China’s corruption and misrule are to blame for this global health emergency | thearticle

The World Health Organisation has declared the outbreak of coronavirus to be a global health emergency. Foreign nationals are fleeing China, where the disease originated, aboard chartered

flights taking them into quarantine in their home countries. Huge areas of China are locked down and usually overcrowded cities have become ghost towns. Pharmaceutical companies are racing

to find a vaccine; protection from the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is not likely to be available to the public for many months if and after it is produced. The emergence of coronavirus marks the

third time in the 21st century that the world has been confronted by a potential pandemic — after SARS in 2002 and Ebola in 2013. It is a reminder that infectious diseases can severely test

national and international security. Global travel and trade have already been severely disrupted; the economic, political and social impact will be far-reaching. Like SARS and Ebola,

coronavirus is a zoonotic disease, meaning it originated in animals and was transmitted to humans. Like SARS, it originated in China, where produce markets keep wildlife and domesticated

animals side-by-side for sale as food, and the authorities have failed to tackle what has long been recognised as a dangerous practice. The emergence of coronavirus is evidence of a range of

failures of the Chinese Communist Party, and has once again highlighted the fragility of China’s authoritarian political system. Public hygiene is an obvious area of concern. Timely

transmission of information is another. The veracity of official figures, from harvest yields to economic growth, has long been a concern. On Twitter, a senior Foreign Ministry official this

week bragged about the speed with which hospitals are being built to deal with the spread of the infection — comparing it fatuously to the time it takes to connect broadband in the United

States — seemingly oblivious to the fact that if China’s authorities had learned the lessons of SARS almost a decade ago, perhaps they wouldn’t have to build the hospitals in the first

place. This delusional reaction to global concern about how China is dealing with the outbreak of a rapidly spreading, incurable infectious disease is, in my experience, typical of the

thin-skinned attitude of Chinese officialdom to criticism. The country’s history, since the founding of the New China in 1949, is littered with the tragic results of the lies and filth that

are endemic across the country. In the 1950s, famine caused the deaths of tens of millions of people; the true figure is not known, but is put anywhere between 18 million and 45 million.

They died of hunger after local and regional officials reported record harvests thanks to Mao Zedong’s radical agricultural reforms. They were under pressure to report success, and so they

did, lying to the emperor far away in Beijing that their grain silos were bulging when in fact people were scratching the earth for blades of grass and picking the bark off trees in their

desperation for something to eat. The same instincts were in play in Wuhan, the city of 11 million that was pinpointed as the source of coronavirus. Cases of an influenza-like illness

started showing up in Wuhan hospitals weeks before the outbreak was officially acknowledged by state-controlled media on December 31, as Mark O’Neill reported for TheArticle. It was not

until mid-January that the Chinese State started to act, after the current emperor, President-for-life Xi Jinping, issued a nationwide alert. The lessons of SARS — which killed more than 800

people worldwide in 2002-03, arguably due to the Chinese government’s slow and inadequate response to the rising number of infections — have clearly not been learned. Then, the sale of

wildlife in food markets was temporarily banned. But regulations are easily flouted in a country where officials can be bribed, and rules are often selectively applied according to

relationships, or _guanxi_, that are widely considered more important: _You guangxi, shenmo dou mei guanxi_, the saying goes — if you have the right relationships, nothing is a problem. The

WHO declaration that coronavirus is now a global emergency enables United Nation members to decide whether or not to close their borders, cancel flights and screen arrivals. By Thursday, WHO

said, almost 2,000 cases had been detected worldwide. Most cases were inside China, it said, with 82 cases reported in another 18 countries. Today, two cases were confirmed in Britain. The

disease was incubating as Chinese began travelling in their tens of millions domestically and internationally for the annual Spring Festival holiday. Like SARS, the number of coronavirus

infections is climbing fast. SARS reached 29 countries within six months and infected around 8,000 people, with a mortality rate of about 10 per cent, according to studies. It was quickly

contained, unlike Ebola, which took two years to contain after its 2013 emergence, which killed more than 11,000 people. The _Financial Times_ has reported that each case of coronavirus is

infecting another 2.5 people on average. The virus has so far caused severe respiratory disease in a quarter of all confirmed cases, with mortality of 2 to 3 per cent, it said. The

coronavirus outbreak comes as China is experiencing a slowdown in economic growth, amid an as-yet-unresolved trade dispute with the United States. This alone poses potential problems for the

power pact that the Communist Party has with the Chinese population. If growth and the concomitant prosperity it brings to hundreds of millions of people falters, Xi’s rule, and the power

of the Party, could falter. While the WHO has expressed confidence in China’s ability to deal with the outbreak, which has spread across the country, increased global scepticism about China,

and a sharp eye to the falsehoods, failures, corruption and misrule of Xi and his cohort, would be a healthy outcome of this outbreak of illness.