What China stands to gain from the global outbreak of coronavirus
As COVID-19 continues to sweep across Western nations and throw the global economy into a tailspin, the risk that China will make huge gains out of this is very real, writes Peta Credlin.
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Have you noticed how China seems to have sailed through the coronavirus crisis and is now even offering to help the countries laid low by the virus that originated in the Wuhan wet market? China has reportedly sent medical supplies and ventilators to Italy. And late last week, with its corona deaths rising rapidly past 4000, Spain announced an $800 million deal to buy 550 million masks, 11 million pairs of gloves, 5.5 million rapid test kits and 950 respirators from – you guessed it – China, the place where this crisis all began.
By the time most of the world had focused on the outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese had already put brutal lockdown measures in place, even to the point – reportedly – of welding shut people’s doors to enforce quarantine.
With Wuhan and the rest of Hubei province’s 60 million people under house arrest and with ferocious quarantine measures throughout the country by the end of January, within about a month China had new infections and new deaths down to double figures (if, of course, we can believe what they tell us).
And here we are now, by the end of March, with the country that earlier had used private Chinese-connected businesses in Australia to ship out medical supplies before we realised what was happening abroad, now congratulating itself as the potential saviour of the rest of the world.
Even while we’re still grappling with how much more lockdown measures might be needed to stop the disease here in Australia and how much government support for wages there needs to be to stop an economic disaster even worse than the health one, there are already lots of lessons from this crisis.
One critical lesson is how far the Chinese have penetrated global bodies such as the United Nations. While routinely criticising Western countries’ response to corona, the head of the World Health Organisation has been almost obsequiously deferential to the Chinese, despite their initial attempts to arrest whistleblower doctors and cover up what was happening. He is an Ethiopian, and Ethiopia is a big recipient of soft-loans under China’s Belt and Road initiative (which Canberra has rightly rejected but in a highly criticised move, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews signed up to).
Another lesson is just how dependent Western countries’ supply chains have become on China. China remains a communist dictatorship that’s militarising the South China Sea, imprisoning up to a million Uighurs, and introducing an Orwellian system of technology-enabled surveillance under the guise of “social credit”. Yet something like 80 per cent of the raw materials used in global medicine production are sourced from China, and all of the unsolicited proposals now flooding into our government to procure drugs and equipment for the fight against coronavirus invariably involve even more Chinese imports.
But just how dependent on one country can we afford to be, especially on one that puts other countries in the freezer if their leaders have the temerity, for instance, to meet the Dalai Lama? A country that can suddenly have bogus food safety issues with Australian beef or lobsters and that suddenly has an environmental issue with clean Australian coal – coincidentally at the same time our MPs are legislating against foreign agents – is hardly going to be a reliable partner for any free and independent country.
Quite apart from realising humanity’s continuing vulnerability to new diseases, notwithstanding all our technical advance; the coronavirus crisis should also be teaching us that cheapest is not always best and that wealth is not always everything. Just wait for a flood of new Chinese money seeking to buy the Australian companies that the coronavirus crisis has weakened.
If the Morrison Government was wise, it would urgently reshape Australia’s foreign investment rules to ensure it’s only investment we accept, not foreign ownership or control, ahead of this expected onslaught.
You’ve got to wonder how secure many businesses now feel, having offshored their manufacturing to China because it was cheaper than doing things here? And what’s the point of having money in the bank – as individuals or as countries – if we can’t buy what’s needed, at times like this, to keep us alive?
Compared to China, and even more to the other Confucian societies that have managed coronavirus without the savage repression employed in Hubei – nations such as Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong – the West has struggled to meet this challenge. Not only have our stockpiles of medicine been inadequate and our screening procedures been inefficient, but our character has often been found wanting too.
Societies that for 50 years have mocked authority and praised rebellion have not found it easy to accept restrictions even when they’re absolutely necessary for our own good.
You don’t have to be a Donald Trump fan to worry that a world led by China will be vastly harsher than one that’s been American-led for the past 70 years. Yet as coronavirus starts to take hold in the US, and with G20 economies like ours preparing for the worst, the risk that China makes security gains out of this disease-driven upheaval of world order, is real.