Piers Akerman: Aussie magnates help China muddy the COVID-19 investigation
Great wealth doesn’t necessarily beget great wisdom but it does sometimes proffer “useful idiots”, as Lenin described communist sympathisers in the West. Enter, stage left: mining billionaire Andrew Forrest and media magnate Kerry Stokes, writes Piers Akerman.
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Great wealth doesn’t necessarily endow the rich with great wisdom, as has been amply demonstrated by mining billionaire Andrew Forrest and media magnate Kerry Stokes in recent days.
Both have accumulated trouser-loads of money, and good luck to them, but they are lambs in the field of international diplomacy, “useful idiots” to borrow Lenin’s description of communist sympathisers in the West.
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Their naked self-interest in promoting the Chinese Communist Party’s point of view has made them easy meat for the current generation of Chinese diplomats, who have styled themselves as “wolf warriors” after the heroes of the 2015 blockbuster Chinese war action film Wolf Warrior and its sequel Wolf Warrior 2, released in 2017.
Forrest and Stokes were lured or blindly walked into the propaganda war launched against the West — and Australia, in particular — and have swallowed the virulent anti-West line being peddled by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
Zhao, as a Bloomberg correspondent noted last week, has excelled in the new-age tactics of wolf warrior diplomacy of “misdirection, misinformation and social-media aggression”.
“Across the world, scores of ‘wolf warrior’ Chinese diplomats, named after a set of films about an elite Chinese commando unit, have followed Zhao’s example, setting up Twitter accounts that attack their hosts, clap back at negative stories in the press and sometimes promote fringe conspiracy theories,” Bloomberg’s Mihir Sharma wrote.
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Old-school Chinese diplomats are apparently appalled by the wolf-warrior approach. But they aren’t the audience. Neither is global public opinion. For diplomats like Zhao, the real goal is to win the approbation of your superiors — and, importantly, a devoted following of hyper-nationalists at home, Sharma says.
Their Western allies are merely howling in concert with the Chinese wolf pack to firm up their favoured friend status with the totalitarian government.
The problem for this pack mentality is that an exhaustive investigation into source and cause of the coronavirus pandemic is essential if we are to go any way to preventing pandemics in the future.
Such an investigation is obviously necessary if the world is to learn anything from this global experience beyond how to comprehensively shut down the worldwide economy.
The World Health Organisation, like the rest of the UN, is so highly politicised it is all but useless in dealing with pandemics, as evidenced by its tardy responses to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and the 2014 Ebola epidemic.
It even acknowledged its lack of preparedness a year into the Ebola crisis with a report that said in part, “a formal assessment of the response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic concluded that the world was lucky on that occasion, as the virus was so mild, but ill-prepared to cope with any severe and sustained emergencies in the future, as borne out by the Ebola epidemic.”
In the Western system such an inquiry would be routine but to the deranged Chinese leadership it is seen as an attempt by the evil capitalist West to attack the Chinese system.
But no one in any Western capital is talking of attacking China or talking of taking stupid retaliatory crippling action. The thrust of the Western argument is that if China wishes to be a respected partner in the international community, it must accept the responsibilities that are consistent with those in that community.
No government likes to be accused of a cover-up, and (though it is obvious to all but the Forrests and the Stokes of the world that China has engaged in a wholesale cover-up and disinformation campaign) the purpose of the investigation proposed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and supported by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not to lay blame but to seek answers which will help the world fight the next pandemic.
The challenge now is to restore the global economy. Fortunately, perhaps, the US is in an election year and President Trump does not wish to be defined by the coronavirus when Americans go to the polls in November.
He wants the US economy to be in full recovery and he wants his confidence to assist the rest of the world recuperate.
That’s why the billions are being spent there, and here, and that’s why he is being relentlessly optimistic.
There is no doubt that the pressure is on China to come to the party, and European nations are expected to throw their support behind an international inquiry, but China’s friends here should be supporting this, not attacking those who want to find a solution.
Forrest has been poorly advised, if he takes advice at all, and so has Stokes. It’s not a question of their patriotism.
Both men have proved they are Australian through and through. It’s a question of their judgment and support for the right and proper thing to do.
We know, as Scott Morrison has reiterated, that this virus started in China and that the Chinese are resorting to lies to paint their critics as the villains.
If the world is to be able to respond more quickly in future and cause less damage to millions who have lost their livelihoods, let alone the several hundred thousand who have lost their lives, it needs this inquiry.
Forrest and Stokes, the deluded Victorian Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen, and her even more deranged ally Yassmin Abdel-Magied, are bit players on the fringes of global society and undeserving of the media space they occupy.
In supporting China’s claims of victimhood, they show disrespect for the real victims of this pandemic.