I hope if any silver lining can be found here it's that this country finally wakes the hell up about just how godamn stupid it is for us to have so much of our supply chain in China. First thing after the economy opens should be to spend whatever it takes to relocate that production capacity back home or to countries that are actual good faith allies.
A perfectly closed circle of PPE would be ideal.
Don't get me started on med supply chains. My adhd med (the only one that seems to work for me) has been subject to shortages for nearly two years, and completely unobtainable for the past 5 weeks. I realize the problem isn't just the supply chain, but it's super frustrating, and really not helping me concentrate on teaching my classes online.
Re: the OP, when I was in Wuhan I met a large number of African doctoral students, and I've been worried about them.
I hope if any silver lining can be found here it's that this country finally wakes the hell up about just how godamn stupid it is for us to have so much of our supply chain in China.
I feel like I'm missing at least a couple of stories here. What I've heard about supply chain disruptions have not been specific to China (or specific to geopolitical relations).
If all our PPE came from Italy that would also be a problem right now.
I'm sure those stories are out there, but I've been seeing more of.
•"Lean" supply chain management means that the system is more vulnerable to disruption.
•The disruptions that are hardest to plan for are the cheap, generic, supplies (like reagents or swabs) that nobody is thinking about. Much of that material comes from China.
• Also (much less important, but worth nothing) -- Supply chain disruptions would be less of a problem if we trusted agencies like FEMA to help manage limited supplied in a fair and transparent way rather than just re-routing things with no explanation.
4: right. I think we. Should commit to making some of it domestically.
5: The problem is that China is a bad faith world actor with an explicit goal of undermining the U.S. If someone in 1980 had suggested having our crucial medical supplies and electronics manufactured in the USSR they would have been slapped.
The United States is undermining itself far better than China (or the U.S.S.R.) ever did. But I agree on more protectionism for industrial production in key industries.
And maybe don't make it too easy for China to gain influence over international bodies like WHO: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/who-couldve-known
That ship has sailed. WHO excluded Taiwan and ignored their warning of person to person transmission at the end of December and blithely continued on with Chinese propaganda. And it's not like we didn't have some inkling the WHO director was shady, his first move after getting elected was to appoint Robert effing Mugabe as an ambassador.
Excluding Taiwan from international organizations isn't some new thing that WHO just cooked up.
9 and "bad faith world actor, but not as bad as china" isn't really a prize worth chasing, is it?
No, it's a part of a larger rot in the U.N. in general. China threw a million ethnic minorities into re-education camps. The consequence in the U.N.? A seat on the human rights council.
And the U.S. sometimes undermines itself, but I think intentionally unleashing a global pandemic puts China in first place.
The WHO isn't an espionage agency and can't do that kind of monitoring when faced with a great power's deliberate evasion. It has a $5 billion budget and many other tasks. The United States is supposed to have the capabilities to do that kind of work. We spend something like $50 billion on spying and monitoring China is a very big chunk of that. We also had, before Trump stopped funding them, domestic agencies tracking emerging diseases. The U.N. can't take meaningful action to stop a genocide without a great power pushing it. The United States has done that in the past when we had other presidents. The reason the WHO and the U.N. can't take action without the United States doing something is because the United States created the U.N. and the WHO to work that way.
This is entirely a self-pwn of the United States on itself.
What's a "Taiwan"? Can't say we've ever met before.
With any more competent person winning the 2016 election, and I include Ted Soup-Fucking Cruz in the list, Covid-19 would have been barely a blip in mortality outside of China.
That's quite a claim. I'm not so sure.
I can't prove it. I just think that explains why his wife was in such a hurry to return the soup to the store.
That ship has sailed.
The fact that WHO sometimes fails doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying to preserve WHO as an organization. I don't have strong feelings about WHO one way or the other, but I'm skeptical of the argument that, "we have examples of them operating in bad faith (or incompetently) therefore we shouldn't want to work with them."
WHO excluded Taiwan and ignored their warning of person to person transmission at the end of December and blithely continued on with Chinese propaganda.
This LRB article presents China's actions as being similar to every other government -- they under-reacted originally not because they knew they had a problem and were trying to suppress it, but because the government didn't acknowledge or think there was a problem. I have no idea how accurate that description is, but it fits what we've seen from around the world -- even when there was much greater evidence of the dangers than the information China had at the time.
Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, where the virus emerged, was locked down on 23 January. Since then misinformation and disinformation have dominated Chinese lives. Before the lockdown, experts said there was no evidence of human to human transmission and therefore no need to panic. Business carried on as usual. Wuhan hosted the Two Sessions, an annual gathering of the regional branches of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. One city district held a mass banquet for forty thousand families, with a world record-beating 13,986 dishes, to bring in the approaching Chinese New Year. No need to disappoint so many good people with inconvenient public health alerts.
