Ringing Hollow: A Synthesised Review on Why a Distrust of Communist China Is Justified, From a Liberalist Perspective
Letting the numbers speak on the CCP’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak
By Catrina Ko
(This isn’t a 24-min read — more like 10 — unless you insist on reading the bibliography too…)
(I have also recorded a two-part audio version of this essay, and you’ll be able to access it on Spotify, if you’d prefer listening to it instead and could do with 21 minutes of just my voice: Part I — The Data; Part II — The Wider Context)
The world should feel cheated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in this coronavirus crisis, and should not fear this feeling. It does not go against any fundamental and universal values that the free world upholds and nurtures. It is true that we have been lied to by the CCP, and that humanity altogether, including the ethnically Chinese or Asian, are paying grave prices, both literally and figuratively. This essay aims to add to the current (and growing) body of concerns worldwide about the CCP’s discourse-thievery and manipulation of information, by providing a synthesised review of the standing evidence for the CCP’s inconvenient and incontrovertible role in creating a full-blown pandemic that swept around the world with its scythe. This essay will also attempt to disentangle contesting views on the ‘cultural geography of blame’ for the current pandemic, and explicate the more nuanced implications of the CCP’s political treatment of the coronavirus for the world.
Plenty of doubts have been expressed over the data published by the Chinese authorities on the coronavirus situation within the country, as well as the way they handled the initial national outbreak and are continuing to handle its global spread. Multiple accounts by whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, and members of both the local and the international community have provided evidence for the Chinese authorities’ refusal to disclose details of the outbreak promptly and accurately, their destruction and withholding of evidence and samples, their silencing of local experts and victims, their denial of foreign observers access to sites, and how they still continue to hide and falsify vital information in order to advance propaganda both inwards and outwards.[1]
One of the most salient, statistically demonstrable aspects of this constellation of accusations is the death toll within the city of Wuhan from which the virus originated.[2] A simple comparison between officially published annual numbers of deaths and the estimated number of cremations offers insights into how much of the truth could have been obscured, as reflected in the disparity between the two sets of figures.
Table 1 shows the most up-to-date official annual mortality statistics for Wuhan since 2010.[3] At least two versions of the estimated number of actual deaths within a given time period can be calculated based on multiple numeric and contextual constraints surrounding the distribution of ashes urns or the cremation situation in Wuhan. Seven major Han-Chinese funeral homes in Wuhan began distributing 500 ashes urns to the families of the deceased on 23 March.[4] Up until 5 April (Ching Ming Festival, a.k.a. Tomb-Sweeping Day), 42,000 urns would have been distributed in total within this 12-day window for the deaths that came prior to this time. Using the capacity of the local crematories and their rates of operation in the calculation, if 65 out of the 84 furnaces at the seven major funeral homes were functioning around the clock, and if each body takes an hour to be fully cremated, it follows that 1,560 bodies would be burnt within any 24-hour period. Deducting about 200 non-coronavirus-related deaths each day from the result, it can be concluded that 46,800 people had died within a 30-day period during the local outbreak. A third proposal of the figure came from an informant connected to Hubei’s Civil Affairs Department. According to the data submitted to the provincial government by the Wuhan authorities, 28,000 bodies were processed at Wuhan’s funeral homes during the peak month of the outbreak.[5]
All of these estimates denominate a figure that totals either six months’ or almost a year’s worth of deaths for an average year in Wuhan within a calendar month, or in the case of the calculation based on urn distribution, multiples of that. Either way, the results of these calculations render the officially broadcast number of 2,535 for the death toll in Wuhan by the Chinese authorities unrealistic.
While the true scope of the local outbreak remains a mystery in China, the CCP’s data manipulation is evident mathematically and is manifest in the global statistics on the pandemic. Researchers at the Citizens’ Press Conference of Hong Kong, a citizen-led pro-democracy broadcast platform that focuses on fact-checking and debunking false information by authorities, performed an original pattern analysis on country-specific statistics on the COVID-19 situations in a selection of nations, and uncovered notable inconsistencies within the data.
Their study compares the case fatality rates (CFR) (calculated from death toll data and numbers of confirmed cases taken from the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus dashboard) in the USA, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Iran, and China. Figure 1 (fig. 1) presents the temporal progression of the CFR values, plotted as cumulative frequency curves, for each of the countries listed above.[7] The curves appear to cluster into two distinct groups on the graph by their gradients: one that consists of countries with much steeper curves than the other. A potential explanation for the gradient difference between the two groups of curves is that, for countries with a higher death toll per unit increase in the number of confirmed cases, and thus a steeper curve, their medical system is likely to have already collapsed upon the early surge in confirmed cases. When that is the case, medical professionals are required to prioritise treatment for patients with certain characteristics, leaving other patients to fight the infection on their own, thereby significantly increasing the fatality rate. This explanation is in line with the differing numbers of intensive care unit beds or critical care beds (ICU-CCB) per 100,000 inhabitants across different countries: the USA — 34.7, Germany — 29.2, Italy — 12.5, France — 11.6, Spain — 9.7, the UK — 6.6, Iran — 5.3 (for non-cardiac ICU beds), and China — 3.6.[8]
Among all these countries, the only exception to the trend is China. Based on the case number and death toll submitted to the WHO by the Chinese authorities, the curve plotted for China lies in between the two clusters (fig. 1). This signifies that its medical system copes better with the COVID-19 pandemic than the one in Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and Iran, but less well than that in the USA and in Germany. This is a surprising finding when the ICU-CCB bed number is adopted as a proxy for the capacity of a medical system to cope under strain, because the number of ICU-CCB per 100,000 inhabitants for China, which is 3.6, is lower than that for any of the other countries studied. On the contrary, one would expect that a higher capacity for critical care (denoted by the ICU-CCB number), and thus a more robust medical system, would correlate with a lower CFR value. This expectation is supported by the pattern formed by the inverse correlation between the CFRs and the ICU-CCB numbers of these countries presented in Figure 2 (fig. 2). China, again, deviates from this trend: despite having the lowest ICU-CCB number in the group, it observes the third-lowest CFR value, only slightly higher than the value for the USA and Germany.
In the meantime, the trajectory of China’s curve is also anomalous. A surge in confirmed cases can be seen on the graph featured in Figure 1 just before the cumulative case number approaches 5,000. Beyond that, a stall in the rates of increase of new cases and of deaths is observed. The curve plotted for the CFR in China even reached an asymptotic point on Day 14 (marked with an *) after severely affected cities around the country were locked down. This part of the curve is identified as ‘the mysterious slope’. When other countries implemented similar measures, their CFR, which determines the slope of their curves, showed no change in pattern and remained linear even on Day 29 (as is the case for Italy) after a national lockdown. The spacing between data points, and thus between subsequent days, also remains largely stable, if not increasing at an exponential rate, for all the countries studied — with China being the only exception. China’s curve does not only follow a counterintuitive pattern, but also violates too many mathematical and epidemiological assumptions to be possible in reality. Taking into consideration the capacity of the Chinese medical system approximated from their ICU-CCB number, it is extremely unlikely that the reported case and death figures reflect the actual situation within mainland China.
It is worth bearing in mind at this point that China has signed an international treaty called the International Health Regulations (IHR) under the WHO, and has thus pledged to ‘prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease.’[11] The IHR underwent revision in 2005 and became more stringent after the 2003 SARS epidemic which broke out in China — another contagious disease that the CCP also tried to hide from the world. It is apparent from the current situation with COVID-19 that disease surveillance in China has not improved since SARS as required.[12] This ultimately comes down to their model of governance, which abides with the values of totalitarian control and stability over pragmatism, transparency, accountability, and even human lives. The expectation that the authoritarian regime would learn from its mistakes has time and again proven to be the wishful thinking of the pro-engagement crowd. Nonetheless, China’s seeming (but never truly confirmable) success in containing the virus should not negate the fact that they could have prevented a significant proportion of the cases in the world (up to 95% of all cases, according to Lai et al. (2020)), had they reacted timely and prudently.[13]
Beyond their disinformation and propaganda campaigns, the CCP proceeded to evade responsibility by spreading conspiracies and then portraying itself as a coronavirus success story and the friend that rushes to the world’s rescue with aid. Much of this ‘aid’ in their diplomatic manoeuvre was, in reality, sales (at times at excessive prices) of supplies that they had initially hoarded from or were donated by other countries.[14] Very often, these Chinese equipment or testing kits are also faulty and unfit.[15] Moreover, these supplies might not always come with an altruistic intent, and might instead be strategic commodities for the CCP to advance their imperialistic ambitions. For example, the effectively state-owned Chinese telecom giant Huawei delivered masks to The Netherlands, Canada, and other countries that are yet to choose their 5G infrastructure provider, potentially as an attempt to influence these governments’ decisions on whether to exclude Huawei over espionage concerns.[16] Experts also worry that these supplies are being exploited as leverage for better terms in an investment agreement with the EU.[17] The overall theme of China’s diplomatic rhetoric after COVID-19 became a pandemic can be summarised with this Chinese idiom: ‘mending the fence after a sheep has been lost’ (亡羊補牢), meaning ‘better late than never’, except that they have only pretended to have mended the fence, and, in a cruel twist, used the sheep to invade other people’s fields.
One might very well argue that now is not the time to point fingers (or ever), as we are all in the same boat trying to weather this storm and come through the other end as quickly as possible. However, as the free world increasingly considers itself one entity, embracing the complexity and diversity of humanity and making a coordinated effort to create a sustainable world to be inherited by future generations, the CCP latches on with its ‘community of shared future for mankind’.[18] This is a paradigm that on the surface chimes with such visions of partnership and shared obligations, but in truth serves to penetrate into spaces for intergovernmental cooperation and warp definitions of universally upheld values that humanity pursues and preserves.[19] The CCP has already broken its commitment to the IHR by triggering a pandemic that is costing humanity thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of damage.[20] Standing in the midst of this predicament faced by every member of this, so very rightly put but wrongly conceived, ‘community of shared future’, there is no better time than now to rethink whether humanity is being led astray from where it is trying to reach by its engagement with the CCP. The world has witnessed time and again the CCP’s behaviour. Realising the dangers that we are facing as democracies and as freedom-loving, peace-loving people of the free world is not ‘pointing fingers’, but the fundamental first step to rising up in unison and protecting our values and future from someone for whom we can no longer afford the benefit-of-the-doubt.
This ‘someone’ is not a nationality, nor is it a race or ethnicity, nor is it a culture. That ‘someone’ is not even China, but the CCP. There is firstly a confusion between geography and identity and, secondly, one between race and nation. This campaign to call out the CCP is pro-China and pro-Asia in essence, because it speaks clearly and truthfully of the distinction between these concepts. The blurry boundary between ethnicity and citizenship provides a prime opportunity for pro-CCP commentators to ride on the Western liberal instinct to protect cultural pluralism, proliferate nationalist sentiments along with disinformation, and obtain some kind of defence for the CCP’s mismanagement of and responsibility for the current crisis.[21] The ‘geography of blame’ exists in the CCP’s head; the imaginaries it projects outwards give existing xenophobic mentalities and discourse an added excuse to pathologise the Chinese and Asian ethnicities.[22] It is not difficult to see that, for instance, the acknowledgment of a geographical fact is not at all a manifestation of racism in the etymological debate over the denomination of the virus. Racism is prejudice based on appearances, stemming from ignorance; it is irrational and unjustified. Deeds (of either what- or whomever) warrant differential treatment, not heritage or genetics. One can certainly denounce a political entity for creating a global chaos without attacking the people over whom it rules, because the two cannot be conflated; and one’s values, and surely whether a person is pathological or not, depend on neither colour nor nationality.
The CCP has been inept, dishonest and negligent in its management of this global coronavirus crisis. It is not only information that it skews, but also human history. Around the world, we are seeing already-‘immunosuppressed’ democracies (those that are borderline or fragile) coming under the whims of the virus and dying from it.[23] Absolute power for the government is now being excused as a ‘necessary’ measure against the backdrop of the virus. In some places, emergency powers are being abused by authoritarian leaderships to further restrict civil liberties and personal freedoms.[24] This seems a particularly ripe opportunity for the CCP to dissolve the rules-based international order and overcome democracy, and to replace universal values with its ideologies, for they threaten its existence. COVID-19 is seeping into the cracks of the free world and fracturing it from the inside out. It is forcing democracies into authoritarianism by taking human lives hostage. It is killing democracy and freedom by killing people.[25]
Sinologist Matthew Henderson has very correctly put that the dangers in which we find ourselves today are ‘a result of years of naiveté and over-optimism’ in our engagement with Communist China.[26] Our shared predicament and battle against the current coronavirus crisis will be etched in our collective memory, and so will the lessons learnt about the ways of the CCP. Humanity has one chance only against this recidivist liar who does not bat an eyelash at taking thousands of lives, particularly those of its own people. The numbers have spoken, the evidence has been examined and the theories explored. For the sake of the people of China and of all affected nations, and of the deceased and the grieving, the free world needs to wake up at last and fight for our own existence and our values, which must stay strong — and true.
Footnotes
[1] Jennifer Zeng, “The Comprehensive Timeline of the CCP’s Cover-up of COVID-19 Pandemic (1) 中共隱瞞COVID-19（新冠肺炎）疫情的完整时间線 (1),” Jennifer’s World 曾錚的世界, April 6, 2020, https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2020/4/5/the-comprehensive-timeline-of-the-ccps-cover-up-of-covid-19-pandemic-1; Jin Wu et al., “How the Virus got Out,” New York Times, March 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/world/coronavirus-spread.html; Pinghui Zhuang, “Chinese Laboratory that First Shared Coronavirus Genome with World Ordered to Close for ‘Rectification’, Hindering its Covid-19 Research,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), February 28, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chinese-laboratory-first-shared-coronavirus-genome-world-ordered; Oiwan Lam, “China Censors Report About How Authorities Hid Coronavirus Genome Sequence Test Results for 14 Days,” Hong Kong Free Press, March 7, 2020, https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/07/china-censors-report-authorities-hid-coronavirus-genome-sequence-test-results-14-days; Amy Qin and Cao Li, “China Pushes for Quiet Burials as Coronavirus Death Toll Is Questioned,” New York Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/world/asia/coronavirus-china-grief-deaths.html; British Broadcasting Company, “Li Wenliang: Coronavirus Kills Chinese Whistleblower Doctor,” BBC, February 7, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51403795; Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks,” New York Times, February 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/cdc-coronavirus-china.html; Jeremy Page, Natasha Khan, and Warren P. Strobel, “Fear Lingers in Wuhan as China Eases Lockdown,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-eases-wuhan-lockdown-but-coronavirus-fight-remains-incomplete-11586293305; and “【武漢肺炎】中國宣揚武漢「清零」金融時報專訪醫護︰有醫院五日收 120 名病人全無通報,” Stand News, March 28, 2020, https://www.thestandnews.com/society/武漢肺炎-中國宣揚武漢-清零-金融時報專訪醫護-有醫院五日收-120-名病人全無通報/#.
[2] Sophia Yan and Nicola Smith, “Doubts Surface Over Chinese Virus Death Toll After Thousands of Urns Spotted in Wuhan,” Telegraph (London), March 27, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/27/doubts-surface-chinese-virus-death-toll-thousands-urns-spotted.
[3] Hubei Provincial Bureau of Statistics, “武漢市統計年鑑,” last modified June 6, 2019, http://tjj.hubei.gov.cn/tjsj/sjkscx/tjnj/gsztj/whs/.
[4] Long Qiao and Siu-fung Lau, “武漢肺炎死亡數字撲朔迷離 骨灰盒出貨量能見真章？” Radio Free Asia, March 27, 2020, https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/casket-03272020062659.html.
[5] Ibid.,
[6] Hubei Provincial Bureau of Statistics, “武漢市統計年鑑”.
[7] Johns Hopkins University, “COVID-19 Map,” Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, accessed April 11, 2020, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
[8] Neil A. Halpern et al., “Intensivists In U.S. Acute Care Hospitals,” Critical Care Medicine 47, no. 4 (2019): 517–525, http://doi.org/10.1097/ccm.0000000000003615; Andrew Rhodes et al., “The Variability Of Critical Care Bed Numbers In Europe,” Intensive Care Medicine 38, no.10 (2012): 1647–1653, http://doi.org/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8; Ahmad Ameryoun et al., “The Assessment of Inequality on Geographical Distribution of Non-Cardiac Intensive Care Beds in Iran,” Iran Journal of Public Health 40, no. 2 (June 2011): 25–33, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3481771/; and Jason Phua et al., “Critical Care Bed Capacity In Asian Countries And Regions,” Critical Care Medicine, (2020): 1, http://doi.org/10.1097/ccm.0000000000004222.
[9] Johns Hopkins University, “COVID-19 Map.”
[10] Halpern et al., “Intensivists In U.S. Acute Care Hospitals”; Rhodes et al., “The Variability Of Critical Care Bed Numbers In Europe”; Ahmad et al., “The Assessment of Inequality on Geographical Distribution of Non-Cardiac Intensive Care Beds in Iran”; and Phua et al., “Critical Care Bed Capacity In Asian Countries And Regions”.
