More than two years after Covid-19 appeared to bedevil our lives — with the first cases manifesting just a bit down the road from a state-run lab doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses — and after the virus killed 6.2 million people around the world — likely a huge undercount — China is still locking down an enormous portion of its citizens: “Nearly 400 million people are estimated to be under some form of lockdown in China as officials try to stop a fast-moving Omicron outbreak that is beginning to weigh on the world’s second-largest economy.”
For a long while, those of us on the right have argued that many corners of U.S. media world treated the Chinese government with kid gloves. Your mileage may vary, but I would argue bit by bit, month by month, the coverage of the Chinese government has gradually gotten more critical — although perhaps not as critical as you would prefer. But the latest sweeping lockdowns and inhumane treatment of innocent people have brought a fairly widespread revulsion among Americans paying attention; you have to look pretty hard to find any American political leader or health expert nodding and declaring, “Yes, the Chinese government knows what it is doing, and the ‘Covid zero’ approach is working well.”
This is a nice step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor whose proposals shaped Europe’s lockdowns, declared in an interview with The Times of London that the Chinese government successfully exported its model for dealing with the virus: “It’s a Communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”
I would like to think that China’s ongoing nightmarish catastrophe, where the richest city in the country is facing food shortages and residents of other cities are panic-buying food, would dispel the notion that the Chinese government is a contagious disease management role model for the West.
But even before the pandemic, there was this unnerving trend of China exporting its values to the West instead of the West exporting its values to China.
The Chinese people are as delightful, hard-working, innovative, creative, and inspired as any other country’s population. But the Chinese government is not a role model for the West in any fashion; it is one of the most dangerous, aggressive, reckless, and destabilizing forces on earth. (Admittedly, Vladimir Putin is giving it some fierce competition for that title these days.) The Chinese government cannot be an effective partner for the U.S. on anything — not climate change, not fair or free trade, not building a more stable world. Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo is wrong when she tells the Wall Street Journal that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China.