...
Since the Wuhan lockdown began, there have been tensions between local government and the central organs of the state. There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy 'throwing woks'. The Wuhan municipal government maintained that it had reported the virus to the central health authority in Beijing as soon as details emerged, and that Beijing's team of experts had responded by telling them that there was no evidence of human to human transmission and the outbreak was containable. So Wuhan followed the advice it was given and carried on as normal. The experts in Beijing, meanwhile, insist that Wuhan didn't provide them with reliable data, which made it impossible to respond with an accurate assessment. The woks flew back and forth for so long that Beijing lost patience. People under quarantine were whipping up a storm on social media in the hope of landing a hospital bed; seriously ill patients were being ignored or denied treatment; desperate sufferers were being driven to suicide; senior officials were seen on TV news using high-end N95 respirators while frontline doctors made do with disposable medical masks. The incompetence of local government, as Beijing saw it, could no longer be tolerated. An envoy was dispatched to Wuhan to inspect the mess, with a group of journalists in tow. It took the journalists no time at all to find a bus full of sick people to interview but the driver hadn't been told where to take them. The bus drove around for hours, until the journalists finally found them a hospital. The next day, the heads of city districts were summoned into the envoy's presence to receive their reprimand: they were made to apologise and bow to the patients they had overlooked.
I don't think it is fair to blame Trump for the interment camps China is running now, but I think they are running on this scale only after Trump is in office because China gambled, correctly, that Trump would not do anything for a Muslim without oil. The stupid way he ran his trade war with China was the nail in that coffin when he made it clear that all China needed to give him was something that could claim as a victory for his bean salemanship.
but I think intentionally unleashing a global pandemic puts China in first place.
I don't think they intentionally unleashed this, but they certainly lied about it once unleashed, causing suffering and death for their own citizens, and allowing the virus to spread around the globe, causing suffering and death for untold millions around the world. So yeah, China is a bad faith global actor.
Unfortunately, Trump has sought to direct hatred (and racism and xenophobia) toward Asian-Americans, with his "China virus" nonsense. And liberals, not wanting to participate in this anti-Asian hatefest, have gone altogether too easy on the government of China, which truly is a bad faith actor.
China's actions as being similar to every other government
And what other government arrested doctors and journalists who were sounding the alarm in December?
And what other government arrested doctors and journalists who were sounding the alarm in December?
Right? This is just a bunch of bullshit, to pretend that China's authoritarian regime is just like Denmark or Canada.
How are liberals going easy on the government of China? Fuck the government of China. But I don't owe allegiance to China and I don't pay them taxes to provide for a common defense. Pointing out how China is bad is in no way going to excuse how the United States government is failing. Trump throws up chaff about others' failures to hide his own all the time. I don't think it helps anybody to let him change the subject like that.
I remember the Cold War pretty clearly. If the Soviet Union caused a problem and lied about it, nobody was satisfied with "the commies lied and we got caught flat-footed." Everybody knew they lied and we had people who were supposed to not be fooled.
26: If this is purely a Trump failure why did Western Europe pretty much fail in the same way, often worse? In deaths per million, we're doing way better than UK, Spain, Italy, France, etc.
And let's not pretend the left is covered in glory here. I remember a bunch of Dems running around calling Trump a xenophobe for the China travel ban at the end of Jan. Christ, DeBlasio was still telling New Yorkers to go to the movies in the beginning of March.
15: there really isn't any evidence of Chinese intent in this. Did they fuck up handing it and go right into information containment mode? Absolutely. Would things have been better if they hadn't? Absolutely. Would rest of the world have handled it better ? Really hard to say. US and Italy are perfect examples of pissing away the lead time we did have, having a month or two more warning because China was being more transparent might not have changed anything much.
At this point arguing "my countries method of undermining, obfuscating and silencing experts was less bad or evil than your countries methods of undermining, obfuscating and silencing experts" doesn't seem very fruitful to me.
23 sounds a bit like the results of incompetent leadership in places like Italy and the US can be laid at the feet of China - however much those leaders might like it to be true, it's not.
27: It's obviously not purely a Trump failure. But it is very clearly a Trump failure, among others. Very few people are covered in glory here, and the few that are have mostly been treated shittily by their governments. I really shouldn't have to say this but yes, not all shitty treatment by governments has been equivalent.
De Blasio was being criticized here and elsewhere on the left in real time. The travel ban was a failure (tens of thousands were exempt) and it's purpose should have been to buy us time to prepare, which Trump did fuck all with. C'mon man. Do better.
