JimC wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2020 9:04 pm
Brian Peacock wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2020 9:27 am
China is simply playing from the Imperialism handbook - and Morrison clearly is too. What kind of inquiry does Morrison want? One like the Royal Commission into the bushfires? How would he react if China chided Australia for feathering the terms of that inquiry to exclude climate change? What specific lessons might we learn from a Chinese-focused inquiry given that xenotropic viruses are already in the human population and something like Covid-19 could spring from any geographic region and be spread around the world in a matter of weeks?
Morrison's implicit suggestion is that China poses a unique a particular risk as far as human-transmissible xenotropic viruses go (that the Chinese need to be exposed for the dangerous, dirty, diseased people they presumably are) and that this needs to be accounted for in a government's response to a pandemic threat. This is a red-herring.
Covid-19 is a pandemic on a global scale, but it's also an epidemic at the local and national level. Given what is already common knowledge about epidemics and how to address them, from TB to smallpox in times past, to SARS, MERS, and Ebola more recently, or even STIs in particular populations etc, I think the Australian people would be better served by an inquiry into how the government processed the information it was getting about Covid-19 and the actions it took in response to that information and in light of what we already know about the prevalence, distribution, and possible control of infectious diseases.
The inquiry may never get off the ground due to the way international politics works, but a well-structured, objective and independent inquiry by health experts is surely in the world's interests. There are serious questions about the Chinese government's response early in the piece - the answers to those questions might be embarrassing to China, but they would also be a valuable lesson for the world to learn before the next pandemic hits. It is an inquiry that would be unwise to leave in the hands of the WHO, given their initial pandering to China (This, of course, is only down to their upper echelon - around the world their staff on the ground do a vital and magnificent job). Your bushfire analogy is somewhat strained - they did not spread world-wide, other than some smoke, and the Royal Commission is already charged with examining the impact of climate change, which of course is vital. In any case, this would not be an Australian inquiry - all our government did is make a sober and responsible suggestion for an international inquiry, after the dust has settled, which produced a false accusation from their ambassador that it was an attack on China...
And, holding no brief for Morrison, I don't think he misdoing anything imperialistic, jingoistic or racist. In fact, annoying China is a dangerous ploy for Australia in terms of future trade.
Also, the existence of wet markets containing captive wild life (often endangered species) in densely packed human populations is truly a unique threat, one that should be unacceptable to the world in future, wherever such markets may be.
We already know how China acted at the onset of the epidemic in Wuhan. Local officials tried to cover it up, sacked the doctor who identified the problem and other health workers who were expressing alarm. The Chinese government initially misinformed the WHO about the extent of the outbreak and made it difficult for the WHO to gain access to the region for monitoring and assessment. However, by January that had all changed. Wuhan was in lockdown, the WHO were on the ground and reporting, and on Jan 24 the Chinese paper was published in The Lancet about the virus, its features, its infectiousness, its lethality, and its transmission rates. On the 26 Jan the WHO and the authors of the paper gave a joint press conference to publicise this info.
So given what we already know what would Morrison's called-for inquiry contribute the the global conversation beyond pointing the finger China and saying, "You should have told us sooner."? I would suggest that the outcome of such a report would be i) to say that things could have been done better in the initial stages of the outbreak, and ii) to recommend a properly resourced health organisation with global scope to be given the role of coordinating future responses to similar potential crises. Or, stating the bleedin' obvious.
However, given our current climate Which of those is more likely to pepper the headlines and think-pieces of the world's media. "REPORT: Chinese Failings Lead to Coronavirus Tradegy" or "REPORT: Global Health Oversight A Necessity"? Moreover, those governments and interests with an overtly 'exceptionalist' agenda will tie "Chinese Failings" to "WHO Failings" as we've seen already - further undermining global institutions, preparedness, response, and mitigation for future threats. And if the worse should happen the exceptionalists will point to China and the WHO and say, "See, we told you so."
