There seems very little the world can do to punish China if it deliberately created Covid-19 as a biological warfare agent, if we listen to the China apologists and economic fear-mongerers

 

If the Department of Energy report is true and China deliberately created Covid-19 in a lab and allowed months to pass before reporting it as it to spread over the entire world, then there has to be some price to pay, right? We can only make educated guesses as to the true number of Covid fatalities in China during the first waves of the pandemic since China was attempting to minimize its culpability while the affect of its criminality on the rest of world was plain to see.

After the civil unrest that occurred recently and the Chinese government was forced to relax its “zero” policy, it has been reported that as much as 80 percent of the population became infected with Covid, and while “officially” there has been something in the neighborhood of 80,000 Covid deaths in China, the speculation among researchers is that China has “hid” at least one million deaths.

Despite the explosion of new Covid cases in China, its government is now ludicrously declaring that it has “decisively defeated” Covid, apparently using the “logic” of “herd immunity” which countries like India have used to conceal its true numbers. Few are buying it, of course. Most people in most countries know that in a tightly-controlled society like China’s, virtually all the “official” information is designed for the purpose of avoiding putting the government in a negative light, that nothing “bad” is the fault of government policy, or assertions to the contrary are foreign misinformation.

The lack of transparency and cooperation with world governing bodies in regard to its culpability for Covid isn’t just yesterday’s story. Far from having “decisively” defeated Covid, its variants continues on with new strains that while for the moment are not as deadly as the initial strains, tend to be for infectious. People who were infected by the initial strains and lived (that is most of them), likely will have lasting effects, particularly on their brains.

Yet China goes around as if it is not the “villain” in any of this. That despite what one Chinese scientist name  Dr. Li Meng Yan claimed back in 2020, that the Chinese government “intentionally” manufacturing and allowing the virus to escape was not an “accident.” Meng claimed that given the surveillance system in the Wuhan lab, it would have been “impossible” for the virus to escape on its own.  Of course that is why others dispute the lab leak theory, insisting that it initially showed up in a Wuhan market, supposedly from bats.

How to punish China if in fact this was an "experiment" that actually worked as hoped, at least in other countries? There are those who say that China should at least be banned from G-20 (Russia as well), but that seems unlikely despite the fact that China doesn't play by any rules but its own, and it has used coercive economics to further its ambitions; that this doesn’t always work is because in limited actions of this sort targetted countries can find new sources, and deny natural resources that China needs, which has been the case in its disputes with Australia.

We are told that despite what we see in the media, especially in the cities, most of China is relatively poor, which shouldn’t be surprising given the cheapness—both in price and in quality—of most consumer goods with the “Made in China” label. Disruption of the Chinese economy would have devastating impacts on the world economy, we are told, although this is like Europe’s prior dependency on Russian gas; finding new sources may hurt in the short-term, but while Russia’s economy and its gas giant Gazprom is being hurt, other suppliers will see higher demand and profits.Or at least that is what can he "hoped" as a side effect of "punishing" China. 

But there are those who point out that the general lack of economic integration of the Soviet Union with the world at large meant that its collapse had limited and short-term impact on the world economy. But China is a different matter, particularly in the short term if countries decided to punish China in a serious way. The YouTube channel "Economics Explained" in a  tells us in its video "What Would Happen if China's Economy Collapses" that the world economy has been growing at a slower pace than in the 1980s and 90s, and that the slowdown has been masked by the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, making the economic impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union virtually unnoticeable. 

While the Soviet Union was little integrated economically with the rest of the world, Economics Explained notes that

China is much more integrated into the global economy than the relatively isolated USSR ever was even the world as a whole is much more interconnected than it was just 30 years ago with Global Supply chains, the prevalence of multinational corporations international finance and even just regular Communications spanning countries being far more common than it was back in 1991.

The Soviet Union, despite having at one time the third largest economy in the world, was involved in less than one percent of world trade (mainly with Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba), while today China accounts for 12.5 percent of world trade. This trade doesn’t necessarily have to do with the production of goods, since many countries' GDP is in fact largely the goods and services that pass through their markets—meaning being “middlemen”—and of course a decline in trade would affect their economies more than those who are actual producers of goods.

A Chinese economic collapse would be akin to the effect the pandemic had on the world, but trade as a percentage of GDP has been on a decline since the financial collapse of 2007, and part of that is the fact that China relies less on imports now than some other countries do, with Chinese domestic markets being seen as more “reliable” consumers of domestically manufactured product once only meant to be shipped overseas.

So we are told that a collapse of the Chinese economy would result in a global depression that likes the world has never seen (well, perhaps not since the Black Death). Of course during the Great Depression, the U.S.’ protectionist strategy could only work if the country was capable of manufacturing most of the goods it required, especially with the need to create jobs. But that clearly isn’t the case with the U.S. today, and why it is so bone-headed to be attacking NAFTA as some on both the extreme right and extreme left have been doing, when it is a partial deterrent to Chinese economic coercion. 

So that is likely what is being said behind closed doors. Congress is investigating China’s skullduggery, and there is plenty of that going on, especially with the theft of technology, cyber warfare, various forms of espionage (including those infamous “weather” balloons), threats to neighboring countries and their maritime territory and natural resources (like offshore oil reserves) and, lest we "forget," is the principle source of manufacture of Fentanyl or its ingredients that finds its way to the U.S.

The problem with China is that unlike the U.S. and its European allies that claim to have a “moral” obligation to world stability, China (and of course Russia, Iran and North Korea) only seems to be interested in its own insular concerns and how they can take advantage of other countries, ignoring the sovereign interests of those countries. We are told that in a recent speech, Xi Jinping attempted to take a “conciliatory” tone, but at this point who is he fooling?

A few days ago, the Washington Post published an op-ed by a woman of Chinese heritage, a Dr. Leana Wen, who tells us that instead of punishing China for being responsible for the worst global pandemic since the influenza outbreak over a century ago, we should just not be playing “tit-for-tat”:

But it’s not going to make the world safer to threaten punishment. Political leaders should consider that the shoe could have easily been on the other foot. Instead of further inflaming tensions, we should reiterate that while the cause of the coronavirus remains unknown, what is known is that its spread was not intentional. And we must emphasize that preventing the next pandemic requires international cooperation, including on the critical issue of laboratory safety.

This seems to be a little naive and self-serving. The problem with that assumption is the widespread belief that China "probably" deliberately developed the virus in a lab; the question then is “why” and how did it spread so quickly all over the world to such deadly effect? There are those that claim that asserting the virus was deliberately created and somehow released from a lab by "mistake" or otherwise only makes U.S.-Chinese relations “worse.” 

And their point is? If China has been lying about the virus—and they certainly have been—then this means a liar doesn’t like being called a liar. Why should that be allowed to pass “unpunished”? Because "everyone" does it? Oh, so everyone knows China is an untrustworthy leach on the world, but the moral and ethical thing is to look the other way?

Of course the obvious answer for the rest of the world is to do what China itself has been doing—weaning its domestic market off foreign exports. But we are told that is a “bad” thing for us to do because it  would "destroy" the world.