The travel ban was always too late, too little, too directional, and too many exceptions. As it was structured, the xenophobia label was mostly fair as it clearly was more political than practical.
27: Because the United States was always the one that provided coordination and usually the one that had the key intelligence. A coordinating response to limit contact with China would have only worked if done broadly and early. They still haven't adjusted to the world in which the United States runs in foreign policy based on filling beds in an over-priced hotel chain.
The key failure point was that the person making decisions about international travel is running a highly leveraged hotel chain which is only profitable due to rooms rented in American properties by foreign nationals and governments.
30: And the Democrats did what? Trump is incompetent, that's a given. Who I want to do better is my own damn party.
32: The U.S. coordinates the pandemic response in Europe? Pretty sure that's done by their individual governments. And we're not the only country with intelligence agencies. It's not like MI6 was all over it and the UK had a different response.
This isn't excuse making for Trump. But the U.S. media and the WHO shouldn't keep repeating CCP propaganda and letting those bastards off the hook.
The U.S. did coordinate responses to major threats. Any single country blocking off China by themselves would have born huge costs since it would have had to cut itself off from the world instead of being part of the world cutting China off.
And if the WHO had to pass judgement in real time on the quality of the data on disease reports from every government, there's no way it could function.
I remember a bunch of Dems running around calling Trump a xenophobe for the China travel ban at the end of Jan.
I don't remember this -- who are you talking about?
I do remember that the President issued a different proclamation on the same day restricting entry of people from Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan, Myanmar, Tanzania -- and distinctly remember people pointing this out.
37: Biden and Sanders off the top of my head. I remember Pelosi going off on the expansion to the African countries.
Biden called Trump a xenophobe. Trump is a xenophobe. He never called Trump a xenophobe for the travel ban.
Biden's quote was:
"You know we have right now a crisis with the coronavirus, emanating from China. The national emergency and worldwide alerts. The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it. That he is going to act rationally about it. In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do. This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysterical xenophobia and fear mongering to lead the way instead of science."
Trump is spinning that quote to defend his own nonsense.
The Chinese government does terrible things, no doubt about it. But Moby's right. Criticism by Americans for a fuckup should mainly be directed at people (a) whose actions you have control over or some responsibility for, (b) who are themselves at least somewhat in control over the events, and (c) where you're not criticising them in a way that deflects attention from people much more responsible for the fuckup. The Chinese government doesn't really fit (a) and Nancy Pelosi doesn't fit (b), unless some legislation she helped pass somehow spread the virus. Denouncing Bill de Blasio is great as long as it's accompanied by the disclaimer that Trump is leading a death cult.
I'm not really stalking Moby's comments.
Anyway, Trump is still less racist than Modi and less cruel to the poor. Or at least less able to be so.
I feel bad for getting off Mossy's topic, so I'm trying.
I don't know anything about locusts.
Interesting discussion of the apparently low mortality rate in India so far.
Pointing out how China is bad is in no way going to excuse how the United States government is failing. Trump throws up chaff about others' failures to hide his own all the time. I don't think it helps anybody to let him change the subject like that.
And similarly 40. I don't disagree, but this is a case where, even more than usual, you (by which I mean especially US voters) need to walk and chew gum at the same time. The Republicans are a world-threatening bad actor you must defeat. The CCP is also a a world-threatening bad actor you must defeat (or, realistically contain). The CCP will not go away, will probably get worse, and demands at least a Cold War sized response. This pandemic is a golden opportunity to get started on rolling back Republicans and CCP both.
While the CCP was certainly negligent, it wasn't intentional. The scale of the disaster in China itself (9.8% GDP contraction in Q1, on the official numbers; independent estimates say ~80m additional unemployed, 8.8% of workforce) makes this the CCP's most dangerous moment since the Cultural Revolution. There's no way they took such a gamble intentionally.
Others have pointed out that CCP incompetence has been qualitatively different than that elsewhere. This is correct, but still understates the problem. CCP epidemic response failed where it mattered most, at the source of infection, where infection could be most easily contained and epidemic most easily prevented. The CCP deserves additional blame because its incompetence presented governments elsewhere with a problem they would not otherwise have faced; demanded of them competence that would not have been necessary were it not for the incompetence of the CCP.*
And this still understates the problem. For various reasons China is disproportionately often a source of novel zoonotic diseases.** That the CCP gives Chinese people at all levels strong incentives to suppress bad news makes it likely that CCP incompetence will inflict epidemic problems on other countries not just this one time, but repeatedly. Which we already know for a fact in light of the 2003 epidemic (SARS-CoV), which appears to have had precisely the same sequence of events as that of 2019 (SARS-CoV-2). Any adequate global pandemic policy has to reckon with the PRC as a distinct problem.
