Perhaps the only thing hotter than the subject of the coronavirus at present is the discussion of China’s accountability as the country of its origin. President Donald J. Trump has been pressing the Chinese for greater transparency, arguing that if the country had not been so secretive, the virus might’ve been stopped in its tracks.
Trump himself has a lot of explaining to do about his own early praise of the Chinese response to the virus and his own lax reaction. But we mustn’t allow criticism of Trump’s behavior to obfuscate the Chinese role in the catastrophe, anymore than we can let Chinese culpability obscure the lack of Alexandrian leadership — leadership from the front — on the part of Trump and other world figures like Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, whose macho approach to the virus threatens to decimate the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest. If failure is always an orphan, as the proverb suggests, it certainly has many negligent step-parents.
So we must be careful in our parsing. Innocent lives hang in the balance. Still, the Chinese are at the epicenter of responsibility, as America’s often long-suffering allies have also come to acknowledge, pressing China for answers. And rightly so: This is not China’s first time at the virus rodeo. SARS originated in Foshan municipality, Guangdong province in November 2002. China not only obscured details about the novel coronavirus, skewing the data, but it became indignant when Europeans proved insufficiently grateful for the substandard protective equipment it provided them. And some in China were openly gleeful to see rivals America and Japan suffering. This does not win friends and influence people.
More important, however, China is a country caught between its communist present and traditional past. This produces a rigidity that makes it tough to pivot and tends to have unforeseen consequences — unforeseen by the Chinese but not by some observers. Witness the disastrous one-child policy in the 1980s that selected for boy babies and has created a dearth of marriageable women today. Why? Because Chinese tradition holds that boys, particularly the oldest son, care for the parents in old age. The Chinese could modify this , of course. Instead, they have a society in which they must try to shame single women into marrying — often in vain — while some young men go abroad to find Vietnamese or South Korean brides, who don’t come cheap.
Indeed, in an effort to control their population, the communist Chinese leaders — men, I might add — have put women in the driver’s seat of the mating game, and all because of tradition. Which brings us to the now-defunct Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a so-called wet market that dealt in live wild or exotic animals where the coronavirus apparently jumped from animal to human transmission.
Trump, however, has been trumpeting the notion that the virus had originated in a lab near the Wuhan market, where it was mishandled. Yet Trump and company have provided little evidence that this is the case, leading some to fear that this is another smokescreen for the president’s own bungling that has already resulted in scapegoating Asian-Americans. Perhaps more alarming, some experts are worried that escalating tensions between the United States and China could lead Trump to use the lab scenario to up the political and economic ante.
Remember the weapons of mass destruction that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein didn’t have? Going after Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan for their responsibility in devising the 9/11 attacks was the right thing. Going after Hussein, who had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, only opened up a quagmire in the Middle East.
So the question then becomes could the charge of a lab-born coronavirus be the Trump era’s weapons of mass destruction — or just its weapons of mass distraction?