THE COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic would not have been as damaging had the so-called People’s Republic of China not covered up the early development of the virus. The world would have been able to control the spread earlier, and many more people would be alive today.
There are many theories about the source and nature of the virus. We may never know the whole truth, but the source theories are irrelevant for now when it comes to apportioning blame. We know the CCP lied, people died, and the world increasingly realises it.
On Monday, India’s populist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has also used Coronavirus to call for a move away from China-centric supply chains.
He tweeted: “India, with the right blend of the physical and the virtual, can emerge as the global nerve centre of complex modern multinational supply chains in the post-COVID-19 world. Let us rise to that occasion and seize this opportunity.”
Translation: China’s global reputation is in tatters – let’s take their title as the workshop of the world.
In the UK, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said this month that Britain’s relationship with China was no longer “business as usual”.
At the same time, an op-ed in the Sunday Times by former Theresa May Advisor Nick Timothy described David Cameron’s China policy as “naive and cynical”. When even the wetter elements of the Conservative Party is CCP-aware, expect a policy shift.
President Donald Trump has known this for decades and built much of his 2016 campaign on it, and will also angle his 2020 campaign on opposing China.
We know what the PRC is – a dystopian absolutist state ruled with an iron fist by the Chinese Communist Party.
We know that it is a genocidal government operating concentration camps. We know that it is an occupying power that has ravaged the people and land of Tibet. We know that it routinely harvests the organs of unwilling donors. We know that it has millions of poverty-stricken labourers herded into sweatshops. We’ve known so much for so long, yet the world did nothing, until now.
A foreign policy pivot on China by the rest of the world is not just a strategic opportunity to re-establish our domestic industrial power and take back control of our economic destiny. It is a declaration, by humanity about the kind of planet we wish to live – a world where free association and the human individual is valued.
It is the moral duty of all those who call themselves human to oppose the PRC, because if we do not, we will find ourselves looking on as Orwell put it, watching “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