*By the same token of course some governments elsewhere also deserve additional blame; the US certainly is one of them.
**AFAICT, which I admit isn't especially far. I stand to be corrected.
While the CCP was certainly negligent, it wasn't intentional
For some values of intentional, no? I mean they actively persecuted the doctors who sounded the alarm. That sounds pretty intentional to me.
50: I was thinking of swift's "intentionally unleashing a global pandemic".
interment camps China is running now, but I think they are running on this scale only after Trump is in office because China gambled, correctly, that Trump would not do anything for a Muslim without oil.
Is almost certainly wrong. The PRC security state tightening in general predates Trump and Xi, starting 2007-8; grid security predates Trump, in TAR beginning around 2013, in XUAR 2016.
Excluding Taiwan from international organizations isn't some new thing that WHO just cooked up.
PRC isolation efforts have intensified a lot since the DPP election win in 2016. And as Swift said, the WHO seems in this case to have actively suppressed warnings from Taiwan in favor of the PRC line, at a critical juncture.
I think Swift is somewhat too harsh on the WHO.* To do its work it needs universal access, and that means playing nice with bad actors. The challenge is to fudge at the diplomatic level without compromising the technical work; in this case it seems to have failed.
Similarly for all UN bodies - the kind of rot Swift describes was BAU in the Cold War and to a lesser extent in the unipolar too - dictatorships voting to cover each other in the HRC, etc. All that said, PRC influence campaigns in those bodies are large and persistent, and should be resisted (and has in fairness been a priority for the Pompeo Sate Department, with mixed results).
*Though not on Tedros personally.
The supply chain question is complex. For example, the US gets many of our drugs, especially "generics"*, from China. We also get a lot of them from India. It turns out (/shocked, /shocked) that oversight of the manufacturers in both those countries is lax. It is lax by the governments of those countries, and it is lax by the FDA. Sometimes we don't get access, sometimes access is deliberately limited so that when the FDA comes to call, they've had time to clean up. Sometimes local reporting of inspections is a lie. The outcome is that we (and this "we" is mostly the big pharma companies) have outsourced all the sources of certain drugs to manufacturers who we can't trust. The recent pulling of essentially all antacid meds due to contamination is only the latest example.
We used to make drugs in Puerto Rico, until the tax subsidy for doing so went away. We might consider reinstating that subsidy. There are other places in the world which manufacture pharmaceuticals than China and India, but having them made in a place that is (quasi) part of the US would be a win-win.
You can repeat this problem for any number of single-source products. Commodity computer parts? Mostly made in China, though there has been some spread to other low-cost countries.
* Many non-generic, named-brand drugs are made in the same factories as the generics and are basically the same drug, so they can exhibit the same issues as the generic ones. This is why the branded antacids were pulled as well as the generics.
53 I remember some China watchers, James Palmer in particular, warning in real time that the WHO had no understanding of how the CCP operates and was falling for a dog and pony show.
54: Your understanding of the antacid recall is not accurate. I agree generally with your big picture assessment of API manufacturing overseas, but this is a different problem.
in XUAR 2016.
Obviously China has been doing bad things in lots of places, but isn't that the big one in terms of numbers?
If I undersand this thesis right, The CCP is uniquely incompetent, and China is disproportionately the source of novel zoonotic outbreaks, so this adds up to a potential weapons-of-mass-destruction type situation. The good america must defeat or contain this Chinese threat, at the same time that it fights the bad america. Inconveniently, the bad america is also fighting the chinese threat, and must continue to do so. But since the bad america is also somewhat incompetent, and thus vulnerable to the good america, these current events provide an excellent opportunity for the good america to fight both. This could be called "walking and chewing gum at the same time", or less idiomatically, "lighting fires and putting them out at the same time."
Anyone who understands any non-european language, knows that in international affairs there is only one America, racist, bullying, militarist, so this whole idea of america protecting the world from ongoing threats is--hard to know what to call it really. We've seen how it's worked out so far, have we not?
America not managing to protect the world is one thing. America not managing to protect America is the thing that makes Trump vulnerable right now.
48: I don't think they unleashed it on themselves intentionally. I think that once they realized the likely outcome they made a calculated move to not contain it so that all countries would take the economic hit and they wouldn't be put at a particular disadvantage.
60: Interesting, but I think too complicated and far too risky. What the CCP cares about above all is internal stability, and economic pain threatens that whether it's shared worldwide or not.
