The world we thought we knew is no longer assured
China is emerging as the dominant state and our freedom is at stake if we do not reclaim what we gave up in an emergency.
I first saw something stirring on the ground; a mound of bird feathers suddenly rustled and the vague outline of a creature began to form. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but slowly it shook itself down and became more visible. What appeared was a medium-sized dog. Something, though, was not right – the animal was unsteady on its feet, and what was left of its fur was matted and dirty. I could see red raw skin and weeping sores. It seemed to fix me in its sight and began to move closer; my cameraman started filming.
As the dog drew nearer, I could see its eyes were bright red and swollen, pus oozing from an infection. It was the sickest and sorriest animal I had ever seen alive; in fact, it was barely clinging to life. The most humane thing to do would be to put it down. The dog didn’t make it all the way to me – it didn’t have the energy. After a few weak steps it slumped again to the ground.
This was my introduction to a Chinese animal market in Guangdong Province, in southern China. A virus had broken out from a market just like this one – a lethal virus unseen before that was striking down anyone who came in contact with it. The first symptoms were intense muscle pain, lethargy, fever, a cough and a sore throat. For every 10 people who came down with the virus, one would die. It spread rapidly throughout the population, shutting down some businesses and keeping people indoors. Those who ventured out usually wore masks to reduce the risk of infection. Public health warnings told people to avoid crowded spaces and reduce contact with others. Riding on an escalator or entering a lift might be enough to put your health or even life at risk.
At the time, I was living in Hong Kong with my family and working for CNN. We were on the frontline of the outbreak of what became known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The first case was reported in November 2002, when a farmer in Guangdong fell sick and died. It took several months for the world to become aware of the seriousness of SARS. The Chinese government had been secretive and slow to act. By the time the World Health Organisation raised the alarm, several thousand people were infected worldwide, and hundreds had died.
The outbreak of SARS brought China front and centre into the lives of people everywhere. What happened in an animal market in a far-flung province could kill people thousands of kilometres away. It wasn’t just the threat of SARS that put the world at risk, but the secrecy of the Chinese Communist Party. China is a nation built on fear and top-down control: provincial leaders would rather hide the truth than confess any failing to the centralised party powerbrokers. The SARS crisis came and went. The spread of the virus was limited, and a wider disaster was averted. But the world now confronted just how vulnerable it was to this enormous, increasingly powerful but still, in so many ways, impenetrable country. China had opened up to the world, and become the world’s factory. At the time of the SARS outbreak, it was in the midst of an economic revolution transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese. Now they could buy homes and send their children to school. Chinese tourists were travelling the globe, while at home they watched Hollywood movies and danced in nightclubs to Western music. You could be fooled into thinking China was becoming like us.
Fools we were. The Chinese Communist Party had its eyes set far ahead: it would return China to global dominance. It would beat the West at its own game. The Party would embrace capitalism but never relinquish its power.
SARS gave us a taste of what was to come, how another illness would emerge from China and up-end the world, killing millions and infecting millions more, and driving our economies to the wall. In the years after SARS, Western countries would be mired in war, crippled by financial crises and beset by political turmoil. In the battle between democracy and authoritarianism, the Chinese Communist Party would claim the upper hand.
On course for conflict
We find ourselves now at a hinge point of history. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, there is talk of Cold War 2.0. The US is staring down a new rival: China. We are witnessing a return of “great power rivalry”, yet China is economically more powerful today than the Soviet Union was then, and the US is unquestionably diminished. America is politically fractured, and deeply divided along racial and class lines. It is in the grip of an opioid epidemic and a frenzy of gun violence, and of course it has been devastated by the coronavirus. Alarmingly, life expectancy in the country is decreasing.
So damaged and polarised is the US that The Atlantic magazine in December 2019 entitled its edition How to Stop a Civil War. In 2019 talk of civil war may have seemed exaggerated, until 2021 when Donald Trump incited his followers to storm the Capitol building. Trump refused to accept that he had lost the election; America would not have a peaceful handover of power. What the world witnessed was an insurrection in the so-called heart of democracy. What it revealed was that democracy itself is rotten.
America is an exhausted nation. It has been beset by crises for decades: the al-Qa’ida-orchestrated terrorist attacks of September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the banking collapse and global financial crisis of 2007-08.
It is today a nation worn down and poorer; it is less sure of itself, and the world is less sure of American leadership.
A decade ago, the journalist and political commentator Fareed Zakaria coined the phrase “the post-American world”: he saw a world in which the US was still powerful but no longer dominant. Others had caught up. Is this now the post-American world?
China is on track to become the biggest economy in the world, and it is building a military that it says will fight and win any war. The two nations have been on a collision course. In 2017 the US declared China a strategic competitor, and in 2019 the two powers waged a trade war that damaged both nations.
There are serious concerns that China and the US could be on course to an even greater conflict. Any clash between the nations would likely be catastrophic, but as much as we may try to wish it away, military strategists in Beijing and Washington are right now preparing for such an eventuality.
Freedom is precious
The year 2020 was unlike any other in our recent memories. A horrible year. We have experienced fear and vulnerability; some have lost loved ones, others have fallen ill; too many have lost their livelihoods, and we have all lost a little of our freedom. The great strength of liberal democracy – freedom – has not been enough to defeat COVID-19.
For a decade I lived in, worked in or visited China, covering the story of this emerging authoritarian superpower. I felt what it was like to live in a country where the state controls information and movement – where the Communist Party reaches into every aspect of life. In 2020-21, all of us have felt a little of what life is like in China: monitored, suspicious of each other, with our liberty curtailed.
To defeat the virus, we have had to surrender what is most precious to us. China’s President Xi Jinping boasts that his style of government is superior to that of the West; I can imagine him asking: where is your freedom now?
While democracy can be the best vaccine against tyranny, it carries within its own tyranny. To many people – the poor and oppressed – democracy is a sham: a game played by and for the elites. When the threat of coronavirus passes, will we reclaim our liberty? What we have set aside in an emergency we must not allow to be normalised. We must push back against attempts at greater surveillance or control of our lives. Democracies united around common purpose made the world a better place after World War II. The world will need that collaboration, that commitment to a common future, to ensure we defeat the tyrannies of our time.
Thirty years ago we declared the end of history, but history does not so easily end. The West was guilty of hubris and triumphalism: of thinking that countries like China would bend to our will. Now we are at a deep inflection point of history and the world we have known is no longer assured. We have felt the loss of freedom – surely now we know precious it is.
With the Falling of the Dusk by Stan Grant, published by HarperCollins on Monday.