China’s coronavirus culpability

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AP

No matter what interpretation you put on events, Xi Jinping, an ambitious politicker who deliberately made himself China’s paramount leader, bears unique responsibility for a global pandemic that will end up killing millions.

Which incriminating interpretation, though, is the right one?

From the moment a new virus emerged in Wuhan, the all-important question was whether, like coronaviruses that cause the common cold, it was easily transmissible among humans. By multiple credible reports in China’s own press, medical personnel were in little doubt by late December that they were catching the disease from their patients.

An ophthalmologist who would later die of the disease used social media to warn fellow medics to wear protective gear when treating patients. A Chinese lab found an 87 per cent genetic overlap with SARS, a virus of which the World Health Organisation had long since concluded: “Transmission to casual and social contacts has occasionally occurred when as a result of intense exposure to a case of SARS (in workplaces, aeroplanes or taxis) or in high-risk transmission settings, such as health care settings and households.”

On December 31, Taiwan’s government and medical establishment, from its own sources, warned the WHO that such transmission was occurring in Wuhan. On Jan. 7, Mr Xi gave a secret speech on the Wuhan outbreak. Leaked Chinese government memos referred to the likelihood of a pandemic as the disease spread far and wide amid the upcoming mass migration of Chinese citizens for the lunar new-year holiday.

China’s government issued no public warning and allowed the migration to proceed. The Wuhan city government permitted a gargantuan banquet for 40,000 families on January 18. Wuhan, bigger than any American city at 11 million inhabitants, was a major rail hub inside China and, through its international airport, exported thousands of travellers a day to the world.

Circumstantial evidence can’t settle whether the virus, which like SARS is thought to have passed from bats to humans, escaped from a local Wuhan lab that studies such bat viruses.

But China’s government took steps to expel certain foreign reporters from Wuhan, and then from the country, as well as to silence and threaten with arrest doctors, scientists and local journalists who sought to track the outbreak.

All this is consistent with a regime whose secrecy is reflexive and unimaginative when facing an explosive emerging situation that potentially threatens its own survival. It also seems inconsistent with one of the stories Chinese sources have put out — that the incompetence and mendacity of Wuhan officials kept Beijing in the dark about the true extent of the problem.

This has led some to speculate that, having resigned himself to an uncontainable epidemic, Mr Xi sought to make sure other countries weren’t spared so China wouldn’t be uniquely disadvantaged. Your arrival in the world must have been recent if you think politicians not capable of such cynicism, especially when operating under an authoritarian, communist, one-party political system.

At the very least, choosing at every stage to indulge its preference for secrecy was tantamount to a decision to let the world become infected. That much is hard to dispute.

But it’s also true that the world was dependent on neither the WHO nor China to reach its own conclusions. If Taiwan warned the WHO, it certainly warned its indispensable ally, the US. The CIA, NSA and State Department are all tasked with figuring out which developments in China, our most crucial global counterparty, might have world-historical implications. The Western press was picking up and reporting accounts of the Wuhan outbreak from Chinese social media in late December. When Taiwanese authorities began screening visitors from Wuhan on December 31, it was a wake-up call from a country whose entanglement with China is intricate, personal and unparalleled.

This view convicts Mr Xi only of being an uninteresting product of his system, an agent of non-change in a constantly transforming China. Contrary to casual rhetoric, a global pandemic is not a black swan — it’s an event the world has experienced before and plans for. Multiple global contagions have been traced to China, including the novel influenza pandemics of 1957, 1968 and 1977. Historians and virologists make a compelling case that the 1918 killer pandemic also originated in China. SARS, in late 2002, emerged in Guangdong province; the 2009 swine flu, which briefly got the Obama administration excited but passed without more incident than the average flu, was believed by US government scientists to have crossed to humans in Mexico after originating in Asian pigs.

Mr Xi’s very communist responsibility-ducking and secret-keeping eventually gave way to action for pretty much the same reason it did in the US and elsewhere — this most recent pathogen out of China started to manifest itself in demand for healthcare services beyond what existing local healthcare resources were scaled to provide.

Then the textbook took over, which the public now knows as “flatten the curve”. Thereby hangs another not-simple tale, for the US and China, that will have to wait for another day.

The Wall Street Journal