‘Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” lamented Lady Macbeth possessed by the guilt of regicide. Not all the masks in the world can hide China’s culpability for the gravest existential threat to humankind in a century.
While imposing a brutal lockdown on 11 million people in Wuhan in January 2020 for almost 3 months, China encourages its nationals who had come home for the New Year, to return to their countries of residence, carrying the virus with them.
As many people know, there are two main theories (without clinching evidence or a clear smoking gun so far) about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people, a natural ‘spillover’, the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. The other is that the virus escaped from a lab where it was being analysed.
Viruses are master escape artists. The SARS1 virus has leaked from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. If the virus had indeed escaped from a Wuhan laboratory experiment, the savage blowback and massive public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China.
Till date, the Wuhan researchers have been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells. New methods of virus manipulation, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks.
In 2000 Dutch researchers earned the gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats. Enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as gain-of-function experiments, and 21st-century science demonstrates their awesome capability for destruction.
With funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health, China’s leading virologist, trained in America, known as “batwoman” (owing to her work on bat coronaviruses) set out to create novel coronaviruses in her Wuhan lab (the objective of her research is in the public domain) with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her records have been sealed.
It was only a matter of time before a rogue government (trying to win a war without fighting it) realised the astounding potential of weaponising viruses.
Natural emergence from bats was the preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation team to China. The team’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members kept asserting that lab escape was unlikely. But the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory
In any case, why would the bats that infest the caves of Yunnan (they can travel up to 50 km) wait till they got to the Wuhan wet market (1,500 km away) to begin attacking people? The truth (whatever it is) will help prevent a second such occurrence.
As Virus 1 erupted in Europe in early 2020, Xi Jinping created an information dystopia, an infodemic to control the story from Berlin to Bratislava.
Chinese diplomats also approached German government officials to persuade them to make positive statements on how Beijing was handling the pandemic.
Communist China’s leadership has consistently betrayed those who sought to befriend it or trusted it—Jawaharlal Nehru (of bhai-bhai fame), Barack Obama (of US-China partnership will define 21st-century fantasy), Rodrigo Duterte (of I love Xi Jinping effusions).
The 19th-century German unifier Otto Von Bismarck famously said: “A fool learns only from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
The present leadership in Beijing learns from neither, so the march of folly continues. Having enemies on all sides means a failure of diplomacy, of which PingPong’s officials practice the gutter version.
Chinese media widely circulates a morphed image of the recent G-7 Foreign Ministers meeting in London with the slogan “G7-Invaders United Kingdom 1900”.
A provocative element , in very poor taste, in the image is a soldier from India— a guest participant at the G-7—wearing a white face mask and connected to an IV drip. The caricature ridicules India as it battles the Chinese virus tsunami
Deng Xiao Ping modernized China but his foreign and security policy of ‘tao guang yang hui’ (conceal ambitions and hide claws) is a thing of the past. China now wants to bare its fangs. China regularly cooks its economic figures and revised upward its estimate of the number of people who died of covid-19 in Wuhan, the first epicenter, by 50%.
“Let’s not be so naive as to say [China has] been much better at handling this,” French President Emmanuel Macron said of the virus
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told reporters: “We can’t have business as usual after this crisis, and we’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it could’ve been stopped earlier”.
As an adolescent, I enjoyed listening to the insanely popular Hindi song from the film Chalti ka Naam Gaadi: ‘Jaate thay Japan pahunch gaye Cheen, samajh lena’. China has replaced Japan as Asia’s (and the world’s) chief adversary.
Never before in human history has one country lost so many friends so quickly, through its own misdemeanours. A 2020 study found some 10,000 fake Twitter accounts linked to the Chinese government, all involved in influence campaigns. Many were poor-quality fakes and easy to spot, nowhere near as sophisticated as Russian disinformation efforts.
Prominent media tycoon and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, 73, arrested in mid-2020 has been sentenced to 14 months for participating in peaceful pro-democracy protests. His assets have been confiscated. The party mouthpiece People’s Daily hailed the sentencing of Jimmy Lai and others as ‘the embodiment of justice’. China’s communists have truly lost it.
Everybody in China uses the social media application Wechat, and I do mean pretty much everybody. Sit down next to a friend who also has Wechat on their phone. Now try and send them a text message using the name “Liu Xiaobo”, China’s most famous dissident and Nobel Prize winner who died in 2017, allegedly of liver cancer. On your phone, it will appear as if you have sent the message, but your friend will not get it.
When countries push back against China’s fabricated story of its coronavirus success, or complain about faulty supplies, or are wary of Beijing’s unabashed attempts to profit from the crisis, Chinese diplomats, leaders, and media lash out — in large part because they are so unused to dealing with dissent and open discussion at home.
Driven by overcapacity at home, Chinese companies were lured by easy finance and a closed bidding process in Pakistan, to offload outdated coal-based energy technology. The few coal-fired power plants that are the early harvest of the CPEC collapsed along with Pakistan’s grid in January 2021!
It would appear that China sold Pakistan a lemon, with huge cost overruns and corruption.
CPEC was justified by reference to future growth and revenue but with the Chinese-virus-induced recession, no one, except a few unrealistic Chinese and Pakistanis, believe that insurgency-plagued Balochistan would become a global hotspot for coastal tourism.
A starry-eyed and resource-starved developing world—bristling at conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions—swallowed the Chinese BRI con with a wide-open maw. They are choking. The BRI is massively dependent on the international transfer of Chinese personnel and managers to its projects.
With virus-induced travel restrictions, China cannot find employment overseas for its teeming masses yearning to breathe free.
The World Bank’s most recent Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report indicates, conservatively, that the pandemic could have pushed tens of millions into extreme poverty in 2020 alone, and led to an increase in global poverty for the first time since 1998.
