WHY CHINA!
The Darwin's Finch
China is being accused by nearly all the countries since the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China. From calling coronavirus as 'Chinese virus' to making lawsuit against China, the conspiracy has been rising continuously.
Frankly, no one knows what the hell is happening with us, but we're not gonna stop blaming China for this.
For sure, China should deserve the blame for this pandemic but we deserve more to know the right information about everything happening around. I'll try my best to present each and every point to be discussed in this context.
First of all, here's the report of an online survey conducted by The Takshashila Institution,
A majority of Indians think China was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. A significant number of them also feel calling the illness a “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” wasn’t racist or stigmatised.
Around 67 per cent of the total respondents believed that China was responsible for the Covid-19 outbreak. Out of these, 48 per cent said China failed to stop illegal wildlife trade, contain an early outbreak of the contagious illness and had “lied” to the world. Around 18 per cent also believed coronavirus could be a biological weapon created by China.
This is shocking !
Let's start from the beginning of this conspiracy when China and the US have started blaming each other for this.
It seems like China has been striving since then and is on the prowl looking for a candidate nation to fix the blame for the Covid-19 pandemic. Their's current strategy is to resolve around sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of the international audience and convicting its own people about the 'foreign origin' of the novel coronavirus.
On December 31, China formally informed the World Health Organisation about the novel coronavirus outbreak. In the next three weeks, China enforced lockdown in Wuhan and all the other provinces affected by the outbreak.
WHO clarified that the origin of novel coronavirus might be the seafood market in Wuhan that was shut down a few days after the outbreak declared nationally.
By this time, reports appeared saying that the doctor who alerted about the novel coronavirus outbreak and went public with his views was harassed by the Chinese authorities.
But what many people missed was a statement made by perhaps China's most famous epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan on February 27 who has been famous for handling another coronavirus crisis -- the SARS outbreak of 2002-03.
Zhong Nanshan told a press conference that,
the novel coronavirus "may not have originated in China".
Chinese foreign office spokespersons Zhao Lijian again sparkled up the conspiracy in his tweets and started the US-CHINA war for deflecting the blame on each other for this coronavirus pandemic.
The US responded by saying, "The Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false and absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members. #ChinaPropaganda."
300 athletes from the US military attended the 7th Military World Games in Wuhan in October. They were infected with novel coronavirus and spread that in Wuhan before heading back to the US.
Another conspiracy arises from Italy in which an Italian doctor, Giuseppe Remuzzi published a paper in the Lancet in which he talked about a "strange case of pneumonia" in the country in November and December.
China has used this research paper to claim that the novel coronavirus originated in Italy, later comes in Wuhan and the outbreak began.
Exactly we don't know what is right or wrong, it might be possible that the coronavirus originated in a different country but the outbreak began in China - in history of epidemics we have lot of examples like that.
But the fact is that China deserves the blame partially, not fully.
We have seen diseases coming out of the seafood markets in China every year, but still, China never takes any strict action plan to ban on wildlife consumption just because of the economic outcome to the govt.
The coronavirus may have first appeared in China, but the ensuing spread and crisis also belong to the global assemblages of commerce, tourism, and supply chains erected by powerful interests in the 21st century.
China covered up the crisis in Wuhan for three weeks in January, and this lost time probably decided the difference between a local epidemic & a global pandemic. Nevertheless, it is still sobering to read reports that even from mid-January other governments took even longer to respond: the UK dragged its feet foran interminable eight weeks and the US ignored clear warning signs for 70 days.
During Italy’s worst weeks, officials admitted they initially viewed the Wuhan crisis as a “science-fiction movie that had nothing to do with us”.
In the US, a Kansas politician stated that his town was safe because it had only a few Chinese residents.
In Philadelphia, in a more tragic offshoot of racial thinking, rumors circulated that the virus could not infect black Americans because it was a Chinese disease, misinformation that officials now fear exacerbated inequalities.
Ultimately, both the pandemic and the accompanying anti-Asian backlash are dynamics that go beyond questions of culture and xenophobia, carrying serious life-and-death consequences. Both are the indirect byproducts of China’s emergence as a major force in global capitalism, not only forging the supply chains and travel networks that conveyed the virus but also threatening Euro-America’s centuries-long economic and political prestige. [The Gurdian]
In the US, such fears were already present that China alone, and not the domestic political and business class, to blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs.
UK have recently been manifest in panic over Huawei providing the country’s 5G network.
Fears over China were not created by coronavirus, but find in it a most apt metaphor, as a global and invisible force of destruction. [The Gurdian]
President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to the “Chinese virus” when talking about the pandemic.
U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, say that we should not politicize the crisis by assigning blame, but focus on pulling together in the common fight against a global disease that makes no distinction between people and recognizes no borders.
If we do not want another global pandemic, we have to hold accountable the politicians responsible for making it worse, chief among them Chinese President Xi Jinping. He did not create the novel coronavirus, but his government’s missteps are directly responsible for its global transmission and uncontrolled spread, with all its terrible consequences to populations and economies around the world.
Similarly, a global pandemic does not happen every time a novel infectious pathogen emerges. It happens when there is an absence of accurate information about the pathogen and a failure of basic public services—in this case, the failure to regulate food and marketplaces to prevent the transmission of pathogens, and the failure to shut down transportation and control movement once it spreads.
Conclusions:-
From the best to the worst scenarios, we've come crossed nearly all the aspects of this blog and now its time to make your on decision whether to blame to disease on someone or to prevent the disease by reinforcing Social Distancing.
Anyhow, as per my opinion, China deserves the blame partially but not fully. In few months, we will get to know more about all these stuffs after proper investigation is done.
Till then, we have to follow LOCKDOWN & SOCIAL DISTANCING as precautionary measures to prevent coronavirus.
References:- The Gurdian, The Print, Medium.
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The Darwin's Finch
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