the party — reassuring the world that this wasn’t a big problem — when in fact it should have been warning the world and getting accurate information rather than relying on information filtered by Chinese government and party officials.”
The end result is that the WHO’s credibility is now in tatters, says Hamilton.
“The reputation of the WHO has been trashed over the last two months, as has that of its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.”
WHERE TO NEXT
While it is hard to see any legal action against the Chinese government succeeding — Beijing, after all, laughed in the face of 2016 ruling in The Hague against its expansion into the South China Sea — once the coronavirus crisis passes, Western governments and businesses will radically recast their relationship with middle kingdom.
This process of reducing Western nations’ and companies’ dependence on China is known as ‘decoupling’, and it has been taking place since at least the Trump administration began taking its harder line with Beijing.
Perversely says Salvatore Babones, an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies, China may attempt to turn this process to its advantage. After the crisis passes, says Babones, “increasingly there will be a China orbit and a Western orbit, and China will use that to further its agenda”.
Their dream is to be the one-stop manufacturing shop for the world, as the US was through most of the second half of the last century, Babones says, “but I doubt they’ll succeed”.
Either way, ASPI’s Michael Shoebridge says that the old order is rapidly changing, and that Australia must know who its friends are — and stick with them.
“This is a bigger deal than just China or US-China relations and engagement. It’s about rethinking the basic assumptions of globalisation and revaluing the ability to produce essential items — including medical supplies, food and fuel — in our own nations and in trusted partners. Simple nationalism is a risk here, with a better path being integration with trusted partners”, says Shoebridge.
“For Australia, that includes at a minimum Indonesia, the US, Japan and our South Pacific neighbours.”