President Trump has been yelping all over the media recently about how China hid the outbreak of what this congenital racist calls the “Wuhan virus.”
Except that you’d be forgiven for dismissing his yelps as just more lies. After all, according to The Washington Post, he has told over 18,000 lies since taking his oath of office in January 2017.
And those do not include his head-spinning spurts of hypocrisy, which tweets like this expose almost daily:
China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020
In fact, the May 4 edition of Politico documents the “15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe.”
But Trump’s pathological mendacity and China’s institutional perfidy are not mutually exclusive. As it happens, I have labored in vain to warn the world about both.
Regarding Trump, the following titles to a few commentaries alone speak volumes:
- “Trump for President?! Don’t Be a Sucker!” April 8, 2011
- “Trump Birther Nonsense: Take 2,” May 31, 2012
- “Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” August 26, 2016
- “WTF! President-elect Donald J. Trump?! America. What. Have. You. Done?” November 9, 2016
Regarding China, the same:
- “Yahoo Becomes China’s Most Favored National Thought Police,” September 12, 2005
- “South Africa Bans Dalai Lama from Peace Conference to Appease China…?” March 24, 2009
- “Countries Queuing Up to Become as Indebted to China as US,” September 15, 2011
- “Wait Till China Begins Doing to Its Neighbors What Russia Is Doing to Its,” April 26, 2014
- “China Buying the Global Influence Russia and US Fighting For…,” October 16, 2016
- “China: Where Hong Kong Is Concerned, Britain Is Adrift at Sea,” July 1, 2017
- “China Using Loans to Colonize the World,” August 20, 2018
But this is more about China than Trump. Therefore, I shall proceed accordingly.
In “Covid-19 Power Grabs Are Playing Out Just as I Feared…and Warned” (April 17), I alluded to many of the geopolitical themes I wrote about in those and many other commentaries. But the way I countered Henry Kissinger’s concerns about China using this crisis to “alter the world order” bears repeating:
Try as it might to buy friends and influence nations, China will never enjoy the goodwill the United States did as deus ex machina after WWII. …
It hardly helps China’s attempt to play a supplanting role that every country is now branding it the pariah nation that unleashed this coronavirus on the world. Resentment is bound to abound for generations.
Trump is clearly a flawed messenger. As those titles and this quote demonstrate, however, he was merely echoing the message I’ve been preaching for years. Indeed, from their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to their cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in 2019, Chinese leaders appear to have learned nothing about the critical art of engendering goodwill – at home or abroad.
I don’t mind admitting that I wanted to see China challenge the United States for supremacy as the world’s sole superpower. If he’s still with us, John Cotton, headmaster at St. Andrew’s Prep in Boca Raton, Florida, would attest that I delivered a 75-minute oration (with no notes) on the evolution of politics, religion, and culture in China as part of my senior thesis.
My affinity for and interest in China were that great. Unfortunately, watching China learn to become a superpower since then has been like watching an idiot savant, with a complex case of Tourette’s, learn to become a diplomat.
This is why I feel obliged to share a little more of what I’ve been preaching about. To that end, here is an excerpt from “World Beware, China Calling In (Loan-Sharking) Debts,” February 3, 2010:
__________
This episode of naked bullying should serve as a warning to all countries around the world that are not just lapping up China’s largesse but heralding it as a more worthy superpower than the United States. After all, China is spitting imperious and vindictive fire at the rich and mighty United States over a relatively insignificant matter like meeting with the Dalai Lama. So just imagine what it would do to a poor and weak country in a conflict over a truly significant matter.
I anticipated that the Chinese would be every bit as arrogant in the use of their power as the Americans. But I never thought they would use it for such a petty cause.
In point of fact here, in part, is how I admonished countries in the Caribbean and Latin America in this respect almost five years ago in “China Buying Political Dominion Over the Caribbean (Latin America and Africa)!” February 22, 2005:
What happens if China decides that converting the container ports, factories, and chemical plants it has funded throughout the Caribbean into dual military and commercial use is in its strategic national interest? Would these governments comply? Would they have any real choice? And when they do comply, would the United States then blockade that island – the way it blockaded Cuba during the Missile Crisis?
‘Now consider China making similar strategic moves in Latin America and Africa, where its purportedly benign Yuan diplomacy dwarfs its Caribbean operations. This new Cold War could then turn very hot indeed.
It clearly does not bode well that China has no compunction about drawing moral and political equivalence between its beef with the United States over the Dalai Lama and America’s beef with it over internet espionage, unfair trade practices, and support for indicted war criminals like President Bashir of Sudan. Because irrational resentment in a regional menace like North Korea is one thing; in a global power like China, it’s quite another.
__________
With that in mind, you can ignore Trump. Because Covid-19 has even The Washington Post and The New York Times echoing my message about China these days.
