China is a rogue state and a danger to the world: Rita Panahi

It says plenty about the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of transparency that we still don’t know the origin of COVID-19.

Staff members line up as they prepare to spray disinfectant at Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 24, 2020. Picture: AFP

As we head into an uncertain year with panicked politicians, hysterical media and a populace that’s been scared senseless, let us not forget how we got here and the role China has played in the death, destruction and hardship endured in 2020.

We start the New Year with more border closures and fearmongering from those with least skin in the game.

In the year of the rat, the Chinese Communist regime’s depths of depravity were on full display from destroying evidence and arresting whistleblower doctors to lying to the World Health Organisation to intimidating smaller nations seeking the truth. We can no longer pretend that China is not a rogue state and a clear and present danger to the world.

For years the West has operated on the naive assumption that the more we trade and share with Beijing the more they’ll embrace our values of freedom, equality and democracy. But all that has achieved is to make China into an economic superpower with an ever-growing appetite for global influence.

Now, we feed the crocodile in the hopes that it’ll eat us last. It says plenty about the Chinese Communist Party’s lack of transparency that we still do not know the precise origins of COVID-19; was it from a bat sold at a wet market or did it come from a lab in Wuhan?

The official story is that, like SARS and the bird flu, COVID-19 originated in a wet market where livestock, sea life and exotic wildlife are kept and slaughtered in disgusting conditions. But as Stanford professor of microbiology and immunology David Relman wrote in November: “We find ourselves ten months into one of the most catastrophic global health events of our lifetime and, disturbingly, we still do not know how it began.”

China has repeatedly sought to blame other countries for the pandemic claiming the virus originated in America and then Italy. There are growing concerns that the “independent” investigation the international community pushed for will be a whitewash with the hopelessly compromised WHO allowing Beijing to dictate the terms of the inquiry.

China lies about forced labour camps, the torture of political prisoners and the persecution of religious minorities so we shouldn’t be shocked that they lied about coronavirus, too. It was just over a year ago that China began arresting medical professionals who were bravely raising the alarm on a new Sars-like virus spreading in Wuhan.

Li Wenliang was one of the doctors interrogated by police and warned to stop “making false statements” after he warned other medics on December 30, 2019 about the Wuhan virus. Two months later he was dead, apparently from COVID.

Chinese authorities were also arresting citizen journalists for reporting what was really happening in the Hubei province.

This week one of those courageous individuals was sentenced to four years jail in a Shanghai court for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” AKA telling the truth.

In February Zhang Zhan wrote about the government not giving “people enough information” and “simply locking down the city”.

Zhang believes she will die in prison. She has been kept in restraints 24 hours a day and force fed via a nasal tube after going on a hunger strike.

China is still concealing the truth. There were credible reports this week that the true extent of the outbreak in Wuhan is 10 times higher than the official number. But China can’t be held responsible for the way that leaders around the world have reacted to this crisis.

Australia has the advantage of being an island nation that can lock its borders but we can’t let our gutless politicians off the hook, both Labor and Liberal premiers have played politics with people’s lives and livelihoods.

On Thursday South Australia’s Liberal government and Victoria’s Labor government announced they would shut their borders with NSW, showing a level of panic-stricken arsehattery that has become the norm in 2020.

Let’s not forget that at one stage during Victoria’s second wave every single case in NSW was traced back to Victoria, with one cluster from the Crossroads Hotel numbering more than 500 infections.

Despite the outbreak occurring in the depths of winter, NSW did not impose Victorian-style lockdown, mask mandates and international border closures. The Berejiklian government trusted its contact tracing to contain the virus while NSW continued to do the heavy lifting in re-opening the economy and taking the bulk of overseas arrivals into Australia.

Rather than closing their borders to NSW, the other states could learn a thing or two about competent contact tracing and having a proportionate response based on science, not hysteria.

IN SHORT

If the pandemic did originate in a wet market then China must finally do something about the inhumane and dangerous wildlife meat trade and the manner in which animals are kept and killed in markets. Otherwise it won’t be long till the next China virus is upon us.

RITA PANAHI IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST