In response to accusations that COVID-19 was deliberately made by protein transplantation, implying that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s safety-level 4 lab was engaged in biological warfare, virologists around the world vehemently protested its innocence. That they were right was amply proven by the lab’s openness to the visits of foreign scientists, but when its foreign defenders also denied with equal vehemence that the virus might have escaped because of carelessness, no doubt in part because of their political antipathy towards the chief accuser, they protested too much: the virologists of the French Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie that had designed and supervised the construction, fitting out, and initial operations of the Wuhan laboratory, withdrew their participation long before the 2020 outbreak, because of systematized if not criminal laxity. Instead of a maximum of two students per professional researcher, they had as many as twenty, making the required level 4 discipline simply impossible.
That is probably the ultimate explanation for the escape of a virus found 800 meters away in the Wuhan animal market in which bats are not traded—a virus only found in nature no nearer than 800 kilometers away in Yunnan province (Le Monde April 26, 2020 Dans la jungle des labos de Wuhan, a headline that requires no translation).
It appears that public opinion around the world agrees with Le Monde, unless it is a mere coincidence that very high percentages of the respondents to the Pew favorability global polls have sharply turned against China. In Australia only 33% of the respondents had an unfavorable opinion of China in 2015, but in the 2020 Global attitude survey it is 81%. In the United Kingdom that percentage has increased from 37% to 74%. Even in Germany, still widely viewed as a country rather favorable to China—for the excellent reason that the Chinese are very partial to German products—the percentage has increased from 60% to 71%, with the U.S. numbers not very different, having increased from 54% to 73%. More surprisingly, in South Korea, where many used to envisage a future under Chinese suzerainty without much trepidation, the un-favorability rating increased from 37% to 75%, a greater change than in Canada (48% to 73%), itself very much in line with France (49% to 70%) and other developed countries, with only two outliers: Japan, where there is less disapproval of China than there was in 2015 when it reached 89%, as opposed to the latest 86%, that being a function of a bit of a respite in China’s explicit claims to the Senkaku islands, though of course there is no political difference between 86% and 89%; and Italy where Chinese diplomacy assisted by gifts public and otherwise achieved its very best results with a 62% un-favorability rating.
It has been Xi Jinping's incessant claim in addressing the Chinese people that his extremely assertive leadership, so very different from Hu Jintao’s deliberate primus inter pares demeanor; and his strong line with insubordinate Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin, whose fishing boats are now sunk and not just shoved, with the uppity Indians on the Ladakh border, and with foreign critics everywhere, has changed the country’s image in the world, evoking widespread admiration.
The first part of Xi’s claim is certainly valid: the image of the People’s Republic of China in the world has certainly changed. But it is hard to see how Chinese interests can be advanced by arousing hostile reactions in so many different countries at the same time, whose combined populations outnumber China’s, whose GDPs are three or four times as large, and whose combined military capabilities are far greater. This is a dynamic that cannot persist without leading to the utter isolation of China in the world, if not an actual outbreak of armed conflict. It remains to be seen if Xi Jinping will persist in his policies, and in his Party and State and military offices even as Chinese students, scholars, investors, and investment-seekers are all paying the price of his triumphalist poses.
