Why We Shouldnt Blame China for the Coronavirus
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As the coronavirus crisis grows in severity and scope, this week I’m starting to see a blame game being played on Fox News, in youtube comments, and in presidential press briefings. Normally I don’t pay much attention to this stuff. Blaming china has become a familiar political strategy in our country that has cut to the core of our national psyche in this moment, so much so that you can make ridiculous videos like this. Recently, though, I’ve started seeing respectable authors and people I personally know promote this narrative. Frankly, that scares and frustrates me, not just because it can promote racism, but because it indicates an ignorance both of history and the world that is dangerous. After having studied the language for 8 years, having spent a semester in highschool and college in China, and having so many friends and colleagues who call China home, the thought of our two countries deterioriating further into nasty conflict with each other saddens me. So I decided to write about it.
A History of Pandemics
A lot of us don’t really know what living through a pandemic means because none of us have ever lived through one. The most comparable historical pandemic to coronavirus everyone’s been talking about is the 1918 Spanish flu. Now, the 1918 Spanish Flu started right in the middle of World War 1, and was primarily spread through soldiers moving around the world during the war (I hope the idea of being forced into a draft to death by bullets or microbes makes wfh and Netflix feel a little better right now). But that isn’t the whole story, and unfortunately most Americans never learned the whole story. As my friend who is an AP US history teacher tells me, the Spanish flu was given a grand total of 1 sentence in their 500-page history textbook. So, let’s take a second to fix the damage of our shitty history education.
There’s a couple interesting things we often forget about the 1918 flu. First, it was called the Spanish flu not because it started in Spain, but because media about the flu was censored virtually everywhere except Spain, especially in the US. This was because the government was heavily censoring media about the flu at the time to keep wartime morale high. Because of this, cities like Philadelphia ignored pleas to cancel large war parades, which led to countless avoidable deaths. Second, it killed lots of people who weren’t involved in WW1, and its toll was much more global than the war. Apart from the millions of Europeans and Americans who died, 1-10 million Chinese died, 1 million Indonesians died, and 1-2 million Iranians died. Over 10 million Indians died, more than any other country. Third, it seems likely that the 1918 flu started in the United States, and there’s no question that American, British, and French troops were the primary driver of spread around the world. In spite of all of this, the west paid virtually no price for bringing this plague to the rest of the world while denying its existence. Shouldn’t Indians and others around the world have blamed Americans and called it the Kentucky Flu?
No, and I’m glad they didn’t. The world was getting more interconnected in the 20th century, and this led to the greatest advancements in public health against disease the world had ever seen, bringing global life expectancy from 25 years in 1800 to over 72 years. What’s important to note is that these advancements started in the United States and spread to the rest of the world. Whatever suffering and death the west caused the rest of the world with the Spanish flu was vastly outweighed by the health benefits of global cooperation and leadership by the west. Despite the fact that more people died in India from the 1918 Kentucky Flu than anywhere else, Indians also lived much longer, healthier lives because of cooperation with America, and it would’ve been much worse if the world responded to the flu by turning away from the west.
The thing about new, highly infectious diseases, is that they happen everywhere, and they very often go global. Ebola started in South Sudan in 1976, H1N1 flu started in the United States in 2009, MERS started in Saudi Arabia in 2012, and each of them spread to many other countries despite being less contagious than COVID-19. The American H1N1 flu killed 200000-500000 people globally because of pig farming in the US. The fact that none of these were as globally catastrophic as COVID-19 isn’t because these countries did a better job of managing the disease than China has. It’s because these diseases happened to be less contagious or less deadly. It was luck, plain and simple. Yes, the wild animal trade in China caused the coronavirus and it should be stopped, but virtually every country has a structurally problematic livestock industry that has led to new pandemics, the US is no exception. Anyone who blames the coronavirus solely on China’s free speech problems knows nothing about the history of pandemics.
Even more important than it being ahistorical to blame china in this crisis, it’s deeply harmful to humanity’s practical ability to fight it.
A Pandemic is a global problem that requires global cooperation
Many people have compared the coronavirus to climate change, as both are global issues that pose existential risks that scientists have been ignored for decades. One point I’d like to make here is that the biggest milestone we’ve achieved in recent years on climate change, the Paris agreement, only became possible when a year earlier, the US and China agreed to far-reaching emissions cuts. Many Americans criticized this deal, complaining that emissions restrictions on China were too loose and didn’t punish China enough for it’s world leading pollution. But it was precisely this deal, this cooperation that laid the groundwork for the Paris agreement getting passed next year. If we had listened to critics of the US-China Climate Pact, the Paris agreement would never have been passed, and the world would be much worse off on climate action. Of course we need much more action, but our lack of progress since the Paris Agreement is largely because the US has abandoned this sort of global cooperation, as Trump calls climate change a “chinese hoax”. Without cooperation and good relations between the US and China, there is no hope to solve global issues.
We need scientific cooperation.
Researchers and Doctors around the world depend heavily on research from China to fight the virus to:
- Understand its fatality rate
- Understand if and how children spread it
- Understand its genetic makeup for testing and drug targets
We should be doing everything we can to cooperate with China and continue to share knowledge to set an example to the rest of the world that scientists must join hands across borders in fighting this threat.