First, this from the April 30 edition of the Post:
China’s effort to avoid accountability for the novel coronavirus pandemic through a global propaganda campaign seems to be doing as much harm as good for Beijing. Attempts by government officials and state media to cast blame on the United States or other Western countries for the origin and spread of the virus have triggered a backlash; deliveries of humanitarian supplies have led to reports about their poor quality.
Rather than retreat, President Xi Jinping’s regime has turned to a familiar tactic: bullying.
And this from the May 4 edition of the Times:
Coronavirus survivors want answers, and China is silencing them. …
In Wuhan, where the pandemic started, the police have threatened and interrogated grieving relatives. Lawyers have been warned not to help them sue.
Meanwhile, you might think your country has only ceded the manufacturing of “non-essential” things like toys, games, and cheap clothing to China. But, like most countries, it has probably also ceded the manufacturing of essential things like computers, electrical machinery, and medical supplies. Hell, did you know that even the mighty United States has to rely on China for something as essential as penicillin…? Again, he’s a flawed messenger, but Trump is right for exclaiming, how could our leaders have been so stupid!
More importantly, other world leaders would do well to follow his lead in this respect:
The global spread of the coronavirus is reigniting efforts by the Trump administration to encourage more American manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and reduce dependence on China for the drugs and medical products that fuel the federal health care system. [Of course, countries should reduce their dependence for many other essential things too, most notably the rare earth elements that are used in iPhones, electric cars, HD televisions, missile guidance systems, superconductors, and too many other essential products to list.]
(The New York Times, March 11, 2020)
Now, here in a nutshell is why manufacturing your own medical supplies is so … essential: There are credible reports that, after months of hoarding personal protective equipment (PPEs) and other medical supplies to fight Covid-19, China began selling them to desperate countries like a drug dealer selling crack to the very users he got hooked. And it does not make China look any better that the United States has been elbowing countries, big and small, out of the way to get its fix.
Incidentally, this reputational damage to the United States was baked in the day Trump won his black-swan election. But the infamous way he elbowed the president of Montenegro out of his way at a NATO meeting in May 2017 was just one of many foreshadowings of this lord-of-the-flies quest for Covid-19 supplies.
American exceptionalism is such, though, that this country seems blessed with eternal saving grace. Only this explains how it got over the warmongering George W. Bush with Barack Obama. And polls indicate that it will soon get over this preening-dotard Trump with, well, Obama 2.0, Joe Biden. By contrast, as indicated above, China is today as it was 30 years ago, and as it will be 30 years from now.
Given all the above, is it any wonder I feel vindicated…? For as unworthy a superpower as the United States clearly is, it is still a more worthy superpower than China or any other power could ever be. By way of analogy, what former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said of democracy comes to mind:
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
(International Churchill Society, November 11, 1947)
That said, I feel obliged to share that my vindication is tempered by the sympathy this all-too-foreseeable spectacle evokes:
Black people in China ‘banned from McDonald’s and evicted from their homes’ over coronavirus fears. …
‘Notice: We’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant,’ reads a sign outside McDonald’s in Guangzhou. It advised that all black patrons ‘notify the local police’ and seek ‘medical isolation’.
(The Independent, April 15, 2020)
Think about that: Africans are being treated in Covid-19 China today the way blacks were in Jim-Crow America during the 1950s …
The Chinese government has announced a “raft of new measures” to promote racial tolerance. But this reeks of the kind of cynicism inherent in the Taliban announcing measures to promote religious tolerance. Again, think what you will of America today, but I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find any African living in China who wouldn’t rather be living here.
Frankly, just as it was with the Soviet Union and the infamous nuclear accident at Chernobyl, so it is with China and the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Totalitarian regimes have shown time and again that we simply cannot trust them to do the right thing. And this is so even if they are faced with a choice between saving the world from an existential threat and protecting their ruthlessly cultivated reputation of invincibility … and infallibility.
Of course, ultimately, the propaganda they propagate is intended to get their people to revere them, not to get us to trust them. Apropos of this, the Chinese government is reporting the big lie that it has done such a good job of fighting this coronavirus that, as of today, this country (of 1.3 billion people) has suffered fewer than 4,700 deaths. But, according to a March 27 investigative report by Radio Free Asia, the Wuhan region alone has suffered more than 40,000.
‘There’s a lot of concern about how this opacity inside China prevented greater international coordination and cooperation,’ [Mario Esteban, a senior analyst specializing in E.U.-East Asia relations at the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid] tells TIME. ‘Nobody believes China’s numbers.’
(TIME, April 1, 2020)
By contrast, even though Trump is always boasting about doing the best job humanly possible, the United States has suffered more than 74,000 deaths … What’s more, the US government is openly modeling that this country (of 330 million people) will suffer twice that toll by June 1.
In any event, coming full circle, if your country had to choose either China or the United States to help it fight an even deadlier virus, which one would you want as your superpower ally in that fight?
I rest my case.
Related commentaries:
WTF America… Birther nonsense…
China… power grabs… Montenegro…
Joe Biden… coronavirus thread…