Virus is reshaping China’s history

“China is a sleeping lion. Let her sleep for when she wakes, she will shake the world,” is a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Despite his comments, China has well and truly woken up, developing an economy that has shaken the world with its growth and the reach of its influence.

Countries like Australia, which counts China as by far its largest trading partner, have had a front-row seat to watching its world-shaking economic development.

The question now for Australia and a world whose fortunes have ridden on the back of the waking lion, with the coronavirus pandemic agitating the world, is what sort of China will emerge from the traumatic events of this year?

What will the coronavirus outbreak mean for China’s long-term relations with the rest of the world?

For communist-run China, 2020 was to be the year when the country officially celebrated its achievement of becoming a “moderately prosperous society” — an aspiration that sounds oddly understated to a Western audience but which represented a specific economic goal of doubling China’s per capita GDP from the 2010 level of around $US4560 and doubling household income.

Instead, 2020 will be remembered as the year when China shook the world as the source of the great coronavirus pandemic — one of the most severe modern public health crises, with no end in sight, one which continues to send shocks through world markets on a daily basis.

While it appears the growth rate of the virus in China may be slowing, the epicentre of the outbreak — the industrial city of Wuhan — is still in lockdown, the virus, however, is spreading to South Korea and Italy.

China and the World Health Organisation, which is treading on political eggshells in China, have argued Beijing should be applauded for taking unprecedented steps to control the spread of the virus: cutting off travel to one of its major cities, home quarantining millions and sending extra medical staff to Wuhan as well as the rapid construction of extra hospitals.

But China knows that it has also been the source of the virus as a result of a combination of its breakneck urbanisation, a lack of regulation of trade in wild animals, a severe underinvestment in its public health system and the move by officials to suppress news of the emerging health crisis, allowing millions of people from Wuhan to leave the city ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

China’s grand celebration of 70 years of Communist Party rule last year showed a strong, nationalistic country hyper confident of its achievements and its growing role as a rising world power.

With outbreaks of grassroots public anger in China over the handling of the virus (including unprecedented first-hand iPhone videos of the near hysteria in Wuhan’s public hospitals), questions are being asked about whether it will undermine the power of Xi Jinping.

Not in 2020, but maybe once the 10-year anniversary of his leadership, in late 2022, comes around?

In a country of tight media controls, it is almost impossible for outsiders to tell. But post-corona China 2020 will have difficulty upholding the aggressive, almost overconfident nationalism and self pride with which it ­approached the world in 2019.

China was upset at Australia’s moves to close its borders to people from China, but as events unfolded, the crisis worsened and spread around the world. Canberra’s decision comes alongside countries like the US, and China’s new best friend Russia, closing their borders.

South Korea was being lauded as a model for using the crisis to improve relations with China, including keeping its borders open, but has now found itself a source of its own coronavirus outbreak.

Japan, which won plaudits from Beijing for its public relations exercise in sympathising with China’s plight, is now worried that the coronavirus could affect its upcoming Olympics.

Italy, which took great pride in becoming the first G7 economy to sign up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative a year ago, is a now also scrambling to manage its own coronavirus outbreak.

Even China’s outspoken deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, was much more careful in his choice of words on the subject during an unprecedented appearance on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night.

In the short term, the coronavirus has proved to be a wake-up call to economies around the world for their dependence on selling into Chinese markets and importing goods from China.

Purchasing managers around the world are rethinking their supply chains, while the dependence by sectors in Australia, such as the university sector on Chinese students, has been all too painfully highlighted.

Will Xi be less aggressive about pushing his ambitious multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, at a time when the horrendous shortcomings of the Chinese health system have been exposed for all the world to see?

How can a country that leads the world in new airports, fast trains and shiny new office buildings — and is handing out billions of dollars to third world countries around the world — leave its population so vulnerable to such a backward public health system?

On the other side, the coronavirus has also thrown a spotlight on the human factor behind the economic numbers — the ties between mainland China and Australia.

Amid the crisis a privately chartered plane-load of supplies took off from Sydney to Wuhan on Monday, in an exercise sparked purely by the desire of a group of Australians to send emergency supplies to their friends in Wuhan.

Recorded for all the world to see by China’s army of social media users, the coronavirus is reshaping China’s history while it continues to shake the world.