[11] World Health Organization, International Health Regulations (2005) Second Edition, (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005), 1.
[12] Steven Lee Myers, “China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed.” New York Times, March 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html.
[13] Lily Kuo, “Life After Lockdown: Has China Really Beaten Coronavirus?” Guardian (London), March 23, 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/life-after-lockdown-has-china-really-beaten-coronavirus?; RTHK, “ Wuhan Denying Virus Tests to Keep Numbers Down,” RTHK English News, March 23, 2020, https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1516240-20200323.htm; Kyodo News, “Wuhan’s Virus Patient Numbers Manipulated for Xi Visit: Local Doctor,” Kyodo News (Tokyo), March 19, 2020, https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/03/b09b868ec468-breaking-news-wuhan-doctor-blows-whistle-on-manipulation-of-virus-patient-numbers.html; Sophia Yan, “Inside Wuhan as City at Heart of Coronavirus Outbreak Tries to Return to Normal,” Telegraph (London), April 7, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/07/never-know-really-happened-inside-wuhan-city-heart-coronavirus/; and Shengjie Lai et al., “Effect of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for Containing the COVID-19 Outbreak in China,” The Preprint Server for Health Sciences, (March 2020), https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.03.20029843.
[14] Sarah Zheng, “Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Tweets Claim US Military Brought Coronavirus to Wuhan,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), March 13, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3075051/chinese-foreign-ministry-spokesman-tweets-claim-us-military; Billie Thomson, “Chinese State Media Links the Origin of Coronavirus with ITALY After Milan Professor Said Doctors There Remembered Seeing ‘Very Strange’ Pneumonia Last Year,” Daily Mail (London), March 25, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8150589/Chinese-state-media-suggests-coronavirus-pandemic-originated-Italy.html; Giulia Pompii, “Ma quali aiuti della Cina contro il virus, è tutta roba che compriamo,” Il Foglio (Rome), March 12, 2020, https://www.ilfoglio.it/cronache/2020/03/12/news/ma-quali-aiuti-della-cina-contro-il-virus-e-tutta-roba-che-compriamo-306324/; Lukáš Valášek, “Confiscated Face Masks Imported by an Influential Chinese Representative in Czechia,” Aktuálně, March 26, 2020, https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/confiscated-face-masks-imported-by-an-influential-representa; Karen Ruiz, “The True Scale of China’s Medical Stockpile is Revealed: More than TWO BILLION Masks Were Imported into Wuhan in Just One Month as the Coronavirus Crisis Escalated,” Daily Mail Australia, April 2, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8178365/amp/China-imported-2billion-masks-peak-coronavirus-crisis.htm; Barnini Chakraborty, “China Forces Italy to Buy Same Coronavirus Supplies it had Donated to Beijing a Few Weeks Ago,” Fox News Channel, April 6, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-italy-coronavirus-supplies-buy-back.
[15] British Broadcasting Company, “Coronavirus: Countries Reject Chinese-Made Equipment,” BBC, 30 March, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52092395; Kate Ng, “Coronavirus: Government’s Testing Chief Admits None of 3.5m Antibody Kits Work Sufficiently, Independent (London), April 7, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-test-antibody-kit-uk-china-nhs-matt-hancock-a9449816.html; Turkish Minute, “Turkey Dumps Chinese COVID-19 Test Kits Over Unreliable Results: Report,” Turkish Minute, March 29, 2020, https://www.turkishminute.com/2020/03/29/turkey-dumps-chinese-covid-19-test-kits-over-unreliable-results-report/; and Andrew Greene, “Australia Seizes Faulty Coronavirus Protective Equipment Imported From China,” ABC, April 1, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-01/coronavirus-chinese-ppe-border-force-intercepted/1208590.
[16] Christopher Balding and Donald C. Clarke, “Who Owns Huawei?,” SSRN Electronic Journal, (April 2019), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3372669; OLT News, “Huawei donates 800,000 masks to The Netherlands — Gizmochina,” OLT News, March 24, 2020, https://oltnews.com/huawei-donates-800000-masks-to-the-netherlands-gizmochina; and Nathan Vanderklippe, “Huawei Sending Millions of Masks to Canada as Supplies Grow Short,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 6, 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-huawei-sending-millions-of-masks-to-canada-as-supplies-grow-short/.
[17] Stuart Lau, “Talks on China-EU Investment Deal Will Continue, EC President Says,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), March 19, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3075945/talks-china-eu-investment-deal-will-continue-ec-president-says.
