The prominent academic’s pro-China views can’t just be dismissed as crankery, when they’ve shaped how we talk about COVID-19.
The prominent academic’s pro-China views can’t just be dismissed as crankery, when they’ve shaped how we talk about COVID-19.
J effrey Sachs, the world-renowned economist who leads Columbia University’s sustainable-development program, has advised three U.N. secretaries-general, is the author of numerous books, and regularly appears on television and in the pages of prominent publications. He currently leads the COVID-19 commission of The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal.
He also routinely takes Beijing’s line on a number of issues, including COVID’s origins, China’s role in the world, and the Uyghur genocide.
The Columbia professor has long expressed views with a forgiving attitude toward authoritarian regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party. Over the past few weeks, though, he’s drawn far more attention for doing so than at earlier points in his career. His recent comments shed light on other stances that have shaped the thinking of many people regarding the origins of the coronavirus.
“It was an aha moment,” said Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University professor of chemistry and chemical biology who, with several other scientists around the world, has advocated an independent inquiry into COVID’s origins that includes examination of a theory that Sachs dismisses. Ebright had his epiphany earlier this week when he read an article co-authored by Sachs, “The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified,” published on April 20. “So it’s not just a one-off, that he was involved in creating a cartoonish caricature of a commission,” Ebright said. “He is also writing cartoonish caricatures of op-eds on a completely different aspect of U.S. China policy.”
Sachs did not respond to National Review’s request for comment.
Whataboutism and Genocide Denial
Earlier this month, Sachs appeared on a BBC panel about the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach on climate, which has included seeking “cooperation” with China on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Naturally, this has led some China observers to ask whether such engagement is possible as long as the Chinese regime continues to perpetrate mass atrocities against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region. When the television program’s host introduced the segment, though, Sachs lambasted her framing of the issue: “I’m not sure why BBC started with listing only China’s human rights abuses,” he said. “What about America’s human rights abuses? The Iraq War, together with the U.K., completely illegal, and under false pretenses.”
Sachs then went on to list what he deemed to be other morally equivalent U.S. transgressions, including the decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, white supremacy, and mass incarceration. “I thought we were going to talk about climate change, which we should,” he continued. “But I think that the idea that ‘there is one party that is so guilty, how can we talk to them?’ is just a strange way to address the issue.”
But Teng Biao, the Chinese dissident and human-rights lawyer who appeared with Sachs on the BBC panel, found Sachs’s comments to be strange. In an interview, he told National Review that not only were Sachs’s arguments unrelated to the panel’s focus, but they could not be justified: “He’s using political whataboutism to defend the Chinese Communist Party.”
Mass detention, rape, forced labor — such are the horrors of the CCP’s conduct. Sachs objected to accusations that the CCP is in the midst of committing mass atrocities because raising this issue could hinder diplomacy. It would seem that, for Sachs, not only is U.S.–China cooperation on climate an imperative, but it’s one that ought not be impeded by fear of accidentally legitimizing Beijing’s human-rights atrocities.
Prior to the segment, Teng was aware only that Sachs was an expert on economics and climate change, but he then came across the April 20 article by Sachs and William Schabas, an international lawyer and expert on genocide. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary and growing recognition of the repression of the Uyghurs, the authors charge that the U.S. government “failed” to make its case effectively for its genocide determination. (The evidence, though, was convincing enough for the parliaments of the Netherlands, Canada, and the U.K. to issue their own genocide determinations.)
While it’s true that some observers have quibbled in good faith with the precise policy determination of genocide, which carries severe legal ramifications, they have nonetheless condemned Beijing’s actions as egregious, large-scale abuses. When, for instance, a recent Human Rights Watch report on Xinjiang noted that it could not document the existence of “the necessary genocidal intent at this time” to make a determination, it nonetheless noted that nothing precludes the possibility that genocide is an appropriate label and pointed out that Beijing’s acts are clearly crimes against humanity — a charge just as severe.
But the argument put forth by Sachs and Schabas goes much further than questioning the precise policy determination: Despite the evidence of repressive actions, their article is exculpatory of the regime and fails to address the allegations of crimes against humanity. While they make passing mention of “credible charges of human rights abuses,” they ape CCP talking points on violent extremism in the region and Uyghur birthrates to dismiss the most damning charges of human-rights violations. All of which serves to justify, and downplay, modern mass atrocities.
Teng also found it strange that Sachs would opine on this topic at all. “He doesn’t have a background of law or human rights or China, and he’s so eager to defend the Chinese government’s atrocities in Xinjiang.”
A Pattern of Pro-CCP Apologism
It’s difficult to speak to Schabas’s motivations. Though he is widely regarded as an authority on the topic of genocide, his work in recent years has taken a bizarre turn with his role in defending the Myanmar government from allegations of genocide against the Rohingya people. Sachs’s indignation at the BBC’s extended look at the CCP’s atrocities makes more sense in that, as his recent column attests, it fits into a broader pattern of rank apologism for Beijing’s line.
His columns have previously been syndicated with CGTN, a Chinese state broadcaster, and he has made repeated appearances on the network taking a hard line against U.S. actions that he says are antagonistic toward China. Of course, one can certainly take a stance against current U.S. strategy toward China without covering for the regime’s abuses. Sachs, though, does both, justifying the Party’s actions to his international audience.
