Wuhan. Who'd heard of it this time last year, other than Chinese people and Westerners who'd been there?
Now here we all are, mindful of a disease that's killed two million people around the world.
China. Where it came from. Bats? The Wuhan Institute of Virology? Who knows. Maybe we'll never know. But we do know that China has had in total fewer cases of Covid-19 than have Oman, Panama or Romania. Half as many case as Czechia. The most populous country on earth, where the disease came from, has had just half as many confirmed cases of Covid-19 as little Czechia.
Yes, we remember those early scenes in Wuhan; people banged up inside their tiny flats for a fortnight while police in gas masks roamed the streets truncheoning folk for straying outside. Two weeks later, the local epidemic was over. Today, China's economy is back in action, revving at full throttle. Making masks for the rest of us. Masks and everything else from smartphones to toy cars. Only a repressive, high-tech regime that takes no shit from anti-maskers marching against lockdown, could achieve this.
I'm not suggesting for one moment that the Chinese Communist Party engineered a virus to enfeeble the rest of the world - but bloody hell - it sure looks like it!
OK - so they didn't engineer it, but maybe a bat-soup enthusiast failed to cook his live bat long enough to kill off all the viruses, and so they escaped from their host into another species. The Chinese authorities knew about it but kept the news quiet... until they'd learned enough about what the virus does to people. Then, by accident or design, they let the virus take off, leave the country - and through state repression and smart use of IT, they shut it down at home.
Democracy is different to totalitarianism even in crisis conditions. Maskless protesters decrying lockdown, promulgating conspiracy theories online, enjoying the frisson of a pub drink after 10pm, ignoring the rules that are ignored by those who set them - democracy trips over its own bootlaces.
Meanwhile, the disease continues to rage on around the world. Into a second, potentially deadlier wave. And who knows - Covid-19 may mutate (Covid-22, -28, -35 etc). How 'long Covid' looks long-term is something we'll learn about in the future. But China will cope. "A new strain! Back into your flats comrades for another 14 days while the West takes another battering!"
Payback time for the Century of Humiliation. Payback time for the Opium Wars.
In China, there were 14 new cases notified yesterday. Around 2,000 times fewer than in the US, 1,500 times fewer than in the UK, 1,000 times fewer than in Poland. Yesterday. And as I'm checking the numbers on Worldometers.com, I'm followed by an ad for a Chinese-made electric bicycle. Chinese factories are now working flat out; the Chinese economy has fully recovered from the Q1 hit and is now ready to sell to the world.
Tell you what - I'm not buying.
I don't want anything that's Chinese-made, while a repressive communist regime with an authoritarian hierarch is in charge.
This is not just about Covid-19.
It's about the Uighurs; modern-day Gulags, forced sterilisation, slave labour, indoctrination in Xi Jinping Thought.
It's about Hong Kong; people culturally part of the Western world being forced to knuckle down to communist dictatorship.
It's about Taiwan; a successful island economy that's continually under threat of military invasion from the mainland.
It's about Tibet - a nation invaded by communist China in 1950 and subject to a similarly brutal occupation that Poland endured during the Partitions.
And remember Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who first noticed a SARS-like respiratory illness among his patients and alerted the world - to face repression from the Chinese state, then to die of Covid-19.
A final thought: after the SARS outbreak in 2002-04, what's the likelihood that the Chinese Communist Party wargamed scenarios for a similar, future epidemic/pandemic? And what conclusions might they have reached?
This time last year:
Poznań by night
[from a time when business travel was a regular thing]
This time three years ago:
West of Warsaw's central axis
This time seven years ago:
Plac Unii shopping centre opens
This time nine years ago:
Visceral and Permanent, Part II
This time ten years ago:
Autumn colours, locally
This time 11 years ago:
Edinburgh
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1 comment:
I agree. We need a new national entrepreneurialism that encourages industrious people to make things locally and the rest of us to value and buy them. Even if that means fewer and better things - no more pointless fast fashion. And to trade these things amongst friendly, decent nations. (Incidentally I haven't called this 'national capitalism' because I value a system that serves people who work hard and carefully rather than the money that lubricates the system.)
China is simply better at reacting. They have worked out how to use the terrible power that they wield. But our nations could wield a merciful power that respects human dignity. (I can't see that in the UK when government fights free meals for children in poverty.)
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