The US administration has taken a quantum leap in the toughness of its relationship with China. On 29 May it blamed China directly for the global spread of COVID. During the first weeks of the outbreak, the Beijing regime engaged in a strategy of censorship and repression of its own scientific community and civilian population to deny the existence of the virus. The loss of this precious time has helped COVID-19 reach its current pandemic proportions.
The world is holding its breath in the absence of specific treatment for the almost unknown severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of the pandemic known as COVID-19. The first outbreak began in late 2019 in the Chinese province of Hubei, whose 58 million inhabitants include its capital city, Wuhan, with a population of around 12 million people.
Following analysis of its DNA, the international scientific community has ruled out that the virus was manufactured. in vitro. However, the five continents are wondering whether COVID-19 could have accidentally passed outside from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab is known for studying the impact of the coronavirus on bats, the mammals it affects as an endemic disease. While in 2018 a member of the US Department of State expressed its concern about the low safety standards at the site in two internal memos, but at the moment there is no evidence to conclude that the virus escaped from Chinese laboratories.
Against this background, the President of France, Emmanuel Macronand the UK Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, following a virtual meeting of the G-7 held on 16 April, said that the origins of the virus "happened in ways we don't know about" and that China in the future "will have to answer difficult questions". But beyond the uncertainties over its provenance - which remains under investigation - the Chinese government's methods of crisis management come under increasing scrutiny from the international community with each passing day.
Reputation over lives
The epicentre of the outbreak is in Wuhan, in the popular Wuhan food market. Huanan, located eight miles from the Virological Institute. A market where live seafood and wild animals - including bats, civets, snakes and pangolins - are sold and cooked in virtually unsanitary conditions. The New York Times y The Economist have echoed the hypothesis that an accidentally infected researcher from the Wuhan lab had gone to eat at this market. For his part, the president Trump, in a statement to the press, has spoken in this context of "a terrible mistake". In the eyes of international public opinion, however, there is as yet no conclusive evidence to support such claims.
It is clear, however, that the Chinese government's reaction was to conceal the facts once the first cases of infected people became known on 20 December 2019.
In other words, the Public Administration of the former Central Empire did not act in the first place to protect the inhabitants of the area, but to defend the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party by the crudest method: denying the existence of the problem and threatening reprisals to anyone who argued otherwise.
The doctor Li Wenliang, the doctor who issued a coronavirus warning to his former students on 30 December, was charged with "spreading rumours", an offence punishable by seven years' imprisonment. His warnings were silenced. Li died on 7 February of the disease he warned about, while the Beijing government tried to quell both the outpouring of support for him and the tide of indignation against the authorities.
By hiding the outbreak from the Chinese media, the public did not stop visiting the food market until its official closure, ordered on 1 January 2020. Censorship on Chinese social media and mobile phones also forced the deletion of keywords referring to the outbreak, while several doctors and nurses were imprisoned for warning the public.
Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China and General Secretary of the CCP, rejected the initial month-long offers of assistance by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And despite the fact that Chinese officials were in contact with the World Health Organisation (WHO), He also chose to ignore their advice.
The documents of the Chinese National Health Commission The COVID-19 reports acknowledged the dark picture, but were labelled as "internal" and their public dissemination was banned during January. In the meantime, Li Qun, head of the China Centre for Disease Control EmergenciesThe first death acknowledged by the regime was a 61-year-old man in Wuhan who had visited the Huanan market. The first death acknowledged by the regime was that of a 61-year-old man from Wuhan who had visited the Huanan market. He died on 9 January. Two days later the authorities confirmed the identity of the virus, but made no reference to the start of the pandemic.
Obscurity in death toll figures
It was only when the first case of coronavirus appeared outside China - on 13 January in Thailand-The Communist authorities discarded their strategy of concealment; the discredit would have been greater if a foreign country had recognised the epidemic before the state from which it originated. President Xi made his first public statements on the virus on 20 January. The outbreak "must be taken seriously", he warned. The city of Wuhan was finally closed on 23 January. According to the study published on 13 February by the University of SouthamptonIf the Chinese government had acted one, two or three weeks earlier, the number of affected people in the UK would have been reduced by 66, 86 or 95%, respectively.
The Chinese government's policies are having a strong impact beyond its own borders. The slow reaction of the international community stems not only from the unpredictability factor associated with an unknown disease, but also from a month-long conscious effort by the party-state apparatus to, firstly, censor and persecute its own population, secondly, conceal significant data from the concert of nations, and finally, carry out management with serious signs of ineffectiveness.
Several intelligence agencies, including those in the US, believe that the communist regime's manipulation also affects the data we have on the pandemic in China itself. This creates an analytical distortion that makes it impossible to assess the real impact of COVID-19 on the world's population, undermining the effectiveness of health strategies.
Moreover, there are serious doubts about the figures provided by China. According to Beijing's official figures, the total number of its citizens who died would amount to 4,642 out of a population of 1.4 billion. On SpainChina, with 47 million inhabitants, the number of deaths, also according to official data, exceeds 25,000 on the day this text was written. A simple extrapolation that crosses Spanish data with the number of inhabitants of China gives the figure of 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus in the Asian country, a number that would fall short when compared with unofficial figures.
Strong pressure to intimidate the European Union
It is no secret that the Beijing regime, aware that its image is seriously damaged by its systematic misrepresentations and concealments, exerts enormous pressures on Europe that go into the realm of more or less veiled threats. Europe's own European Union External Action Service recognises that these disinformation tactics also seek to discredit the effectiveness of Western democracies in stemming the current crisis and to reinforce - by contrast - Beijing's entrenchment of its neo-communist model.
The EU's position on the Chinese government's global disinformation campaign is defined as follows Josep Borrell, vice-president of the European Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Common Security Policy. At this point in time The Washington Post y The New York Times consider Borrell's authorisation of the amendment of a report to remove the most critical aspects of the report on China to be a sell-out.
The High Representative has acknowledged the existence of Chinese pressure, but denies any concessions. The argument used by Josep Borrell is that from the beginning he had two reports in mind: one, public, softer, and the other, internal, with 100% of the information, including the harshest contents.
In any case, the most dramatically certain consequence of this biological Chernobyl is that worldwide - excluding the dubious data provided by China - more than 240,000 people have died from COVID-19 and the lives of several million more are in danger. As for the economic impact of the pandemic on the world economy, it is clear that it will be enormous.
Meanwhile, China's Gramscian-style neo-Marxist dictatorship is taking advantage of the world's attention on the coronavirus to turn its repressive policies in the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong. Pro-democracy leaders in the former British colony are being detained by the regime. Fourteen of its most prominent leaders, including newspaper editors and political representatives, have been behind bars since 18 April. They will be tried this May for organising the mass demonstrations in 2019.
If there is one positive aspect of the current pandemic, it is that it has served to sound the alarm bells of international public opinion about the methods and objectives of the Chinese regime, which is objectively responsible for the spread of COVID-19 around the world.
This article was originally published in FAES Foundation. You can access it by clicking here here.
José Barros
Journalist and communications consultant.