In a February 25 column, he takes CCP general secretary Xi Jinping’s pronouncements at face value. Arguing that the Party aims neither to prove that “autocracy outperforms democracy” nor to erode American national security, he cites as evidence Xi’s speech at Davos in January, writing that the Chinese leader “did not talk about the advantages of autocracy, or the failures of democracy, or the great struggle between political systems. Instead, Xi conveyed a message based on multilateralism to address shared global challenges, identifying ‘four major tasks.’” That may be the case, but to take that at face value is silly, considering the party-state’s own assertions about the superiority of its model over democracy.
Worse, it seems as though Sachs is justifying the Party’s authoritarian practices. In a May 2020 op-ed at CNN, he wrote that allegations that COVID emerged from a lab were “reckless and dangerous” and said that the Trump administration’s charges that Beijing engaged in a “coverup” of the coronavirus from late 2019 “played fast and loose with the facts.”
As a result, Sachs has become a darling of Chinese state media and officials, including a foreign-ministry spokesperson, who tweeted a link to his comments from the BBC climate-change panel with an approving message: “This time, the trick backfires.”
Teng, the human-rights lawyer, sees a convergence. “The Chinese Communist Party, the propaganda machine, is using exactly the same narrative tactic,” he says.
Some go even further, alleging that Sachs’s apparent pro-Beijing sympathies have been not only praised by Beijing but deliberately “cultivated,” as Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg put it in Hidden Hand, their recent book on Chinese political-influence operations in Western democracies. They point to one of the Columbia professor’s articles on Huawei, in which Sachs accuses the U.S. government of maligning the Chinese telecom firm under hypocritical pretenses. That article, they write, “would have carried more weight if he did not have such close ties to Huawei,” including his previous endorsement of the company’s “vision of our shared digital future.”
Hamilton and Ohlberg were not, however, the first to notice that column, which was picked apart online soon after it was published in 2018. At the time, some astute China-watchers, such as Isaac Stone Fish, a journalist and former Asia Society Fellow, also pointed out that Sachs had written the foreword to a Huawei position paper. In a statement to Forbes, the Columbia professor denied ever receiving compensation from the telecom firm. Following the backlash, he quit Twitter.
The Hidden Hand authors make a more cutting allegation, writing that “the cultivation of Jeffrey Sachs appears to have taken place over some years, via his links to a number of Chinese state bodies as well as the private energy corporation CEFC, at whose functions he has spoken.” A Washington Free Beacon report from November cited a 2016 U.N. document indicating that Sachs actually served on the CEFC board, despite his later denials.
Whatever the root motivations of his pro-CCP advocacy, what’s clear is that it would be a mistake to dismiss it as mere crankery. Yes, his comments make for engaging Chinese state-media content, but so, too, do the most obscure Western apologists for the regime. It’s his affiliations with a major university and with the U.N. that set him apart. Perched prominently on those platforms, he expresses views, such as his mass-atrocity denialism, that, though discarded by the mainstream, shape the ongoing debate.
The Lancet Commission and the Lab-Leak Theory
Sachs’s influence has played out most prominently in the coronavirus era. Even before the Lancet COVID-19 Commission was founded in July 2020, Sachs had advocated against an investigation into the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Despite some scientists’ pleas that that theory be investigated, Sachs and others involved with the Lancet commission seized the narrative from the early days of the pandemic, leading many in the media to falsely assert that this lab-leak hypothesis isn’t just incorrect but racist, to boot.
Ebright calls the group, which he says hasn’t taken the actions that Sachs and others claimed it would, “entirely a Potemkin commission.” What it has done is bolster “a full-court press” that since January–February 2020 has sought to “cancel in advance any discussion of laboratory accident origins” and create the false impression that there is a scientific consensus that has ruled out a lab leak. “No such consensus existed then. No such consensus exists now,” he says. “But a series of steps were taken to create the illusion to non-scientists in the press, and in policymaking positions that this was the case.”
Two days after Sachs’s CNN op-ed decrying the lab-leak theory, China’s state-owned Xinhua News amplified his claims in an article with the headline, “U.S. scholar warns against anti-China theory amid pandemic.”
Meanwhile, other Lancet commission members, such as Peter Daszak, had been dismissing the possibility of a lab leak for months. Daszak had been making the rounds, telling all manner of different outlets the same thing: “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney,” as he put it on a Democracy Now! program in April 2020. In February, he had signed onto a statement published in The Lancet asserting that COVID “originated in wildlife” and that suggestions to the contrary “do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice.”
It wasn’t until about a year later, after Daszak took part in the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan to investigate the disease’s origins, that his conflicts of interest became part of the broader conversation. As explained in a 60 Minutes segment in March, he leads EcoHealth Alliance, a scientific-research nonprofit that had long collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experiments with several bat coronaviruses took place. In short, Daszak’s organization stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funding if a lab accident is found to be the source of the disease — and, despite this obvious conflict of interest, he chairs the Lancet commission’s task force on the disease’s origins.
These key voices shed light on the leanings of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, which formed on July 9 with the goal of speeding up “global, equitable, and lasting solutions to the pandemic.”
The group’s first, and perhaps only, action came in September, when it released a statement that included several recommendations for the global COVID response. “The evidence to date supports the view that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally occurring virus rather than the result of laboratory creation and release,” states the report, though it also calls for examination of the theory with “scientific rigour and thoroughness.”
When Ebright, the professor of chemical biology, came across the column by Sachs and Schabas on the Uyghur genocide, things suddenly came together. “I was all ‘Of course,’ you know? There’s a pattern here.”