Until the facts are known, China is under suspicion

China’s ambition to be a respected member of the international community of nations will unravel further if it does not heed growing calls to “come clean” over the genesis and spread of the COVID-19 virus. Transparency, as Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Sunday, is vital. Beijing, if it does not want to be regarded as an ongoing danger to world health, should accept her suggestion for an independent global review, outside the untrustworthy World Health Organisation, to “get to the bottom” of the coronavirus origins and how and why it spread from Wuhan. As of Sunday night, it had killed 160,700 people from 2.3 million cases.

Like Senator Payne, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned China of the need to “open up” and “come clean” in explaining “exactly how this virus spread”. So has British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, acting prime minister in place of Boris Johnson, who is still recovering from COVID-19. Amid pressure from within the Conservative Party for the British government to review its controversial decision to allow Huawei to participate in aspects of the UK’s 5G network, Mr Raab warned there could be no “business as usual” with China until after the pandemic. Senator Payne also hinted at a changed relationship with China post-pandemic, saying “all of these things will have to be reviewed … considered in the light of change in the world economy, in the light of changes in international health security”.

Addressing expectations that governments and companies will want to diversify their trading partners in the post-coronavirus world, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has warned Australian businesses “to not have all your eggs in one basket”. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop also spoke of the likelihood of “a very different world when we have (passed through) this pandemic … many nations will be looking to diversify and bring a greater domestic focus to supply chains”.

Despite its economy contracting by 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, the first decline since 1992, Beijing is apparently paying little heed to the views of its trading partners. It is more intent on seizing a strategic advantage while the US remains incapacitated, as Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department, wrote in Inquirer on Saturday. China is also intent on positioning itself as the saviour of much of the world, sending medical equipment and doctors, building political indebtedness and claiming its authoritarianism is doing better at beating the virus than the US and other democracies.

US intelligence agencies are probing speculation, fuelled by Donald Trump, that the virus might have originated in China’s leading biological research establishment, Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, located close to the city’s notorious “wet” markets. Chinese spokesmen, citing the WHO, insist “there is no evidence coronavirus was made in a lab”. Other matters, too, demand investigation. Early on, when a novel coronavirus was suspected of causing flu-like cases in central China, whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang, working in the epicentre of COVID-19, raised the ire of the communist state when he attempted to warn other doctors on social media about an emerging virus. Chinese authorities made him sign a letter stating he had made false comments about the virus, of which he later died. In a Lancet article, researchers observed the first diagnosis was made on December 1 — a month before China alerted the WHO. China was also dangerously slow in alerting the world. Yet at the time the virus had only just begun to spread, in January and early February, Chinese businesses across the world, including property developers in Australia, were buying up tonnes of medical supplies from unsuspecting companies to send back to China. As late as February 13, China’s embassy in Canberra was expressing “deep regret and dissatisfaction” over Australian restrictions on travel from China, claiming they were “extreme measures’’ and an “overreaction’’. China has a lot of explaining to do.

It must not be allowed to brush aside its responsibility for a catastrophe destroying lives and plunging the world into its worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who has recovered from the virus, is correct in saying accountability would “certainly be demanded of us if Australia was at the epicentre of this virus”.