Morrison and other conservative leaders are playing politics with this by applying a teleological outlook retrospectively as a way to distract from the fact that from Jan 24 this year they had all the info they needed to take rational decisions and make preparations in the interests of public health. They'd like us to believe that we can only have arrived 'here' because we set out from 'there' - with 'there' being China's failings. It's like say that because we've arrived at the supermarket then we could only have got here by the driving along the route we did, and we could only drive the route we did because we set out from home. The fact is that finding ourselves outside the supermarket does not entitle us to declare that we must have taken a specific route and started from a specific place, particularly when we could have started from anywhere and taken any number of routes. In political terms it's an attempt to say where we find ourselves with Covid-19 today is, and always was, inevitable.
Nonetheless, we know now that the US administration was briefed on what was going on in Wuhan late last year dispute the president's claims in Jan and Feb that Covid-19 wasn't a problem for the US, that everyone in the US recovered (exceptionaism again) and it was just a bigly Democrat hoax to personally damage his re-election prospects. The UK had five COBRA meetings in January and early February at which the Wuhan outbreak and its ramifications were discussed but which the prime minister failed to attend. Instead Johnson favoured public statements at the beginning like 'coronavirus isn't a problem in the UK' and 'the UK is the healthiest nation on Earth' and 'we should remain calm and keep things in perspective' and '"All Is Well" should be painted on the sides of buses -- basically reinforcing his exceptionalist outlook -- and then as the outbreak took hold in Europe and the UK suggesting that we have to 'take it on the chin' and 'develop herd immunity' and 'etc - which I categorise politically as a 'some of you will die but that's a price I'm willing to pay to keep the economy going' narrative.
Mostly governments sat on their hands for two months while telling us that it was a Chinese problem, if it was even a problem at all. Now that it's been clearly shown to be a real and significant problem in terms of loss of life, healthcare provision, the failure of market principles to meet basic needs, social and economic relations etc, what we're hearing now is basically the same. "Ooo, look over there quick... a badger with a gun!"
The bushfire analogy, while not being entirely equivalent, is not entirely irrelevant here either. On one hand it highlights the practical and political difficulties of one nation judging the competence, responsibility and action of another (in this case layering on a moral assessment of Chinese cultural practices regarding meat markets, food hygiene and animal husbandry standards), and on the other Morrison has excluded looking at climate change in the Royal Commission report on the fires when climate change is a global issue that effects us all and can't (or at least shouldn't) just be excised from the public discussion.
Let's face it, what we now call the Global North is heavily dependent on, invested in (in all senses of the word), and indebted to Chinese authoritarianism and regimes like it. Aside from financial services our economies are primarily driven by consumerism now that the vast majority of manufacturing has been outsourced to regions like China - places with low wages, exploitative working conditions, and social, legal, and political systems that formalise the concentration of power in the hands of a few. To maintain the flow of cheap consumables from North and South East Asia he last thing the Global North needs is China et al to develop anything like a functioning democracy or an independent judiciary and start taking part in the global economy on an equal footing. Like all true liberals Morrison's concerns are primarily economic rather than humanitarian, and his attention is, as ever, placed on positioning himself to cast the best domestic light possible on his party and political agenda. It's in this context that I think focusing on China as an economic region and/or political regime in some 'international report' on the virus is simply Morrison reflecting Western capital interests - in effect maintaining that necessary barrier between China and Western economies that ensures cheap consumables, and by brewing and harbouring an atmosphere of necessary distrust and suspicion in China and the Chinese people at home.
Don't get me wrong here. In saying this I'm not excusing China - let alone praising them. I'm saying that there's wider structural forces at work and that as capitalism requires and necessitates the exploitation of labour it follows that the Global North's relationship with China is the capitalist paradigm played out on a global context. By my lights, focusing on China as bearing the brunt of responsibility for 'releasing' Covid-19 into the global economy is essentially no different to the Victorian mill owner chiding their exploited workforce for lacking the natural capacity or requisite moral fortitude to resist contracting diphtheria or rickets - how dare your sickness limit my ability to make a profit. Morrison my not be explicitly labelling Covid-19 as China's virus, as 'the Chinese virus' like the US president has, but he's still personifying the infection and locating it in the 'body' of China and Chinese people nonetheless - which is to say he's still working for Western capital interests like Trump is even as he calls his proposed inquiry 'entirely sensible and reasonable'.
