I’m not normally one to say “I told you so” and I won’t here.  But if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times … nope … not gonna do it.  I’ll just simply say that I bet EVERYONE now knows more about Asia—specifically Northeast Asia—than they did just four months ago.  As for me, if you’ve read my bio or followed me here at all, you know I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life in this part of the world, and I’ve got something to say … again (sorry: “What Happens in Asia” 13 AUG 17).

The potential (a laughable word now, I think) for events taking place on the other side of the world to affect us in very real, tangible ways, has just been undeniably proven with about seventeen exclamation points.  If I’d have told you last year you’d spend the first few months of 2020 without work, locked in your homes, afraid to venture out, eschewing human contact, and watching the death toll mount around the world on CRAZY politicized 24-hour news networks in between binge-watching a show about a redneck tiger-wrangler—all because of something that happened in China—you’d have called me insane.  And yet …

Some of you might have bought that prediction if I added a zombie element, but that’s neither here nor there.  The bottom line is that a virus, of either natural or human-engineered origin, exploded across the region of Hubei, China, turning the metropolis of Wuhan into a city of death.  When the Chinese Communist Party finally reacted in a meaningful way, it basically marched in the People’s Liberation Army and locked the area down.  No one went in and no one came out.  Now we’ve got the scene set for a truly compelling story, right? Killer virus inside—guns and soldiers outside the affected zone.

World governments, ever cognizant of the rising death toll, panicked and many sought diplomatic means to get their citizens out of Hubei, repatriating them on a revolving door of contracted aircraft.  Recent discoveries about the Novel Coronavirus, of course, make clear that human carriers are most contagious in the days prior to showing any symptoms at all, making a mockery of the temperature-taking and screening done on those early evacuees.  Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but the rapid and ubiquitous spread of this virus should come as no surprise to anyone now given that every medical assumption was wrong from the very beginning.

Meanwhile, everyone was aware that the Lunar New Year celebrations meant millions of people were traveling to China and back during the middle of this rapidly evolving situation.  Few anticipated, however, what this might mean in far off places like Milan, Italy.  How could an outbreak on the other side of the planet possibly matter there?  This isn’t a question anybody asks anymore, is it?

But its not the first time a mysterious illness has reached out from the bowels of China to impact the rest of the world.  Many of you remember SARS which killed approximately 800 people from 2002-4.  SARS was traced to civets and horseshoe bats in Yunnan Province, China, where it then passed to humans. 

The origin of the Spanish Flu in 1918 remains a mystery, but strong indicators point to its birthplace in China as well.  The dearth of reliable records from China at the time—enduring yet another period of disunification and dominance by regional warlords—makes it all but impossible for historical epidemiologists to verify that point of origin.  The appearance of this specific flu strain a year prior in China and a relatively low infection rate among Chinese in 1918 indicating a degree of immunity there, offer tantalizing hints for pandemic researchers.  The Spanish Flu was responsible for extinguishing potentially 100 million lives before it spent itself in 1920.

Bubonic Plague, the infamous Black Death that played such a role in European history, emerged from the same place, Yunnan Province, and slew well over 50 million people in just the one massive 14th Century pandemic, one of three recorded historical outbreaks of plague going back to 542.  Bubonic Plague was used as one of the first, well-documented, biological weapons, with infected corpses lobbed into besieged cities to hasten capitulation.  It was also used more formally by the infamous Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 in 1940 which bombed Chengdo, China with plague-infected fleas.  This crime was investigated in the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949, resulting in post-war prison terms for those implicated.  Cases of plague continue to pop up today, accounting for a surprising 584 deaths between 2010 and 2015.

The Antonine Plague of the 2nd Century AD, seems to have emerged from this same geographic location, eventually killing some 60 million people across the Roman Mediterranean and Western Europe.  At one point the disease was reportedly slaying 5,000 people a day in Rome!  The toll on Rome’s legions was significant and the Empire was forced to lower recruitment standards once again in order to make up for losses, all at a time when Rome would most require a strong, experienced army in the field.

Yunnan Province, then, is a place that must be treated with some degree of respect, I think, given the worldwide death toll which can be attributed to it over two millennia of human history.  It makes one wonder that throughout multiple dynasties and, in fact, forms of government, China has yet to figure out how to control the epidemiological beast that routinely rises from the ancient landscape.  Given that all of China’s various forms of rule espoused strict forms of population, and recently, information control, it begs the question whether or not there is an ideological—or perhaps deeply-rooted cultural—component to this long-term failure to adapt. 

Hubei Province, however, would not seem a likely source, yet the presence of a government-run epidemiology lab there raises an awful lot of questions.  As I see it—and you all know I write fiction for a living—there are three likely possibilities.  1) The virus developed naturally, spread through Wuhan’s infamously unhygienic “wet markets”, and the CCP failed in a genuine attempt to contain the virus, allowing it to escape the city, province, and country before the PLA moved in to lock things down.  The CCP then withheld critical information about how the virus spread, hindering global attempts to institute effective measures.  2) Containment measures at the lab failed and CCP efforts to cover it up then facilitated the global pandemic by preventing the information required to effectively defend against the virus from reaching beyond China’s electronic Great Wall.  3) The release of COVID-19 was intentional, designed to cause disruption around the world and prevent international interference in some, as yet, undefined, Chinese political and/or military move.  In this case, the withholding of vital information by the CCP would seem to make the most logical sense—but in a horrible, Machiavellian, usher-in-the-apocalypse kind of way.

Each of these scenarios holds interesting potential for a writer like me, and yet all three have one thing in common, the Chinese Communist Party acting in a manner inconsistent with that of a responsible member of the global community.  Whether through embarrassment, incompetence, or nefarious intent, the CCP contributed greatly to what has transpired around the world these past hundred or so days.  While the most ignorant amongst us has pointed accusatory fingers at Chinese—or any Asian—people on the street, the simple reality that cannot be ignored is that any and all of the infected are by any definition victims, and should be treated as such.  We, as the international community, have got to focus our rage at all that’s transpired directly where it belongs—the Chinese Communist Party—and take steps not only to punish that organization but also ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again. 

What came as a brutal shock to the world didn't have to, and wouldn’t have been so lethal if the Chinese Communist Party had been a responsible actor. The CCP has sought to elevate China beyond its sometimes embarrassing past, but instead of learning from previous pandemics, it has only managed to exacerbate or, in the worst possible scenario, exploit the outbreak.  We should remember that going forward.

This may mean we have to adjust our priorities in the wake of COVID-19.  Maybe price shouldn’t be the only concern when we go shopping.  Perhaps international and US corporations operating in China should admit what they’ve long suspected, that the cost of doing business there is simply too high, despite any apparent short-term benefits.  Maybe the only real way to express our indignation at the CCP’s callous disregard for its own citizens—to say nothing of what it’s inflicted upon the rest of the world—is to stop buying what they’re selling.  Whether products, propaganda, whatever, the only real way to punish those responsible—regardless of how or why it all happened—is to make China feel some financial pain. 

Simply put, it’s time for the People’s Republic to get a timeout.   

M. G. Haynes