Yes indeed. If you have an export-led economy almost the last thing you want to do is to trash your markets.
I have more of a service-based economy.
The CCP like any authoritarian (or authoritarian wanna-be) state doesn't want to hear bad news about their mostly false and rosy economic projections, hence there is a built in incentive to juke the stats, including lying about or stomping on bad news about looming pandemics. I really don't think it's more complicated than that.
I mean they're not playing 11-dimension chess against Gary Kasparov here. Bobby Fischer OTOH...
Come on people, it's quarantine conspiracy time.
58: Hello! You're less crude than the last wumao.
potential weapons-of-mass-destruction
Nothing potential about it: 150,000 dead and counting, worst recession since the 1940s, and at least another year to go. Nice GWB callback! Laughably false analogy, as we're talking simple public health and random events, not weapons or regime intentions, and demonstrated public facts, not murky intelligence. And I'm talking containment, not regime regime.
"lighting fires and putting them out at the same time."
The fires have already been lit, by the CCP and the Republicans.
We've seen how it's worked out so far, have we not?
Yes: World_gdp#Historical_and_prehistorical_estimates. Start at 1950.
The survivors of the millions of non-Europeans eventually killed by SARS-CoV-2 will no doubt be deeply consoled that the destruction of their lives and livelihoods was accompanied by the inaction of racist, bullying, militarist America, and the extension of the benign influence of the non-racist non-bullying non-militarist CCP.
I only now see OP link 1 is being redirected by AFP. Apologies. "non-racist" link above covers similar ground.
I don't disagree, but this is a case where, even more than usual, you (by which I mean especially US voters) need to walk and chew gum at the same time. The Republicans are a world-threatening bad actor you must defeat. The CCP is also a a world-threatening bad actor you must defeat (or, realistically contain). The CCP will not go away, will probably get worse, and demands at least a Cold War sized response.
I mostly agree with this. I'm less sure (as a US voter) what the goal/best outcome should be for "defeat (or, realistically contain)" of the CCP. Compared to the cold war the CCP seems to present a different problem for a couple of reasons:
1) There isn't much threat of a hot war. I think there's every reason to be planning on some version of peaceful coexistence (and normal international conflict) rather than trying to divide the globe into strongly separated sphere's of influence.
2) I have some overlapping goals with the CCP in that I think improving the average standard of living for the population of China is a significant benefit (I'd just like to see that happen with fewer human rights violations).
3) It's not obvious what are the greatest areas of strategic strength for the US. The US has obvious advantages in hard power and wealth, but neither of those are enough to contain the CCP. Ideally the US would have a significant advantage as a voice for international institutions and leveraging existing alliances, but that is steadily weakening.
4) This probably goes without saying, but I would prefer that efforts to contain the CCP don't encourage xenophobia and racism.
So I can support both of those goals but, at the moment, I have a much clearer sense of the ways in which Republicans should be defeated than I do for the CCP.
This pandemic is a golden opportunity to get started on rolling back Republicans and CCP both.
I hope this is true.
I looked up wumao and I see it is an insult. There was a time when you could have these kinds of discussions on the internet, but as somebody here said, I guess those times are over.
NickS: To know what "containment" means in stateDeptSpeak, I guess the case of Iran could give you some idea...
What is "stateDeptSpeak"? A George Kennan reference?
no no. nothing so sophisticated. Just what "containment" of a regime or what have you means when the US government uses it.
Nearly everybody here can remember the Cold War. Try to sound like less of a tool.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that MC is using the term in the same way that the US government would use it.
In other horrible news, my home province just had a mass shooting. Possibly worse than the Montreal Massacre in terms of number killed. The killer owned/worked at a denture place 5 min from where I grew up.
I hadn't seen that yet. That's horrible.
I'm very sorry. Absolutely shocking and horrific, and counter to the rare good trend that this sort of crime has decreased during lockdown.
I grew up there too-- well, across the harbour. There are more victims than Covid deaths in all the Atlantic provinces combined. This is so horrible.
The covid situation at the care home there is the other depressing news.
The covid situation at the care home there is the other depressing news.
Yes. My in-laws live around the corner from that home. They have friends who live in it. It's going to be horrific.
And then there's this:
" Although Northwood is advertising for employees, the premier said the province does not plan to take advantage of an offer from Ottawa to participate in a program to top up wages for some low-earning essential workers."
If you start paying people more because they are doing essential work in times when that work is riskier than usual, capitalism is dead.
Worst mass killing in Canadian history. Because what? you weren't satisfied by the COVID-19 death rate?
I just can't even begin to understand...In rural Nova Scotia, of all places!
