China’s to blame?
- April 23rd, 2020
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Early on during the outbreak, China first ignored the pandemic. It suppressed public knowledge about the virus hoping that it would just go away. An obfuscation of responsibility, but not malicious. Governments are layered like a bean dip and just because one part knows about a problem doesn’t mean the other levels do. But there is a theory that as the Chinese government began to realize just how problematic the situation was, they continued to limit information of the disease in hopes that it would spread to the rest of the world. Why should China suffer and sacrifice so that other countries remained safe. China might become relatively weak compared to other global powers due to the pandemic. A malicious motive but not impossible. It is a government that takes part is massive ethnic cleaning and global censorship to preserve it’s authoritarian system.
This theory is ridiculous. Not because I don’t think China would be willing to do something like it but because a global pandemic would only harm China more. China relies on the export of goods to other countries. It’s not just those countries that are harmed by shutting down, Chinese factories are also harmed by the global recession. And when your social and political legitimacy is built on economic prosperity it becomes a much larger problem than just a pandemic.
Jakob Frederick Harteis
https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/did-xi-jinping-deliberately-sicken-the-world/