In his book Understanding the Politics of Pandemic Scares, Mika Aaltola, an international relations expert studying world public health, argues that global politics is manifested in the realm of world public health as the alternation between “compassion” and “containment”. Before a global health crisis occurs, there is often a lot of transnational compassion for distant sufferers. However, once a global emergency is declared, such “compassion” will be replaced by “containment”, which means containing an outbreak within a certain location or area to prevent the disease from spreading. Although many examples support this observation, it is not a holistic description of the complex relationship between worldwide public health management and global politics, especially when the world is experiencing a paradigm shift of epic proportions. The last time something of this scale took place was about a century ago.

Let’s look at two examples. One is non-government action. The public in Japan was among the first in foreign societies to donate necessities for battling the novel coronavirus epidemic in China. Many packages contained messages in Chinese, such as “Our countries may be far from each other, we are on the same planet after all” and “Don’t have clothes? Wear mine.” In shocking contrast, The Wall Street Journal published a commentary penned by Walter Russell Mead on its online edition on Feb 3, under the racist headline of “China is the real sick man of Asia”. Those words were not found in the article and therefore logically taken as the newspaper’s opinion. Well-known as a conservative academic specializing in foreign affairs, the author is not above such bigotry either. He littered his commentary with racist diatribes and anti-China sentiment that undoubtedly inspired the repulsive headline. Infuriated by the heartless rant, many Chinese-Americans launched a petition on the White House website demanding an apology from the WSJ and immediate correction of that headline or deletion of the commentary. Meanwhile, Mario Cavolo, an American writer living in the city of Shenyang in northeastern China, published an article “Something’s not right here folks — a look at USA 2009 H1N1 virus compared to China 2020 Coronavirus” on his LinkedIn profile on Feb 5. He began his article by comparing figures of the two prevalent diseases: “When the United States 2009 H1N1 swine flu emerged, it eventually infected 60 million people in the US and killed at least 18,449 patients worldwide that year. But the final story of the H1N1 global pandemic was far worse than that, with close to 300,000 deaths, as shown in the final tallies in the official report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012.” He then pointed to a bizarre phenomenon he observed: “During 2009 H1N1 outbreak, I don’t recall xenophobic anti-America attacks across the globe, do you? In fact, do you recall it took six months for the US to declare a national emergency? Did any government from the onset in April 2009 through the end in April 2010, including the month of June, when H1N1 was declared an international emergency global pandemic, send a notice to its citizens that they should leave the United States? Or close their borders to American travelers? Nope, not a peep.”

As Washington adjusts its global strategy with China as its main rival, the COVID-19 epidemic is more like a blessing than anything else because it is weakening China and making it easier to contain than otherwise

Cavolo’s essay explains government initiatives rather than civilian actions are at work here. The unfair treatment of China is a representation of the centennial shift in the global political landscape. “American hegemony” aptly explains why there was not a single country that took action or spoke out against the US during the swine flu outbreak. As for the case of the COVID-19 outbreak, China’s strategic location in Asia, coupled with the fact that the center of political influence is shifting from the West to the East, explains why a number of Western countries and their allies defied the recommendations of the World Health Organization and issued travel warnings against China. They even condoned anti-China sentiment in the local communities. Many people in the West find it hard to acknowledge this paradigm shift, and the US, being the heart and soul of the Western world today, is trying hard to stop it.
As Washington adjusts its global strategy with China as its main rival, the COVID-19 epidemic is more like a blessing than anything else because it is weakening China and making it easier to contain than otherwise. On Jan 25, the first day of the Chinese New Year, the US warship USS Montgomery entered the South China Sea, six days earlier than last year on the lunar calendar. On Feb 6, the US think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies organized a seminar where prominent American officials such as Attorney General William Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray and National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina accused China of stealing US technology and national secrets. At the National Governors Association Winter Meeting on Feb 8, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged state governors to adopt a cautious attitude to the political missions of Chinese diplomats, academia, media entities, friendship associations, etc, designed to “exploit US vulnerabilities at all levels”, and not to make separate individual deals with China.
We must bear in mind that the anti-China and anti-communist political forces in Hong Kong have not only organized strikes by some public hospital staff members to fan hatred toward the mainland but also stepped up offensive and defamatory commentaries in local newspapers that echo the anti-China rhetoric in the West. That is why the war on the COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong should not be taken out of the context of the epic paradigm shift in the balance of global power.

The author is a senior research fellow of China Everbright Holdings.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.