There is no reason to suppose that it might someday be discovered that China was experimenting in and before 2019 with enhancing the coronavirus that caused the pandemic of 2020, and that criminal laxity or worse on the part of the Chinese government explains its spread. Nor need we speculate about the strategic consequences of such a discovery for China’s various global initiatives. We know that the Chinese engaged in such experimentation and were more than merely criminally lax, and we have a pretty good idea of the strategic consequences attendant on that knowledge. All that we have to do is to look around.
Here is what we know. First, the malady in question, sometimes called COVID-19, derives from a coronavirus found in bats in Yunnan province in southwestern China—more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan. In genetic structure, the two viruses are 96% identical.
Second, in 2013, a team led by a Chinese scientist named Shi Zengli, who is known in China as “the bat woman,” collected a sample of the pertinent virus from these bats and began studying it in her laboratories at the Wuhan Institute of Virology some eight miles from the wet market in Wuhan, where many later contracted the disease. There is another institute—the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention—located just over three hundred yards from the wet market, and there another researcher also worked on the viruses found in bats.
Third, although the virus spread to visitors to the wet market, it did not originate there. Bats were not sold in the market. Studies of the feces of the animals that were sold in the market show no indication of the virus, and the earliest known victims had no contact with that market.
Fourth, the virus did not spread from Yunnan, and in its original form it was not susceptible to human-to-human transmission. Nor is there any evidence, despite speculation encouraged by the Chinese, that it passed through another animal, such as a pangolin, wherein it underwent the transformation that enabled human-to-human transmission.
Fifth, to this we can add that in 2018 American diplomats in China warned of “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the Institute of Virology, which had higher biosafety standards than the Wuhan CDC. Shortly thereafter, the Trump administration shut down the Beijing office of the National Science Foundation, which had been exploring the possibility of collaboration with the Institute of Virology.
Sixth, once the disease began to spread, the local authorities—then, when they got involved, the national authorities—did everything within their power to suppress the news, lied shamelessly about the diseases’ contagiousness, and came down hard on medical doctors, scientists, and genetic-sequencing laboratories that spread the word. Until it became impossible to hide that an epidemic likely to turn into a pandemic was underway, mum was the word.
Seventh, Shi Zengli and the others associated with the two laboratories in Wuhan fiercely deny that they were working on the pertinent coronavirus and that a genetically altered version could have escaped from their facilities, and their friends and collaborators in the West have rallied to their support. But Chinese researchers would issue such a denial and their colleagues would accept it, wouldn’t they?
Eighth, the Chinese government with its “wolf-warrior” diplomats has angrily threatened and bullied those abroad who have suggested that Chinese scientists fabricated the disease and that the Chinese government was criminally negligent in the early stages of the epidemic––and in the West the news pages of the mainstream press have fallen in line.
It is an open question—as Holman Jenkins, Jr. put it in his Wall Street Journal column on 22 April—whether, once he figured out that the epidemic was going to wreak havoc in China, Xi Jinping “sought to make sure other countries weren’t spared so China wouldn’t be uniquely disadvantaged.” But this possibility is hardly unthinkable. As Jenkins went on to observe, “Your arrival in the world must have been recent if you think politicians not capable of such cynicism, especially when operating under an authoritarian, communist, one-party political system.”
This may, indeed, be an open question. But other questions are settled. I doubt that anyone in the intelligence community and that any half-way observant statesman in the Indo-Pacific world, the Middle East, Europe, or the Americas doubts that one or both of the research laboratories was seeing what could be done with the coronavirus collected from the bats of Yunnan; that due to sloppy biosafety procedures the re-engineered coronavirus escaped from one of the two labs; and that the government of Wuhan and Xi Jinping were criminally negligent in their handling of the crisis, if not worse. If there are any skeptics in the group I identified, they should be made to watch the HBO Docudrama Chernobyl and contemplate the first reaction of the Soviet authorities to the accident at Chernobyl and what they subsequently did.
If the Western press was as honest and discerning as it ought to be, and if the general public was as fully informed concerning this matter as it should be, there would have been an abrupt and dramatic shift in the foreign policy of the United States, the European countries, and those tolerably friendly to us in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. But China has managed to muzzle that press (the owners of which have material interests that the Chinese could harm), and the subject has for the most part been dropped. Popular anger has dissipated, and nearly everyone has moved on.
What is, nonetheless, going on—largely in response to the epidemic hatched in Wuhan—is a more gradual decoupling. Apart from North Korea, China has no allies. She has friends that she has bought—the leaders of various third-world countries as well as a host of elite figures in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere—and they are rallying in support of their patron. But I doubt that things will ever be the same again. The character of the Chinese regime can no longer be hidden. It has become a problem for everyone, and misgivings about Chinese power and Chinese bullying will grow. Money talks, but, then, the same can be said about the fear that malice, swagger, and moral indifference engender. The Chernobyl catastrophe may have brought down the Soviet Union. I doubt that COVID-19 will bring down Xi Jinping and his minions. They are far more ruthless than was Mikhail Gorbachev. But, in the international arena, our experience with the Wuhan Coronavirus will impose constraints. It is already doing so.