We need political cooperation.
Of course, there’s no doubt that censorship played a role in allowing the outbreak to get out of control. But then again, if it was so easy to acknowledge the outbreak and act quickly, other countries would have done it. The list of countries who have downplayed the outbreak in early days when it was still controllable with catastrophic results is long. Here’s just a few examples:
Now, there are hundreds of imported cases from each of these countries around the world. Many countries share responsibility for needlessly exacerbating this crisis by refusing to acknowledge the threat. Whether that happened because they live in an authoritarian state that repressed scientists or because they lived in a fake news mobocracy that discredits scientists doesn’t make a difference, the result is the same. We still need international political cooperation to get out of this mess. As Yuval Harari argues
“International cooperation is needed also for effective quarantine measures. Quarantine and lock-down are essential for stopping the spread of epidemics. But when countries distrust one another and each country feels that it is on its own, governments hesitate to take such drastic measures. If you discover 100 coronavirus cases in your country, would you immediately lock down entire cities and regions? To a large extent, that depends on what you expect from other countries. Locking down your own cities could lead to economic collapse. If you think that other countries will then come to your help – you will be more likely to adopt this drastic measure. But if you think that other countries will abandon you, you would probably hesitate until it is too late.”
We need medical and humanitarian cooperation.
China is the medical manufacturing hub of the world, and that will not change overnight, no matter how much we yell that it should. It has typically been the role of the United States to provide aid to the world in global health emergencies, but because we’ve botched things so badly, we will not be able to provide such aid in this crisis, at least in the short term. China has shown that it can provide that aid in Iran, Italy, and even the US, and the world needs that aid. Of course, this is partially a power grab by China in a vacuum of global leadership. But I’d argue some global leadership during this crisis is better than none, especially at a time when the United States is attempting to hoard vaccines for itself. Perhaps some find it uncomfortable that China is trying to assume global leadership, but personally I find a world without any global leadership far more concerning, and until the United States reclaims its role, which doesn’t seem like it’s happening any time soon, I know that Italians and Iranians are grateful for China’s efforts to take some of that responsibility.
“I don’t know and now I don’t care,” Michele Geraci, a former under secretary in the Italian economic development ministry, said in an interview when asked whether the assistance reflected China’s geopolitical ambitions as much as humanitarian concerns. NYT
The challenge ahead for Americans
You might be wondering, why defend china, especially right now in the midst of a global death spree with Chinese origin? After all, they’re also spreading misinformation that the United States military created the coronavirus as a bioweapon, why shouldn’t we blame them? Also, China’s done lots and lots of bad things. It caused the greatest dying in human history, it is imprisoning millions of muslims in XinJiang in barbaric camps, and yes, local Chinese officials suppressed information indicating an outbreak in Wuhan that started this whole crisis. When you look at china with an open mind, you can find a lot of dark stuff. And it’s tempting to point a finger at China when shit’s hitting the fan, especially when it’s clear that Chinese officials fucked up in early management of this crisis. But that isn’t the point.
We have ended up in this mess largely because we have put politics over truth, just as we blame the Chinese to have done. The conceit of our system is that more freedom is better for truth. We have seen that time and again to not be the case, and the idiot in the white house and his many, many followers who trumpet the importance of free speech when they spout hateful lies is a perfect example of that we should not ignore. That doesn’t mean authoritarian countries are all fundamentally better, but it also doesn’t mean they’re fundamentally worse. For example, the Straits Times in singapore, widely called a mouthpiece for the government in a country where free speech is certainly restricted for example has excellent coverage on the coronavirus. In general, the singapore government has been fantastic in public state communication about the virus and how people can prevent it, much better than the free media in the west, where fake news such as how you can diagnose the virus by holding your breath for 10 seconds has been rampant. Now Singapore has its own problems and benefits, as does China, as does the United States. But let’s think deeper about the things that make any of these societies better in dealing with global crises like the coronavirus, rather than arguing about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
It seems to me the best predictor of the quality of truth in a society is how scientifically and intellectually literate the society is, not what system of government it has. The USA was the leader of the world in science and effective governence in the first half of the 20th century, precisely because we spent money on research and universities, our population was the most educated, and it was cool to be smart. I think our pride around democracy has blinded us to the fact that we have to have an educated populace and a strong civic culture for it to work. We haven’t done the work of maintaining that civic culture. I and many other young people didn’t vote in 2014 even though I could have, and that fact fucked our governement. This primary, I voted for and donated to elizabeth warren, and many young americans are starting to get back into civic engagement, but my concern is it’s too little too late. Efficient and stable government depends on people doing the hard work of engaging with govt patiently, and we seem to have lost that ability in the us in favor of knee-jerk ideological reactions. There’s a lot to criticize about China, but there’s also a lot to learn. Their investments in research, science education, public health and their social solidarity have put them on better footing in this crisis. I think it’s ultimately patriotic for us to try and learn that so we can get back to being the benevelont defender of the international community who leads by example, rather than one of its many tragic villains.