In increasing numbers, debtor nations demand debt relief. Some BRI infrastructure projects (a magnificent palace for the President or a splendid apartment in an upmarket area of a European city for the spouse and daughter) had little regard for the host nation’s long-term needs. There are too many white elephants running along the BRI and it is deader than the dodo. Will the world go back to a pre-virus system?
All existing systems will suffer from post-crisis hysteresis, the effects of the virus remaining long after the immediate crisis is past. When digital connectivity replaces physical contact, as is now happening globally, the need for physical infrastructure declines.
Increased use of digital communications technology has given rise to ‘firms from nowhere’. Virtual reality, AI, and robotics mean reduced person-to-person contact.
The virus has accelerated the trend to rationalise global value chains (GVCs), decoupling from China, building flexibility (and alternative locations) into GVCs, holding more inventory and other forms of insurance against hold-ups, and breakdowns, and localisation.
Ping-Pong feels he has gained unlimited political power, but China has lost the world. So, it resorts to abuse and aggression to distract attention, whether in the South China Sea or Ladakh.
Beijing’s boasts about the supreme power of China has engendered a growing hubris that it is the indispensable tool of global development, and “the only splendid civilisation in human history with an uninterrupted record of more than five thousand years” (it used to be 3,000 till a former Chinese leader visiting Egypt was told that the pyramids were built 5,000 years ago and promptly extended China’s antiquity by 2,000).
The Galwan clash is a climacteric that will be analysed for decades as the defining moment when the ‘invincible’ PLA was exposed as a bloated dragon that seeks to intimidate through a show of force rather than the application of that force.
Despite its impressive high-tech arsenal, the PLA must deal with an obsolete command system, rampant corruption, and poor training. Its doctrine has not evolved beyond human wave tactics.
Historically, the Chinese are no fighters. That is why an imaginary fellow called Sun Tzu talked about winning a war without fighting, akin to making money without working!
Xi keeps lamenting this, urging his troops to learn how to fight, afraid that they will huff and puff and blow their own house in.
When Prime Minister Le Keqiang says the Communist Party’s goal is to strengthen the political loyalty of the PLA, he acknowledges a core fragility The type of infrastructure that will be welcomed post-virus is ‘soft infrastructure’—institutions that rely on human capital and services, including healthcare, transparent digital-economy based financial systems, open education systems, and government services delivered directly to the public. All these depend on trust and soft power, and China, despite its Confucius Institutes, has neither.
The top priorities of our brave new world will be health, climate change, and free trade. China could not care less about them.
China’s rising domestic unemployment, acknowledged by its Prime Minister, is an immense problem, particularly among migrant workers, and is leading to increasing social unrest.
Investments in China’s massive infrastructure projects in 2020 fell “well short” of 2019 levels as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged participating countries, many of which are small economies with diminished ability to take on new debt financing, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
With former beneficiaries saying “thank you but no thank you”, China now looks for oversized domestic construction projects to keep the wheels of its factories whirring and to reassure its legions of unemployed. The fantasy dam on the Brahmaputra in Tibet is but one example.
Next will be a highway to the Chinese colony on Mars— remember it is the Red Planet founded by famous Chinese explorer Eye Fine Nut Ting.
Even its son-in-law, the fellow who heads the World Health Organization, is uncharacteristically quiet. Till Ping-Pong calls the shots, Beijing will not ‘reverse course’.
China cannot achieve its goal of surpassing the US as a global power because the US can draw on the talents of the entire world and recombine them in diversity and creativity that is not possible with China’s ethnic nationalism and authoritarianism. No one trusts China, even as she displays confidence and a sense of victimhood at the same time.
The new US Administration suggests that the China-US contention is now structural and that their relationship will keep growing increasingly antagonistic.
President Joe Biden famously said about his Chinese counterpart: “He does not have a democratic bone in his body”.
The unfortunate attacks on Asian-Americans—euphemism for Chinese-looking people—in the US, UK, and Europe are a grim reminder of China’s badly dented image. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, the New York Police Department removed its Chinese-looking officers from foot patrols. People spat on them. I was there.
The oppressive and calcifying Chinese system is past its expiry date. Every ruler of China, as in other nations, has done well in the beginning but given time, no ruler has done well.
Because no criticism is allowed from within or without the regime, the system risks being undermined by a climate of insufficient critical thinking.
Senior citizens recall Mao’s Let Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign of the mid-1950s when people were encouraged to criticize the Party. So many did, that Mao quickly shut it and hunted down the critics (Tiananmen in 1989 was almost a repeat). Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because the chubby cartoon reminds one of the General Secretary.
With deft political manoeuvering and bullets in the necks of his erstwhile buddies, Ping-Pong has gained unlimited political power, but China has lost the world.
PingPong believes that he is the greatest statesman ever to have walked the earth, the historical pivot around which the universe revolves. So his thoughts are embedded in China’s Constitution, an honour not even given to Mao’s Red Book.
Countries like India recall their subjugation, but try to move on. We celebrate Independence Day on 15 August, not Colonization Day on 2 August (1848) when we formally became a colony. China seems stuck in a time warp.
It observes 18 September as National Humiliation Day to commemorate Japanese aggression. It is a time for wallowing in the national obsession with a century of indignities inflicted on a weak China until the Communists came to power in 1949. Why is Xi nervous? The CPC monolith is cracking and Humpty Dumpty, sitting on the Great Wall, will have a greater fall.
Desperate for real estate, he had hoped to swallow some poor weak nations. Now his buddies, Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, and Satan wait impatiently to swallow him.
The free world can accelerate the process by boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Boycotts have happened before.
Ambassador Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau; and a Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil. The views expressed are personal.