[18] 小山, “中美學者各推百人公開信 說的一樣不一樣?” Radio France Internationale, April 4, 2020, http://www.rfi.fr/tw/中國/20200404-中美學者各推百人公開信-說的一樣不一樣.
[19] Joyce Huang, “ UN Human Rights Council Divided Over China’s Xinjiang Policies,” Voice of America, July 17, 2019, https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/un-human-rights-council-divided-over-chinas-xinjiang-policies; Lindsay Mainland, “Is China Undermining Human Rights at the United Nations?” Council on Foreign Relations, July 9, 2019, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/china-undermining-human-rights-united-nations; Michael Collins, “The WHO and China: Dereliction of Duty,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 27, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty; The Economist, “In the UN, China uses threats and cajolery to promote its worldview,” The Economist, December 7, 2019, https://www.economist.com/china/2019/12/07/in-the-un-china-uses-threats-and-cajolery-to-promote-its-worldview; and Nick McKenzie et al., “Beijing’s Secret Plot to Infiltrate UN Used Australian Insider,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 11, 2018, https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/beijing-s-secret-plot-to-infiltrate-un-used-australian-insider-20181031-p50d2e.html.
[20] Matthew Henderson et al., Coronavirus Compensation? Assessing China’s Potential Culpability And Avenues Of Legal Response, London: The Henry Jackson Society, 2020. https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Coronavirus-Compensation.pdf.
[21] Tanner Brown, “Inside China’s campaign to blame the U.S. for the coronavirus pandemic,” Marketwatch, March 15, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/inside-chinas-campaign-to-blame-the-us-for-the-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-03-15; and David Gitter, Sand Lu, and Brock Erdahl, “China Will Do Anything to Deflect Coronavirus Blame,” Foreign Policy, March 30, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/30/beijing-coronavirus-response-see-what-sticks-propaganda-blame-ccp-xi-jinping.
[22] Paul Farmer, AIDS And Accusation: Haiti And The Geography Of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Matthew Sparks and Dimitar Anguelov, “H1N1, Globalization And The Epidemiology Of Inequality,” Health & Place 18, no. 4 (2012): 726–736, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2011.09.001.
[23] Ishaan Tharoor, “Coronavirus Kills its First Democracy,” Washington Post, March 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/31/coronavirus-kills-its-first-democracy/.
[24] Christy Leung and Natalie Wong, “Coronavirus: Police Arrest 54 at Hong Kong Prince Edward Protest, but None Over Social-distancing Rules,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), April 1, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3078006/coronavirus-police-arrest-54-hong-kong-prince-edward.
[25] Cas Mudde, “Don’t Let Free Speech be a Casualty of Coronavirus. We Need it More Than Ever,” Guardian (Manchester), April 6, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/06/coronavirus-free-speech-hungary-fake-news;and Ellie Bothwell, “Fake News Laws May ‘Catch on’ During Coronavirus,” Times Higher Education, April 6, 2020, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/fake-news-laws-may-catch-during-coronavirus.
[26] “Does China Owe The World Billions For COVID-19? Matthew Henderson Discusses With The Sun — Henry Jackson Society,” Henry Jackson Society, April 9, 2020, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/media-centre/does-china-owe-the-world-billions-for-covid-19-matthew-henderson-discusses-with-the-sun/.
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Credit
I need to thank my co-author, Jon, for his contribution on the part on the CCP’s ‘imperialistic ambitions’. Extra credit goes to Lucy for sitting down with me and proofreading the text to polish it into perfection, and to Matthew for taking up the tedious work to slot in the references and build the bibliography.
The data analyses were conducted by Papa from the Citizens’ Press Conference of Hong Kong — the numbers spoke because of his work. The research work around the content of this essay was done by Jon, Johannes, myself, Kwan Kung, and Gung — thank you for helping me put this together.
Gratitude also goes to Laura for creating the two-part podcast (narrated by myself) on Spotify, and Ming Gor for producing the YouTube videos for the recordings (and for his patience with me), and the Creative and the Social Teams at the Citizens’ Press Conference for advertising this essay and its related products.
Last but not least, I must thank the absolutely brilliant Evan for translating this giant into Chinese along with Gung.
I deeply appreciate everyone’s kindness in bearing with me and all the hours of work that you guys have put in. Glory be to you all (and to HK, eventually).
