Coronavirus: Beijing cannot be trusted and we must watch it like a hawk

Foreign Minister Marise Payne was right to refuse to say to David Speers, on the ABC’s Insiders program, that she trusted China over the coronavirus, or even generally.

In that polite but insistent way of his, Speers asked her repeatedly whether she trusted China — with whom Australia notionally has a comprehensive strategic partnership — and she sensibly refused to say yes.

A careful minister who tends to use technocratic language, Payne also said her concerns about China’s information on the origins of the coronavirus, among other things, were “at a high point”.

French President Emmanuel Macron joined Britain’s Acting Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, and US President Donald Trump in criticising China and demanding that it come clean over what it knows of the origins of the virus, its spread and the true number of infections and deaths in China itself.

Outside China, perhaps only in the credulous head office of the World Health Organisation will you find anyone who believes the stories Beijing has been telling about the virus.

Senior Chinese officials who claimed the virus originated in the US have reduced Beijing’s pronouncements to the equivalent of the most ridiculous Cold War propaganda to ever come out of the old Soviet Union.

There is a small, probably very small, chance that the virus was accidentally released from a Chinese laboratory conducting disease research on viruses in bat populations. However, every relevant Western intelligence and technical agency has looked into this and has come to the view that there is little or no evidence for it, and that it’s much more likely it emerged from a wet market.

Intelligence agencies in particular have not seen the kinds of signs within the Chinese government they would expect if it had come from a laboratory.

Payne is right to join other international voices calling for an independent inquiry into the origins of the virus. There is not the slightest chance that Beijing would meaningfully and fully co-operate with such an inquiry, but it is quite right that this international pressure should be mounted and sustained.

The wider critique of Beijing is undeniable: that it lied about the virus in the early days of the disease and therefore robbed other nations of critical weeks of potential response time, that it deceived the WHO into making absurd pronouncements and foolish recommendations, and that in January and February it purchased huge quantities of medical gear from countries such as Australia, which then experienced shortages of that critical gear.

Incidentally, can any of the local pro-Beijing lobby possibly argue any longer that there is a significant distance between Chinese private companies and the strategic objectives of the Beijing government?

No one in the West knows how many new cases of the virus are happening in China every day, although presumably even Beijing could not really hide massive new outbreaks. So its brutal social isolation has probably worked to some extent.

Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to exploit the coronavirus ruthlessly, ostentatiously shipping some medical supplies to favoured destinations while ramping up its own provocative military activity in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and around Taiwan.

It is too early to think the confused response to the virus in the US means Beijing is the geostrategic winner out of this virus and the US the loser. It is much more likely the credibility and standing of both Beijing and Washington has suffered, although in very different ways.

Liberal internationalism has also suffered with the chaotic failure of the WHO.

This disorder and entropy are the chief international outcomes of the virus so far. But there is so much more to come